Briseis, Andromache and Cassandra in the Iliad

In Book 19 of the Iliad, Briseis grieves the death of Patroclus in the epic's first lament by a woman over a fallen hero. Introducing this lament, Homer describes Briseis’ initial realization that Patroclus is dead (19.282–6), comparing her to Aphrodite:

What has most often drawn scholarly attention to this passage is the identification of Patroclus’ torn body with that of Briseis’ husband in Il. 19.291–2.Footnote ⁵ The identification of Briseis with Aphrodite is considered merely ornamental, describing the woman's beauty, equivalent to the comparison of Hermione's physical form to Aphrodite's in Od. 4.14.Footnote ⁶

One exception is Casey Dué, who recognizes that the connection with Aphrodite conveys more than a superficial likeness. Dué sees this comparison as relating to Aphrodite's association with marriage, highlighting Briseis’ role as wife, both to the man she lost at Lyrnessos and to her imagined future husband, Achilles.Footnote ⁷ As evidence for this proposal, she cites Il. 22.468–72, in which Andromache is similarly confronted with the death of her husband and tears off the veil that χρυσῆ Ἀφροδίτη ‘golden Aphrodite’ had given her on her wedding day. Certainly, the dominant association of Aphrodite in Homer is with marriage, specifically its sexual aspect. When she is pathetically wounded in battle by mortal Diomedes, her father Zeus chides her to leave warfare to Athena and Ares and play to her strengths, the ἔργα γάμοιο, ‘works of marriage’ (5.429). The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite is less reserved, celebrating Aphrodite's power to snare all mortals and all but three of the gods with sexual desire (Hymn. Hom. Ven. 34–9).

While the Homeric epics and hymns name Aphrodite explicitly as connected with sex and marriage, even depicting her as engaging in sex with a mortal, nowhere do they describe her as lamenting. And yet, this is precisely the allusion I argue Homer makes, with the identification of Briseis with Aphrodite in the moment of grief.

The association of the reference to Aphrodite with the Adonis myth was first proposed briefly by Laurialan Reitzammer in her recent book on the Athenian Adonia festival.Footnote ⁸ Accepting Dué's association of the mourning women with Aphrodite as a reference to the goddess's role in marriage, Reitzammer adds the suggestion that ‘the narrative of goddesses and mortal men is activated’, positioning the lamenting women in the powerful role of a goddess vis-à-vis a mortal male lover. Reitzammer takes this brief observation as the point of departure for a discussion of the trope of goddesses’ affairs with mortals, specifically Adonis’ feminized role as bride to Aphrodite in Classical Athens. I focus here instead on the meaning of this allusion to the Homeric poems. Instead of understanding it as a means of elevating the lamenting woman or feminizing the dead, I argue in the following that the Homeric comparisons of a lamenting woman to Aphrodite functions by highlighting the pathos of extreme grief in the first moment of recognition of the man's death, in which both Aphrodite and the mortal women find themselves. Though the women may be likened to an Olympian, it is in that goddess's weakest and most vulnerable state; the effect of the allusion is one not of power but of utter devastation.

In only two instances in the Iliad is a woman said to resemble Aphrodite, in both cases with the formula ἰκέλη χρυσέῃ Ἀφροδίτῃ ‘like golden Aphrodite’.Footnote ⁹ The first is Briseis, who appears ‘like golden Aphrodite’ at the moment she recognizes Patroclus’ mangled body and begins her lament. The second instance comes in 24.699, when Cassandra is the first to recognize Priam returning across the plain bearing Hector's body. Wailing (κώκυσεν; compare Briseis in Il. 19.284: ἐκώκυε), she announces Hector's return to the city and calls them to gather, initiating the lamentation. At the moment she recognizes Priam and Hector, she is identified as Κασσάνδρη ἰκέλη χρυσέῃ Ἀφροδίτῃ ‘Cassandra, like golden Aphrodite’. The resemblance between the descriptions of Briseis and Cassandra is striking. Aside from the repetition of diction, both women initiate the lamentation: Briseis for Patroclus and Cassandra for Hector. Although Cassandra is not quoted delivering a γόος ‘lament’ over Hector, as Briseis is for Patroclus, she shares with Briseis the primary role of being the first and most spontaneous. Both women are compared to Aphrodite in the moment that they first recognize the corpse, at which point they wail and then initiate the lament.

