les larmes de sa mere,
Et fecondait le monde en tordant ses cheveux!

But Astarte was a stone which Aphrodite's eyes would have melted. It may
be that they did. The worship of the Dea Meretrix was replaced by the
purer rites of this purer divinity, unconscious as yet of the names and
shames of Ishtar.

The Aphrodite whom Homer revealed differed from that of Hesiod. In Hesiod
she was still a novice, but less austere than she afterward appeared in
the conceptions of Pheidias. The latter succeeded in detaining the
fluidity of the gods. He reproduced them in stone, sometimes in gold,
always in beauty. He created a palpable Olympus. To die without seeing it
was thought a great calamity. The universal judgment of antiquity was that
art could go no higher. At the sight of the Pheidian Zeus, a barbarian
brute, AEmilius Paulus, the Roman invader and victor, shrank back, awe
struck, smitten with sacred terror. The image was regarded less as a
statue than as an actual revelation of the divine. To have been able to
display it, the general assumption was that either Pheidias had ascended
above, or else that Zeus had descended to him. The revelation of Aphrodite
Urania which he effected for her temple near the Cerameicus must have been
equally august, the celestial in its supremest expression.

Thereafter the decadence of the goddess began. Previously she had ruled
through her perfection. Subsequently, though the perfection persisted, the
stamp of divinity ceased. In lieu of the goddess was a very pretty woman.
If that woman did not, as Hesiod claimed, issue from the sea, she at least
emerged from marble. The statues differed. Sometimes there were doves on
them, sometimes there was a girdle embroidered with caresses and kisses,
at times in the hand was an arrow, at others a lance, again Aphrodite was
twisting her hair. But chiefly she was assassinated, not like Lais by
jealous wives, but by sheer freedom of the chisel. It was these profaner
images that inflamed Phaedra and Pasiphae. Among them was Praxiteles'
Cnidian Aphrodite, a statue which a king tried vainly to buy and a madman
offered to marry. The Pheidian Aphrodite belonged to an epoch in which art
expressed the eternal; the Praxitelean, to a period in which it suggested
the fugitive. One was beauty and also love, the other was beauty and
passion.

Originally both were one. It was only the idea of her that varied. Each
Hellenic town, each upland and valley had its own