Mnemosyne — Classical Greek Myth Library

When Diomedes, powered by Athena, drives his spear through Aphrodite’s wrist as she shelters Aeneas, ichor flows—the blood of the gods who eat no bread and drink no wine. She drops her son; Apollo takes him up. Iris leads Aphrodite, faint with pain, from the battle; Ares lends his chariot; they reach steep Olympus. There Dione, her mother in the Homeric genealogy, draws her daughter onto her knees, strokes the hurt, and speaks comfort by listing gods who have suffered outrage from mortals: Ares bound in a bronze jar by Otus and Ephialtes for thirteen months until Artemis (or Hermes in some readings of the tale’s rescue) freed him; Hera shot in the breast by Heracles’ triple-barbed arrow; Hades likewise wounded by Heracles at the gate among the dead. As Dione speaks, she wipes the ichor from Aphrodite’s arm with both hands; the pain eases, and the wound heals. Athena and Hera mock; Zeus smiles and calls Aphrodite to him, advising that her works are not war but the sweet secrets of marriage—leave fighting to Ares and Athena. The scene’s classical interest is Dione: otherwise shadowy, here she is fully mother, healer, and mythic consoler, enacting Homeric Aphrodite’s Olympian birth against the Hesiodic foam-born line. The wounding on the Trojan plain belongs to Diomedes’ aristeia entries; here the Olympus half—knees, ichor, paradigm-list, Zeus’s counsel—stands alone.