Only one other woman is associated with Aphrodite in the Iliad in the context of lamentation, although she is not said to resemble her with the phrase ἰκέλη χρυσέῃ Ἀφροδίτῃ.Footnote ¹⁰ As noted by Dué, this is Andromache in Il. 22.437–76, in the moment she learns of Hector's death. At first, Andromache is blissfully unaware of her husband's fate, weaving and calling for water to be heated for Hector's bath on his return. As she begins to suspect what has happened, she runs to the walls; at the moment she sees Hector's body being dragged away behind Achilles’ chariot, she faints, casting off the veil that Aphrodite had given her on her wedding day:

In this case, the woman is not compared to Aphrodite. She is described rather as μαινάδι ἴση ‘equal to a Maenad’, a mad woman often associated with Bacchic cult (460).Footnote ¹¹ This passage, therefore, cannot be fully identified with the two lamenting women explicitly equated with Aphrodite. Nevertheless, some strong similarities are apparent. As with Briseis and Cassandra, a reference to ‘golden Aphrodite’ appears at precisely the moment she first identifies the corpse, just prior to her speech. In this case, the comparison with Aphrodite is overridden by the comparison to a Maenad and is only slightly displaced to the veil she throws in her moment of recognition.

The common thread between these three allusions to Aphrodite is their narrative setting. While this may be unsurprising given the stereotyped nature of Homeric diction, this specificity contrasts with the general comparisons of men to an individual god (nearly always Ares). The comparison to Ares appears in numerous battle scenes, but there is little else that ties these scenes together. In some cases, the hero is successful (7.206–12), while in others the comparison is made even as the warrior is killed (5.576). Rather than alluding to a specific scene from Ares’ mythology, the comparison seems to function as a generic epithet for any hero on the battlefield, regardless of context.Footnote ¹² In contrast, these three allusions to Aphrodite show a marked specificity of context; in each case it is precisely the moment of the woman's recognition of the corpse at which it appears. This observation alone suggests that the allusion is not to Aphrodite's beauty or sexuality, generally, as with men's loose association with Ares’ martial nature, but that it is the event itself that holds the key to understanding the allusion.

Penelope in the Odyssey

The formula ἰκέλη χρυσέῃ Ἀφροδίτῃ also appears twice in the Odyssey, both times in reference to Penelope in contexts in which she thinks that her son or husband has died. In these two instances, the identical phrase appears as part of an entrance formula (Od. 17.36–7, 19.53–4):

The lines following Penelope's first comparison to Artemis and Aphrodite clarify the specific manner of her resemblance to Aphrodite. The passage continues:

Throwing her arms around Telemachus, kissing his head and wailing, Penelope goes on to explain that she thought she had lost her son in a shipwreck, just as she fears she has lost her husband. For this sequence of actions, compare the description of Briseis as she begins to lament. Far from commenting on Penelope's physical beauty, she is being cast as a figure of the same type as Briseis, Cassandra and Andromache, when they realize that they have lost a loved one. Here, Penelope has found her son alive when she thought him dead and must express her emotions of both fear and relief simultaneously. She throws herself around her son's body, focussing especially on the head, which is the typical stance of a mourning woman lamenting a loved one at a prothesis.Footnote ¹³ Though her emotions are mixed, her appearance is that of the bereaved mother lamenting. In other words, tears of relief are tears none the less, and intense sorrow and joy may be expressed simultaneously with the same outward appearance.

