So Persephone has the chest, and
Aphrodite expects her not to open it, but we all know what happens when you
give a box to someone in mythology: they open it. Okay, yes, Pandora didn’t
open a box, she opened a jar, but we all know what we meant. Besides, squeezing
an infant into a jar is just not practical.
On finding the boy, she raises him
to manhood, which means Aphrodite has been gone for a while or the kid grows
freakishly fast. After he’s a man, Persephone takes him on as her lover. Yeah,
it’s kind of awkward, isn’t it? Even though Persephone is in no way related to
him, she still raised him. So now we have a pseudo-incestuous relationship,
here. Remember the side effects of parenting according to mythology? Yeah.
Anyway, Aphrodite finds out about
this, and wants the kid back because she wanted Adonis for the same reason.
Does anyone else hear David Lee
Roth’s cover of “Just A Gigolo / I Ain’t Got Nobody”? Just me? Well, okay then.
So Adonis’s only value to these two
goddesses is for his body. It gets so bad that the matter actually goes to
trial. Now, Zeus is a smart cookie, as we’ve seen, and what we’ve got here is a
court case between two of his daughters, arguing over the man with whom they
wish to cheat on their husbands with. Yeah, no way he’s going to get into that
one.
He transfers the case (which is
something he does quite frequently) to another court. Judge Calliope (of the
Muses) gets jurisdiction. She more or less goes the Solomon route, here,
dividing the year into thirds so that each goddess gets four months and Adonis
gets time to himself, which I thought was considerate of Calliope to think that
the guy might want some time to, you know, live his own life.
We are dealing with gods, though,
and no story can end that simply. Aphrodite cheats.