Aphrodite
Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics
BBC
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 22 July 2024
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Greek goddess of love, sex, desire and beauty, Aphrodite is mostly depicted naked and/or wet. And depending on your age and taste, that could be by Botticelli, Bananarama or Lady Gaga.
Born from the sea foam, you can still visit her rock in Cyprus, where there's always a crowd of tourists. No one is immune to her charms, says Hesiod. In fact we can all learn from Aphrodite's stress-busting strategy: when something annoying or stressful happens, she goes to Cyprus - for a bath.
'Rock star mythologist’ and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. Here she explores key stories from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They might be biographical, topographical, mythological or epic, but they are always hilarious, magical and tragic, mystifying and revelatory. And they tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.
Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts. |
| 0:05.1 | Ladies and gentlemen, today I am standing up for Aphrodite. |
| 0:28.0 | Aphrodite is, of course, the goddess of love, of sex, of desire and of beauty. |
| 0:33.4 | I think it says a lot about a person what they think of when they hear her name, either the Greek version of her name, Aphrodite, or the Roman version, Venus. |
| 0:36.7 | I think for a lot of us, |
| 0:38.2 | it's probably the Botticelli birth of Venus. It's like three meters across, it's two meters high. |
| 0:44.3 | It's such an iconic image of this beautiful newborn goddess appearing from a shell and Zephyr |
| 0:50.9 | trying to blow her hair away from her body so he can see more of her naked. |
| 0:55.2 | So I think for a lot of us, when we hear Venus, it's Botticelli. |
| 0:58.0 | For some of us, no judging, it's banana-rama. |
| 1:03.5 | Showing my age, obviously. |
| 1:05.7 | Quite a lot of people, Natalie, it's Lady Gaga. |
| 1:07.6 | I know. |
| 1:09.2 | It's banana-rama. |
| 1:13.5 | But she is a goddess who is often represented naked and or wet. And that's either because she is coming out of the sea where she has been |
| 1:20.1 | born or because she is bathing at any point actually in Aphrodite narratives, particularly |
| 1:25.7 | in Homer. When something annoying or upsetting or |
| 1:28.4 | stressful happens, she goes to Cyprus for a bath. |
| 1:34.5 | Something I fully intend to start using as an exit line at any point. One of our earliest female |
| 1:40.0 | nudes that doesn't survive to us today, although copies copies do that shows an identifiable female figure |
| 1:45.0 | is praxiteles is Aphrodite of Canidas this is from the fourth century BCE and it shows her sort of |
| 1:51.8 | slightly covering her breasts but not very successfully just drawing more attention to them frankly |
... |
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