This formulaic introduction of Penelope is used once again in 19.53–4, this time in unknowingly greeting her disguised husband. When she greeted home her son whom she thought dead, her tears flowed and dried as quickly as she recognized him. As she welcomes Odysseus, she is not overcome by tears, but sits him down to question him; commensurate with his twenty-year absence, she takes her time to narrate her sorrows and long years of lamentation (19.123–64). By introducing her with the same comparison to the goddesses on each occasion, Homer draws the parallel between Telemachus’ short νόστος ‘homecoming’ and Odysseus’ long one, accentuating the sorrow that Penelope must bear through it all.

The glaring difference of this formula vis-à-vis the Iliadic one, of course, is the addition of Artemis. Even alone, the juxtaposition of Artemis and Aphrodite is unusual; Aphrodite is most closely associated with sex, while the perpetual virgin Artemis is its antithesis. In Hymn. Hom. Ven. 14–20, Artemis is listed as one of only three gods whom Aphrodite cannot tame with sexual desire, while in the Odyssey an extended simile identifies Nausicaa with Artemis, calling attention to her status as a παρθένος ἀδμής, literally an ‘untamed maiden’ (Od. 6.109). One interpretation of the juxtaposition of the two goddesses is that it highlights the opposition of Aphrodite's sexual appeal with Artemis’ chastity.Footnote ¹⁴ This rather shallow interpretation, however, falters under further examination. It would be inappropriate to highlight Penelope's sexuality in the absence of her husband and it would be a bizarre introduction to meeting her son. As a solution, scholars have sought to understand Penelope as an object of sexual desire, like Aphrodite, but not actively sexual. Aphrodite's brand of sexuality, however, is not passive;Footnote ¹⁵ her primary appearance in the Odyssey is in Demodocus’ second song (Od. 8.266–366), the subject of which is her adulterous affair with Ares while married to Hephaestus. Understood sexually, Aphrodite is quite an inappropriate comparison for Penelope, the wife who waits chastely for her husband and cunningly wards off her suitors.Footnote ¹⁶ The connection with Aphrodite, therefore, is unlikely to relate to the goddess’ sexual aspect. Furthermore, if the image is meant to evoke Aphrodite in the sense of the married woman, matronly and beautiful, comparisons to other goddesses would be more apt: Hestia, for example, the goddess of the hearth, who is courted by Poseidon and Apollo but chooses chastity (Hymn. Hom. Ven. 22–32); or Hera, who is not only the most beautiful goddess, more even than Aphrodite, but also supremely respectable (Hymn. Hom. Ven. 41, 43).

Penelope's comparison to Aphrodite, then, cannot be about her sexuality. Nevertheless, the natural initial reaction to contrast Aphrodite and Artemis on the basis of their opposing representations of sexuality serves an important function. Not every formula can be an allusion; most of them exist to texture the epic language, providing an epic backdrop to those formulas that do function allusively or metonymically.Footnote ¹⁷ One of the ways in which a poet is able to signal that a certain formula is worth dwelling upon is through the use of an unusual or contextually inappropriate formula or claim;Footnote ¹⁸ the comparison of Penelope to two such contrasting figures as Artemis and Aphrodite has certainly drawn attention. Indeed, Homer plays with the unexpected interchange of the two goddesses elsewhere for dramatic effect, as in the comparison of Helen to Artemis in Od. 4.121–2, which gives Helen a surprisingly innocent sheen; and in Aphrodite's disguise as a παρθένος ἀδμήτης ‘untamed maiden’ (Hymn. Hom. Ven. 82), a description associated with the chaste goddesses, especially Artemis (Od. 6.102–9; Hymn. Hom. Ven. 7–33). By identifying Penelope with two seemingly irreconcilable figures, Homer marks this otherwise potentially ornamental formula as significant. As one hears this line unfold, the first aspect of it, the comparison to the virgin huntress Artemis, seems eminently appropriate for Penelope, given her valiant stand against the suitors. However, as it continues on to include Aphrodite, the audience is initially faced with the opposition between the two poles of sexuality. Penelope can resemble the sexuality of either Artemis or Aphrodite, but not of both goddesses.Footnote ¹⁹ As Penelope quite clearly aligns with Artemis’ sexuality, the sexual aspect of Aphrodite must be eliminated. Penelope resembles Artemis in her long-term chastity but Aphrodite in her moment of grief. By contrasting the two goddesses, this clever line highlights an aspect of Aphrodite that a reference to her alone struggles to make clear. Whereas in the Iliad one might need to understand the metonymic import of the formula in order to grasp the allusion, in the Odyssey its referent can be inferred from a single occurrence.

