hen comes the reign of APHRODITE, the beautiful, the wronged. Wronged, because human coarseness cannot keep up to the conceptions of the celestial Venus, but degrades her into a French lorette, and fills story-books with her levities. How unlike this are the conceptions of Plato, whose philosophy has been called "a mediation of love." Love, according to him, "first taught the arts to mankind," arts of existence, arts of wisdom. Love inspires self-sacrifice; he who loves will die for another.

"Love," he says, in his Banquet, [1] "is peace and good-will among men, calm upon the waters, repose and stillness in the storm, the balm of sleep in sadness. Before love all harsh passions flee away. Love is author of soft affections, destroyer of ungentle thoughts, merciful and mild, the admiration of the wise, the delight of the gods. Love divests us of all alienation from each other, and fills our vacant hearts with overflowing sympathy. Love is the valued treasure of the fortunate and desired by the unhappy (therefore unhappy because they possess not love); the parent of grace, of gentleness, of delicacy; a cherisher of all that is good, but guileless as to evil; in labor and in fear, in longings of the affection or in soarings of the reason, our best pilot, confederate, supporter, and savior; ornament and governor of all things human and divine; the best, the loveliest, whom every one should follow with songs of exultation, uniting in the divine harmony with which love forever soothes the mind of men and gods."

Now love is Aphrodite, either represented by the goddess herself or by her son and viceregent, who seems almost identified with herself; "N'était autre que la dèesse elle-méme, douée du sexe masculin," as Éméric-David well states it. "Love," says Empedocles, in that great philosophical poem of which fragments only remain, "is not discoverable by the eye, but only by intellect; its elements are indeed innate in our mortal constitution, and we give it the names of Joy and Aphrodite; but in its highest universality no mortal hath fully comprehended it."

Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and Harmonia, according to some legends ; while, according to others, Harmonia is her daughter by Ares, and the mother of Aphrodite is the child of Heaven and Earth. She is usually seen naked, unlike every other goddess save Artemis. Yet Praxiteles carved her veiled at Cos; others armed her as Venus Victrix; Phidias carved her in ivory and gold, her feet resting on a tortoise, as if to imply deliberation, not heedlessness. The conscious look of the Venus de' Medici implies modesty, since she is supposed to be standing before Paris with Hera and Athena. In Homer's hymn to her she is described as ordinarily cold and unimpressionable, and only guiding others to love, till Zeus, by his sovereign interference, makes her mind to wander and she loves a mortal man. And though she regards Anchises simply as her husband, and calls herself his wedded wife, yet she is saddened by the thought of her fall, as much as Artemis when she loves Endymion. This is Homer when serious; but the story of her intrigue with Ares he puts into the mouth of a wandering minstrel in the Odyssey, as a relief from graver song, and half disavows it, as if knowing its irreverence.

The true Aphrodite is to be sought in the hymns of Homer, Orpheus, and Proclus. The last invokes her as yet a virgin. [2] It is essential to her very power that she should have the provocation of modesty. She represents that passion which is the basis of purity, for the author of Ecce Homo admirably says, that "No heart is pure which is not passionate." Accordingly, married love is as sacred to Aphrodite as the virgin condition; [3] if she misleads, it is through sincere passion, not frivolity. No cruelty comes where she dwells; no animal sacrifices are offered her, but only wreaths of flowers; and the month of April, when the earth stirs again into life, is her sacred time.

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[1] Mackay's translation.
[2] [Gk. transliteration:] Basilêida kouraphraditên.
[3] [Gk. transliteration:] Aphroditê gamon plokais êoetai. Tatian orat. contra Graeccos, c.8.