Adonis

Adonis was born from a tree, and his parentage is told several ways. Apollodorus's main account, in Library 3.14.3, makes him a son of Cinyras, founder of Paphos in Cyprus, and Metharme, daughter of King Pygmalion. Hesiod, Apollodorus adds, called him a son of Phoenix and Alphesiboea. Panyasis made him the son of Thias, king of Assyria, and Thias's daughter Smyrna. Ovid names Cinyras as father and Myrrha as mother, and Myrrha is also Cinyras's own daughter.

The Panyasis version, kept in Library 3.14.4, is the origin of the myrrh tree. Aphrodite was angry that Smyrna did not honor her, so the girl fell in love with her father. With her nurse's help she shared his bed for twelve nights without his knowledge. When he found out, he drew his sword and chased her. She prayed to be invisible, and the gods turned her into the smyrna tree, which is myrrh. Ten months later the tree burst and Adonis was born.

Ovid tells the same birth at greater length in Metamorphoses 10. The nurse leads a drunken Cinyras to the disguised Myrrha during the nine nights of the festival of Ceres. Cinyras finds out and draws his sword, and Myrrha flees through Arabia to Sabaea. She prays to be neither living nor dead, and turns into the myrrh tree. Lucina eases the birth, the bark splits, and the Naiads lay the baby on soft leaves and anoint him with his mother's tears.

Adonis grows into a youth of great beauty, and here the accounts turn to Aphrodite. In Apollodorus she hides the infant in a chest, unknown to the gods, and entrusts it to Persephone. Persephone looks inside and will not give him back. The dispute goes before Zeus, who divides the year into three parts: one for Adonis alone, one for Persephone, and one for Aphrodite. Adonis then gives his own share to Aphrodite as well.

Ovid tells it differently. Cupid, kissing his mother, grazes her breast with an arrow, and Venus falls for the youth she sees. She leaves heaven, Paphos and Cnidos to follow him through the woods, dressed like Diana and hunting only hares, deer and does. She warns him against lions, wolves and boars. To explain her fear she tells him the story of Atalanta and Hippomenes, whose race for her hand ends with both as lions after offending Cybele. The lesson is that courage is not safe against the bold.

Adonis dies hunting. In Apollodorus he is gored by a boar while still a boy, through the anger of Artemis. Ovid gives the boar no divine sender. Adonis wounds it with a spear, it knocks the spear loose, and it drives its tusk into his groin. Aphrodite, flying home in a chariot drawn by swans, hears his groans, sees the blood, tears her hair and garment, and vows that the yearly memory of his death will repeat her grief.

The flower is her answer to loss. Ovid's Venus sprinkles his blood with nectar. It bubbles like rainwater, and within an hour a blood-red flower grows, the anemone, which the wind shakes down as easily as it opens it. Ovid says she wants this change to match what Persephone once did to the nymph Menthe, turning her to mint. The poet Bion's Lament for Adonis has a different flower story, in which his blood becomes a rose and her tears the wind-flower.

Bion's lament is the main poem of mourning. In Elizabeth Barrett Browning's translation, the boar's white tusk pierces Adonis's thigh, the Loves weep, and Aphrodite calls out for her Assyrian husband. She begs one last kiss before he passes to Acheron, and the poem ends with him in Persephone's keeping. The mourning is one of the few passages that treats Aphrodite's grief as ritual, telling her to weep again when a new year returns.

In Theocritus's fifteenth Idyll the ritual is on stage. Two Syracusan women go to see the Adonis at the palace of Ptolemy in Alexandria. They admire the tapestries and the beautiful Adonis lying on a silver couch, then hear a singer's hymn to Aphrodite. The hymn says the Hours bring Adonis back from Acheron in the twelfth month. It adds that next morning the women will carry him out to the waves on the shore. Pausanias adds that Amathus in Cyprus had an old sanctuary of Adonis and Aphrodite.

The name is probably not Greek. It is usually derived from the Semitic word adon, meaning lord, but Walter Burkert cautions that no Semitic cult matches the Greek Adonis exactly. Panyasis calls his father the king of Assyria, and Bion's Aphrodite calls him her Assyrian. Yet the Greek sources anchor his birth and love story in Cyprus, and Ovid's version begins with the Cypriot dynasty of Pygmalion and Cinyras. The myth we read in Apollodorus and Ovid is told in Greek and Latin, in a Cypriot setting.