Based on both the Iliadic and the Odyssean examples, then, when a mortal woman is said to resemble Aphrodite (primarily through the formula ἰκέλη χρυσέῃ Ἀφροδίτῃ ‘like golden Aphrodite’), Homer evokes the image of the shocked and devastated woman, at the moment in which she recognizes the body of a loved-one and begins the lament. The formula functions more literally in the Iliad, while in the Odyssey it is slightly more complex and is applied to Penelope more metaphorically; in both cases, however, the underlying image is the same.Footnote ²⁰ For this process of recognition to work as an example of Foley's ‘traditional referentiality’, there need not be any reason for the association between this particular formula and the image, other than the fact that the association is observable and apparently traditional.Footnote ²¹ The resonance of the formula between multiple instances of female bereavement is enough to express its inherent meaning.

I maintain, however, that the association of a bereaved woman with Aphrodite is best understood as an allusion to an external mythology, never explicitly narrated in the epics. This type of allusion is one of the major features of Homer's art and can be understood to supplement, rather than supplant, the traditional referential meaning of a formula.Footnote ²² To note but one example, Dionysus is nearly absent from the epics, despite evidence of the importance of his cult already in the Mycenaean period. Homer, however, has chosen largely to suppress Dionysus to the level of allusion.Footnote ²³ For the comparison of the grieving women to Aphrodite, though never stated explicitly, the image evoked is of immortal Aphrodite as the archetypal bereaved woman, lamenting the death of mortal Adonis.

Adonis and the Near East

It is well established that the myth of the death of Adonis and the female ritual lamentation over him originated in the Near East.Footnote ²⁴ The name Ἄδωνις (adōnis) derives from Northwest Semitic ’dn ‘lord’ and the long /ō/ vowel in Greek locates the transmission of this figure into the Greek-speaking world specifically via speakers of a Canaanite dialect, presumably Phoenician.Footnote ²⁵ The myth originated in Mesopotamia in the third millennium with Inanna's laments over the death of her young shepherd lover Dumuzi.Footnote ²⁶ Adapted into Akkadian by the second millennium as the goddess Ishtar and her lover Tammuz, this myth was marked with ritual lamentation during his eponymous summer month, consisting of lamentation over the course of the month, culminating in the burial of an effigy of the youth.Footnote ²⁷ By the first millennium, the summer ritual lament for Tammuz was practised by women in the Levant (cf. Ezekiel 8:14).Footnote ²⁸ By the fifth century, Athenian women were lamenting the death of Adonis during the summer months in their homes during a festival called the Adonia, outside of the state ceremonial calendar and unconnected to the official state cult.Footnote ²⁹ There is no evidence of men taking part in this festival; it is, therefore, unlikely to have arrived from the Near East solely via merchants but rather also through direct contact between Greek and Near Eastern women.Footnote ³⁰

