After all
the effort and gentlemanly behavior of Hades, Persephone doesn’t prove to be as
caring. In fact, she has herself an affair with a mortal and kicks off a catfight
with Aphrodite. Aphrodite is responsible for starting the whole thing . . .
well, indirectly. Okay, let’s get into.
So,
Aphrodite rescued a child born from a myrrh tree. . . .
Um, right.
I need to rewind a bit more, don’t I?
Right, this
is more of an Aphrodite myth, but it does have a big dose of Persephone in it.
Okay, so
King Cinryas was an arrogant SOB, and he decided to boast that his daughter was
more beautiful than Aphrodite. Classic mistake. We’ve already seen with the
likes of Arachne and others that it’s a crazy-bad idea to ever boast that
someone can do X better than one of the gods.
But he did
it anyway. Now, in the course of punishments handed down from the gods, the
Acteon and Arachne generally top out the list as being the most famous, and
received pretty severe punishments. Demeter has a nasty one about a man name
Erysichthon—say that five times fast—where she makes him perpetually hungry.
However, Aphrodite wins the prize in my book.
When Cinryas
makes his boast, Aphrodite gets revenge with her own style. Cinryas has a
daughter, Smyrna. Instead of doing something directly to Cinryas, Aphrodite
instead puts a whammy on Smyrna. She makes Smyrna fall uncontrollably in lust
with her father.
And she
acts on this lust.
Yup, the
daughter rapes the father. He’s not really aware, either, since she slipped in
at night. And she gets pregnant.
Yeah, this
is why Aphrodite wins this particular contest. PSA: do not ever, ever claim to be more beautiful than
Aphrodite.
When Cinryas learns that he is both
the father and grandfather of Smyrna’s unborn child, he kind of goes off the
deep end. He wants to kill her and the child for the unnatural lust. Aphrodite
felt a little bad over what happened, so, at the last moment, she turned Smyrna
into a myrrh tree. Cinryas’s sword cut the tree in half, and out fell a baby
boy.
This sure beats the idea of the
stork, right?
This baby boy is Adonis, and he
becomes the object of Persephone’s affections, but we’ll tackle that next week.