Aphrodite vs. Artemis

Born from the remains of the castration of Uranus, Aphrodite arose from the foam in the sea and became known as the goddess of love to those who worshipped her, described by Hesoid. We see another version of her this goddess’s birth as well, from the gods Zeus and Dione, leaving a double tradition of Aphrodite’s birth and a basic duality in her character. Artemis, the Greek goddess of wild things, was born to Zeus and Leto, and remained a virgin goddess who roamed the forests with her female companions. These two goddesses disagreeing viewpoints on sexual relationships naturally set them up to have a conflicting relationship, yet their well-known trait of revenge in their myths bring a similarity to both the goddess of love and of hunting. Their personalities are compared through their primary functions in Greek mythology and physical characteristics, their behavior in myths that they are involved in, their portrayal in Greek art and literature, and if and how they are worshipped in Greek religion.

Aphrodite is depicted in her persona as a perfect, breathtaking woman, characterized by her potent sexual attractiveness. While Artemis is similar in her gender and her eternal youth, her appearance is not characterized with sexual attraction as much as it is fruitfulness and purity, as she is the goddess of chastity and natural environments. Aphrodite’s main symbol is a girdle that has magical powers to compel love, while Artemis contains a bow that is used for hunting flesh, and is very physically strong. And of course, because Artemis is a virgin god, she lacks a husband or any children for herself, while Aphrodite is in the complete opposite realm: she not only has a husband (Hephaestus), but an illicit lover too (Ares, the god of...

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...als. In this sense, divinities like Aphrodite and Artemis possess a power rather like that of Zeus; and in this sense, too, these apparently contrasting divinities have something in common. Joseph Dial summarizes the relationship between Aphrodite and Artemis quite well in Instructure article, claiming “While we often think of both of these goddesses in rather benign terms—Aphrodite as the charming “goddess of love” or Artemis as the spunky huntress—the fact is that they can mete out punishment with the best of them, in the process demonstrating that their power may often be as extensive and as potentially lethal as that wielded by ‘the father of the gods.’”

Works Cited

http://gogreece.about.com/cs/mythology/a/mythaphrodite.htm http://gogreece.about.com/cs/mythology/a/mythartemis.htm https://uw.instructure.com/courses/862997/wiki/artemis-aphrodite-and-revenge