From our earliest attestation of Adonis in Greek-speaking communities, he is identified with Aphrodite and therefore probably accompanied the transmission of other aspects of the Levantine goddesses to Greek Aphrodite.Footnote ³¹ Early Greek historiographers identified the worship of Aphrodite as having arrived from the Near East via contact with Phoenicians on Cyprus, with Herodotus claiming that Aphrodite's first temple, at Cythera, was built by Phoenicians (1.105). The evidence for Aphrodite's origins, however, is debated. Deborah Boedeker argues that Aphrodite is fundamentally a refraction of the Indo-European dawn goddess, while more recently scholars have emphasized the role that the Levantine goddesses played in the construction of Iron Age Cypriot and Aegean Aphrodite.Footnote ³² Regardless of the degree of her Near Eastern origins, by the time of the composition of the Homeric epics, Aphrodite had taken on numerous Near Eastern aspects and was thought to have originated in Cyprus at a period of intermingling between Greeks and Phoenicians.Footnote ³³ Both in Hesiod's Theogony and in Book 5 of the Iliad, Aphrodite is repeatedly called Cypris ‘the one from Cyprus’Footnote ³⁴ in scenes that closely parallel scenes known from Near Eastern mythology.Footnote ³⁵ These observations have led scholars to identify Aphrodite as one important vector of Near Eastern influence on Greek epic, probably via contact on Cyprus.Footnote ³⁶

Adonis in later Greek myth and reflections on Homer

The question of when either the practice of women lamenting Adonis or the associated myth of the goddess lamenting him arrived in Greece has not been settled and usually relies solely on the evidence of the first Greek literary reference to it. While most of the sources of the myth date to the Classical and the Hellenistic periods, references to Adonis and to the practice among Greek women of lamenting him long precede that. The earliest unambiguous reference to Adonis appears in the late seventh/early sixth century with Sappho, who depicts an antiphonal lament between Aphrodite and her girls (fr. 140A):

In this fragment, an archaic poet depicts Aphrodite lamenting Adonis. Sappho is quoted elsewhere as having composed what looks to be a lament over Adonis: ὦ τὸν Ἄδωνιν ‘Alas, Adonis!’ (fr. 168). In what context these poems were sung is unclear, although they are often taken as evidence for the early practice of the Adonia on Lesbos.Footnote ³⁷ Whether or not this was part of a women's ritual like the Adonia, at the very least these lines attest to knowledge of the myth and to Aphrodite's association with lamentation already in the Archaic period.

It is significant that Sappho, one of the earliest surviving lyric poets, is a witness to the Aphrodite-Adonis lament tradition. The relationship between Sappho and Homer is rich; linguistically, the Aeolic formulaic system, attested by the Lesbian lyric poets Sappho and Alcaeus, forms one of the major phases of the Homeric dialect.Footnote ³⁸ The Lesbian Aeolian lyric tradition itself stands as a cognate tradition to hexametric epic, both in terms of metre and traditional formula and in terms of theme.Footnote ³⁹ The parade example of Sappho's ties to Homer is fr. 44, the Wedding of Hector and Andromache, which tells in lyric form an event referenced in both of Andromache's primary Iliadic scenes. In both passages, Homer dwells on many of the same details that Sappho highlights in her song.Footnote ⁴⁰

The mythic worlds represented in Sappho and Homer are highly complementary. Nothing in the surviving fragments of Sappho is contradicted by the Homeric tradition and nearly every aspect of Sappho's mythic content is corroborated in Homer. Regarding Aphrodite, Sappho stands rather closer to the Homeric than to the Hesiodic tradition. All three traditions identify Aphrodite with Cyprus; only Sappho and Homer, however, agree that she is the daughter of Zeus (Il. 3.374, 5.131, 5.312, etc.; Sappho 1.2), while Hesiod describes her descent from Ouranos (Theog. 188–200). If Homer were unaware of Aphrodite's association with Adonis, then Sappho's recurring reference to it would stand out as the only aspect of her mythological world that would not correspond to Homer's.

