earlier.

About the place of composition, Cyprus or Asia Minor, the learned are no
less divided than about the date. Many of the grounds on which their
opinions rest appear unstable. The relations of Aphrodite to the wild
beasts under her wondrous spell, for instance, need not be borrowed from
Circe with her attendant beasts. If not of Homer's age, the Hymn is
markedly successful as a continuation of the Homeric tone and manner.

Modern Puritanism naturally "condemns" Aphrodite, as it "condemns" Helen.
But Homer is lenient; Helen is under the spell of the Gods, an unwilling
and repentant tool of Destiny; and Aphrodite, too, is driven by Zeus into
the arms of a mortal. She is [Greek text], shamefast; and her adventure
is to her a bitter sorrow (199, 200). The dread of Anchises--a man is
not long of life who lies with a Goddess--refers to a belief found from
Glenfinlas to Samoa and New Caledonia, that the embraces of the spiritual
ladies of the woodlands are fatal to men. The legend has been told to me
in the Highlands, and to Mr. Stevenson in Samoa, while my cousin, Mr. J.
J. Atkinson, actually knew a Kaneka who died in three days after an amour
like that of Anchises. The Breton ballad, _Le Sieur Nan_, turns on the
same opinion. The amour of Thomas the Rhymer is a mediaeval analogue of
the Idaean legend.

Aphrodite has better claims than most Greek Gods to Oriental elements.
Herodotus and Pausanias (i. xiv. 6, iii. 23, I) look on her as a being
first worshipped by the Assyrians, then by the Paphians of Cyprus, and
Phoenicians at Askelon, who communicated the cult to the Cythereans.
Cyprus is one of her most ancient sites, and Ishtar and Ashtoreth are
among her Oriental analogues. She springs from the sea--