The marriage with Vulcan, and the relation to a mother Dione, invented apparently for the purpose of maternity, are marks of recency. If I have rightly referred Vulcan to the Phœnician order, this marriage may be an indication that Venus likewise had a place in it: and again, considering her station in Troas, it seems not impossible that the worship of Vulcan may have been introduced there the more readily, because of his being reputed to be her husband.
Like Maias the mother of Mercury, Dione, the mother of Venus, is excluded from the list of Jupiter’s amorous or matrimonial connections in the Fourteenth Iliad (312-28). This leads to the conclusion, either that the tradition respecting her was known only as a foreign one, or else that it was recent, slight, and as yet unauthenticated in popular belief. In either view it coincides with the other indications as to Venus.
The primary function of Venus, apart from Asia, appears to lie among the Olympian deities. That she was, as a member of that family, in actual exercise of her prerogatives, we see plainly from the application made by Juno to her in order to obtain the grace and attractiveness, by which she hoped to act upon the mind of Jupiter. As a mythological conception, she exhibits to us on the page of Homer the union of the most finished material beauty with strong sensuality, and the entire absence of all traces of the ethical element. She represents two things, form and passion; the former refined, the latter not so. In her character, as conceived by Homer, we see how that which is divine, when it has ceased to be divine, becomes, not human, but something much worse and baser: as he that falls from a height cannot stop half-way down the precipice at his will, but must reach the ground. Even feminine tenderness does not cling to the character of Venus. She is effeminate, indeed, for when wounded she lets her son Æneas fall: but gentle she is not, for in the scene of the Third Iliad with Helen her conduct is harsh even to brutality, and she drives the reluctant princess into sensuality only by the cruel threat of violence and death[478].
In Venus we see the power of an Immortal reduced to its minimum. Even the faculty of self-transformation seems to have been in her case but imperfectly exercised[479]. She does not pretend to give strength or courage to her son Æneas, but is represented simply as carrying him off in her arms. It is here worthy of remark, that she has not even the ability, like the greater deities, to envelop him in cloud: she has no command over nature, only over the corrupt and rebellious impulses of man: she has power to carry Æneas away, but he is folded in her mantle[480]. In fact, her privileges in general appear to be like those of the inferior orders of deity, held and used for her own enjoyment; but they do not carry the power of acting upon man or nature, except in a particular and prescribed function. Her capacity of locomotion is limited in a peculiar degree. Mars, though no great deity, went, when wounded, up to heaven on the clouds. But Venus required to borrow the disengaged chariot of Mars for the purpose, when in the same predicament[481].