Artemis & Aphrodite

Artemis & Aphrodite

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Artemis (= Roman Diana). A virgin goddess, associated with the hunt, chastity, and childbirth (!)  Attributes: bow, fawn (or doe or stag); often appears with her brother, Apollo; usually a short dress (chiton) and a girl's hairstyle
     Artemis, the maiden-who-is-desired-but-cannot-be-touched
Associated with "virgin" nature, animals, hunt, chastity (but also childbirth!)
Odyssey 6 (a simile describing Nausicaa): "As Artemis the arrow-shooting moves across the mountains, delighting in boars and swift running deer, and with her play the nymphs, daughters of Zeus, who range in the wilds, and Leto rejoices in her heart: Artemis holds head and forehead above them all and is easily known, but all are beautiful: so excelling her handmaidens shone the unbroken virgin.
In origin, "Mistress of the Animals", both (in some sense) a fertility goddess assoc. with wild beasts, but also a slayer of beasts (Artemis - deer - Iphigenia). Portrayed both with a gentle, virgin nature, accompanied by fawns, and as "the modest maiden who loves the din of the hunt and shoots volleys of arrows at stags" (Homeric Hymn to Artemis). Similarly there are two sides to her virginal (lack of) sexuality. Not, like Athena, a lack of sexuality: peculiarly erotic, and challenging in the erotic allure. The inviolate and inviolable virgin, usually accompanied (as in the story of Actaeon) by a swarm of equally enticing nymphs. But the appearance of Artemis' nymphs is strangely bound up in myth with rape: Zeus and Callisto, Theseus and Helen.  The image of the "Pure Virgin" is unstable: no sanctity here, but rather that destabilizing eroticism tied up with virgin girls of marriageable age. "Nymph": cf. Greek nymphe =
(1) divinities present in streams and flowers and young trees
(2) newlywed brides
(3) young women in their first encounter with love
 Actaeon and similar tales can be read then as a mythical exploration of the dangerous eroticism that goes along with the innocence and beauty of a young woman or girl of marriageable age
  Aphrodite. (= Roman Venus; sometimes called Cytherea or Cypris).
 Attributes: in early art, usually clothed and often impossible to distinguish from Hera or other goddesses, unless there is an inscription; from the 4th century onward, usually nude (after Praxiteles); sometimes pictured with a sceptre or a mirror; often accompanied by Eros (=Roman Cupid) or several Erotes (Cupids); sometimes accompanied by a goose or swan.
     Aphrodite, the woman-who-is-desired-and-CAN-be-touched (cf. Artemis), the woman-who-is-not-the-wife (cf. Hera), woman-as-destabilizing-force (cf. Athena)
Greek verb: aphrodizein. Aphrodite represents female eroticism in the full bloom of beauty and without restraint, not a loss of innocence but a mature sympathy with the frank appreciation and expression of beauty and sexual love: "the joyous consummation of sexuality" (Burkert)
Near Eastern antecedents: Ishtar (goddess of love & war), also called Inanna and Astarte. Ritual prostitution. Sexuality, despite later representations, not solely feminine: bearded Aphrodite/Ishtar, male Aphroditos/Astar.  
But as Aphrodite develops in Greek culture, clearly she is conceived as a contrast to Artemis.
Artemis: simple garb, lives among the beasts, accompanied by nymphs (feminine divinities of the wild: streams, trees)
Aphrodite: heavily adorned, accompanied by 3 Graces (feminine divinities of feminine allure as it is enhanced by clothes, jewelry, hair-dressing)
Artemis "shoots straight"
Aphrodite "leads astray": Anchises because "she even led astray the mind of Zeus...": her feminine wiles are too much for Anchises, Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, lines 97ff (Powell p. 158-9)
Artemis as the "repression" or denial of Aphrodite (and Euripides' Hippolytus as a meditation on that)

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