While references to Adonis appear in early fragments, the myth is more fully attested in later Hellenistic sources. Bion's second-century b.c.e. Epitaphios for Adonis embeds a depiction of a bereaved Aphrodite, lamenting the death of Adonis in language reminiscent of the Iliad's lamenting women (40–5):

This scene depicts the moment when Aphrodite, having anxiously wandered the hills in search of Adonis, was the first to find his mangled body after a hunting accident. The words ὡς ἴδεν, ὡς ἐνόησεν … | ὡς ἴδε φοίνιον αἷμα ‘when she saw, when she perceived … | when she saw the purple blood’ (40–1) depict the moment of recognition, just as Briseis and Cassandra are depicted when they are likened to golden Aphrodite and as Andromache is depicted when she faints on seeing Hector's body. Briseis is compared to Aphrodite ὡς ἴδε Πάτροκλον δεδαϊγμένον ὀξέϊ χαλκῷ ‘when she saw Patroclus torn with sharp bronze’ (19.283); Cassandra is described in the same light immediately following her comparison to Aphrodite: τὸν δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ἐφ᾽ ἡμιόνων ἴδε κείμενον ἐν λεχέεσσι ‘and she saw him lying upon the bier of the mules’ (24.702); and Andromache faints and throws off golden Aphrodite's gift when τὸν δὲ νόησεν ἑλκόμενον πρόσθεν πόλιος ‘she perceived him being dragged away from the city’ (22.463–4). The very next action for all four characters—Aphrodite and the three Iliadic women—is to wail and then give a speech initiating the lament. To be sure, Bion writing hexameter verses in the Hellenistic period is probably drawing heavily on Homer in his depiction of female lamentation. That the type scene is considered especially appropriate to Aphrodite, however, should not be discounted, and helps to illuminate the scene to which I argue Homer alludes.

The key thought in the lament itself is delivered in lines 52–3: ἁ δὲ τάλαινα | ζώω καὶ θεὸς ἐμμὶ καὶ οὐ δύναμαί σε διώκειν ‘But I, wretched, | am a god and live on, and am powerless to follow you.’ Despite her divinity, or rather because of it, Aphrodite finds herself in a state of powerlessness. The Iliadic women's laments revolve around the same pathos; they must continue to live a diminished and miserable life because the man they lament has gone from them. This is especially apparent in the laments of Andromache, who sees her fate as bound to Hector's. She foretells her bleak life after Hector's death and wishes she could follow him into the underworld.Footnote ⁴¹ Although women suffer terribly in the sack of the city, they are rarely depicted as dying in the epics. Instead, they are taken alive as slaves and must live on miserably, remembering the status, love and happiness they lost with the death of their protectors. With a comparison to Aphrodite, Homer highlights the women's plight that they share most especially with the goddess after her loss of Adonis: though they have lost all happiness and would rather be dead, they must all continue living.

Apollodorus tells the story of the Cypriot youth Adonis, who is adopted by Aphrodite, but angers Artemis during a boar hunt and is slain (Bibl. 3.14.4). While this is a very late text (c. second century c.e.), Apollodorus draws on significantly earlier material, citing Panyassis and Hesiod as sources for the Adonis myth. The tradition that Artemis slew Adonis is probably also attested in the Classical period in Euripides’ Hippolytus. In order to avenge Aphrodite's killing of Artemis’ beloved mortal Hippolytus, Artemis vows to kill Aphrodite's favourite, αὐτῆς ἄλλον … ὃς ἂν μάλιστα φίλτατος … βροτῶν ‘that one of hers who is most dear among mortals’ (Hipp. 1420–2).Footnote ⁴²

