Aphrodite

Aphrodite’s role in the war begins with the judgment of Paris, where she offers him Helen and wins. In Iliad III she saves Paris from Menelaus by wrapping him in mist and carrying him to his bedchamber, and then compels Helen to go to him. Her intervention is both erotic and coercive, and Helen resists her.

She is not a martial goddess, and the poem shows the limits of her power when Diomedes wounds her in Book V. She drops Aeneas, whom she was trying to save, and flees to Olympus weeping, where Zeus and Dione comfort her. The scene is funny and revealing: the goddess who can make others helpless is herself easily hurt.

Aphrodite’s domain is the force that the Iliad both needs and distrusts. Helen’s beauty causes the war, Paris’s desire prolongs it, and Hera borrows Aphrodite’s girdle to deceive Zeus. Desire is a power that crosses the boundary between gods and mortals and that cannot be defeated by force.

In the Odyssey she appears mainly in the song of Demodocus, where she is caught in bed with Ares and exposed before the gods. The episode is comic, but it also shows that the goddess of love is subject to the same desires she inspires.