Characters
- Adonis — beautiful youth; divided between goddesses; slain by boar
- Aphrodite — lover and mourner of Adonis
- Artemis — arbitrator of the shared year
- Boar — instrument of death (Ares/Artemis agency in variants)
- Myrrha — mother (birth background)
- Persephone — rival keeper of Adonis for part of the year
Places
- Cyprus — cult and birth associations
- Hunting wilds — scene of the boar-wound
- Underworld — Persephone’s share of Adonis
Themes
Narrative
Adonis, born of the myrrh-tree metamorphosis of his mother (Smyrna/Myrrha) in the Cypriot or Assyrian frame, was of such beauty that Aphrodite loved him. She entrusted the infant to Persephone in a chest; Persephone, seeing him, would not give him back. Zeus (or Calliope as arbiter in some summaries) divided the year: part with Persephone below, part with Aphrodite above (and, in some tellings, a part for himself or for Adonis’s own will). When Adonis hunted, a boar—sent by Ares in jealous tradition, or by Artemis, or simply a wild beast—gored him to death. Aphrodite mourned; from his blood anemones (or roses) sprang in later poetic color.
Keep this Apollodorean classical outline apart from Bion’s bucolic *Epitaphios Adonidos* (05/089) and from the Athenian Adonia gardens (05/090). Ovid’s Myrrha narrative is Roman transmission of the birth; the boar-death itself is Greek handbook and lyric tradition.