She dares to suggest that Aphrodite go to Paris herself. For Aphrodite had bewitched her into leaving her husband Menelaus to run off with Paris.
Helen recognizes the goddess in disguise and asks if she is being led once more to ruin. She then appears to Helen in the guise of an elderly handmaiden and tells her that Paris is waiting for her. The goddess wraps him in a mist and spirits him away, setting him down in his own bedroom in Troy. Her father Zeus tells her to leave war to the likes of Ares and Athena, while devoting herself to the business of marriage.Įlsewhere in Homer's Iliad, Aphrodite saves Paris when he is about to be killed in single combat by Menelaus. There she goes crying to her mother Dione, who soothes her and cures her wound. In pain she sought out her brother Ares, the god of war who stood nearby admiring the carnage, and borrowed his chariot so that she might fly up to Olympus. (Ichor is what immortals have in the place of blood.)Īphrodite promptly dropped Aeneas, who was rescued by Apollo, another Olympian sponsor of the Trojans. The Greek hero Diomedes, who had been on the verge of killing Aeneas, attacked the goddess herself, wounding her on the wrist with his spear and causing the ichor to flow. In his epic of the Trojan War, Homer tells how Aphrodite intervened in battle to save her son Aeneas, a Trojan ally.
In the ensuing Trojan War, Hera and Athena were implacable enemies of Troy while Aphrodite was loyal to Paris and the Trojans. This was Helen of Sparta, who became infamous as Helen of Troy when Paris subsequently eloped with her. The latter two had hoped to bribe him with power and victory in battle, but Aphrodite offered the love of the most beautiful woman in the world. When the Trojan prince Paris was asked to judge which of three Olympian goddesses was the most beautiful, he chose Aphrodite over Hera and Athena. Homer, on the other hand, said that she was the daughter of Zeus and Dione. The poet Hesiod said that Aphrodite was born from sea-foam. Their reversal it is true, led to Cannae but this only establishes a negative presumption in their favor.The Gods and Goddesses of Greek MythologyĪPHRODITE (a-fro-DYE-tee Roman name Venus) was the goddess of love, beauty and fertility. But it is quite a moot question whether his tactics would have proved successful in the long run. That general deliberately measured the endurance of Rome against that of Hannibals's isolated army, because it seemed to him that the latter was more likely to suffer from a long campaign in a strange country. In considering the point raised here by Sun Tzu, the classic example of Fabius Cunctator will inevitably occur to the mind. What he does say is something much more guarded, namely that, while speed may sometimes be injudicious, tardiness can never be anything but foolish-if only because it means impoverishment to the nation. Ho Shih says: "Haste may be stupid, but at any rate it saves expenditure of energy and treasure protracted operations may be very clever, but they bring calamity in their train." Wang Hsi evades the difficulty by remarking: "Lengthy operations mean an army growing old, wealth being expended, an empty exchequer and distress among the people true cleverness insures against the occurrence of such calamities." Chang Yu says: "So long as victory can be attained, stupid haste is preferable to clever dilatoriness." Now Sun Tzu says nothing whatever, except possibly by implication, about ill-considered haste being better than ingenious but lengthy operations. Ts`ao Kung, Li Ch`uan, Meng Shih, Tu Yu, Tu Mu and Mei Yao-ch`en have notes to the effect that a general, though naturally stupid, may nevertheless conquer through sheer force of rapidity. This concise and difficult sentence is not well explained by any of the commentators. Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.