Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

The Homeric Hymn tells how Zeus turned Aphrodite’s own weapon against her. She who made gods mate with mortals was herself filled with desire for Anchises, a mortal herdsman of Trojan blood pasturing cattle on Ida. She came to his hut disguised as a tall Phrygian maiden, claiming Hermes had brought her to be his wife in honorable marriage. Anchises, struck by her beauty, bedded her at once. Afterward she revealed her divinity: the hut filled with immortal radiance; she stood in true form and told him she would bear a son, Aeneas, to be nursed among the mountain nymphs and given to Anchises when a boy. She warned him never to boast that he had lain with Aphrodite—or Zeus would strike him. In later tradition he disregarded the warning and was lamed (or killed) by the thunderbolt; the Hymn itself ends with her departure and the shame of a goddess caught in mortal desire. So Trojan Aeneas’s birth is fixed: Aphrodite humbled by Zeus, Ida’s herdsman briefly the goddess’s lover, and a son who will stand in the *Iliad* under his mother’s shield—Greek hymn first, Roman national epic afterward.