The testimony of Apollodorus, along with Hippolytus, provides an intriguing complement to our Odyssean passages. If Artemis’ involvement belongs to an archaic tradition, this would add another layer of complexity to the already textured comparison of Penelope in the Odyssey. In uniquely bringing Artemis and Aphrodite alone together in the same line,Footnote ⁴³ it is possible that Homer may be alluding to this very tradition as a means of focussing the reference on the bereaved Aphrodite, to the exclusion of her otherwise sexual connotations. Of course, this suggestion must be treated with caution; not all versions of the story have Artemis as Adonis’ killer, nor can we exclude the possibility that another myth that has not survived brought the two goddesses together. But whether or not she is the one to kill Adonis, as Artemis also mourns the loss of her favourite human youth, from the available evidence it seems that it is in lamentation alone that two such diametrically opposed goddesses are similar. Penelope's comparison to both Artemis and Aphrodite, irreconcilable on the basis of sexuality, becomes sensible when one recognizes the characteristic they share: they both live to grieve the deaths of their beloved mortal men, just as Penelope imagines herself in the moments in which the comparison is made.

From a diachronic perspective, Artemis and Aphrodite also share a common history as complementary partial-refractions of Phoenician Ashtart.Footnote ⁴⁴ In the formation of Aphrodite taking place by the ninth century in contact with Phoenicians on Cyprus, the sexual aspects of Ashtart were re-assimilated to Aphrodite, while other elements, such as her role as huntress/mistress of animals and kourotrophos, find their parallels in the non-sexual Artemis.Footnote ⁴⁵ Moreover, some of the mythology belonging to Ishtar, the Mesopotamian origin of and equivalent to Ashtart, appears in Greek mythology split between Aphrodite and Artemis.Footnote ⁴⁶ That both Artemis and Aphrodite are involved in mythologies of mourning over lost mortal men might point back to the common origin of this motif via the Levantine goddess. Their appearance together in the same simile in the context of grief, then, may be a reflection of this shared influence of the myth of the Near Eastern goddess and the loss of her mortal lover.

Homer's avoidance of Adonis

If we understand Homer as alluding obliquely to this myth, then the question remains as to why he does not name Adonis explicitly. A reference to Aphrodite evokes multiple images, as is evident from many scholars’ assumption that the allusion is to her sexuality. It would not have been out of character for Homer, having already introduced a simile for the purpose of emphasis,Footnote ⁴⁷ to have extended it for two or three lines comparing Briseis or Cassandra to Aphrodite lamenting Adonis, in order to clarify the manner in which they resemble the goddess.Footnote ⁴⁸

Ancient writers posited an intentionality behind Adonis’ conspicuous absence from the Iliad. In an attempt to console Aphrodite for her humiliation at the hands of mortal Diomedes, Dione tells the goddess an analogous story of Ares’ humiliation by mortals (5.382–415). In recounting the imprisonment of Ares by Otus and Ephialtes, however, Dione makes no mention of the reason for their actions. The scholia on 5.385 supply the back story as follows: Aphrodite loved Adonis, but, on suspecting Ares’ jealousy, hid him with Poseidon's sons, Otus and Ephialtes. Ares nevertheless succeeds in killing Adonis, but is in turn imprisoned by the youth's guards.Footnote ⁴⁹ Dione omits the reason for Ares’ imprisonment, as it was Aphrodite herself who caused it—a plot point that would rather undermine the consolation effort.Footnote ⁵⁰

In a similar vein, I would argue that Homer intentionally avoids referencing Adonis directly throughout the epics, so as not to detract from a more immanent narrative thread: Aphrodite's relationship with the Trojan Anchises and the son she bears him, Aeneas. To introduce a second mortal lover would complicate her unique association with Anchises. This relationship is highlighted explicitly (Il. 2.820), as it plays an important narrative function. Having a son on the battlefield and an erstwhile lover in the walls of Troy gives Aphrodite a more noble reason to side with the Trojans than her success at bribing Paris to award her first place in a beauty contest.Footnote ⁵¹ Introducing Adonis by name in an extended simile would weaken that connection by making Anchises just one of the multiple mortal lovers of Aphrodite, and in a sense cheapen her close identification with Troy.Footnote ⁵² Nevertheless, Homer can still allude to her relationship with Adonis for the purpose of imbuing his female characters with the image of the archetypal bereaved woman.Footnote ⁵³