Let him feel the pain that his mother felt and rot
-Aphrodite ("God Games")
Aphrodite is the goddess of beauty, love, and lust, the wife (or ex-wife) of Hephaestus, and the lover of Ares. She serves as “Level 3” of Zeus' test for Athena during God Games in EPIC: The Musical.
Biography[]
Act 2[]
Aphrodite is invited by Zeus to test Athena as a pre-requisite for saving Odysseus from Calypso. In “Level 3” of God Games, Aphrodite challenges Athena, arguing Odysseus let his mother die of a broken heart while failing to kill the Cyclops, and he should rot with Calypso. Athena retorts that a broken heart can mend and that he is journeying across the ocean to get back to his wife and homestead. She decides to release him.[1]
Renditions/Animations[]
N/A
Trivia[]
- Aphrodite's instrument is a saxophone because it is associated with a "romantic connotation"[2]
- When Aphrodite greets the crowd at the beginning of the first animatic in which she is featured, she summons two doves, which are one of her many symbols.
- In mythology, there are two versions of Aphrodite's birth: one version (favored by Homer) calls her the divine daughter of Zeus and Dione, making her a direct relative of the rest of the Olympians; the other (favored by Hesiod in his Theogony) describes her as a goddess born from the seafoam after the genitalia of Uranus fell into the Mediterranean Sea, which would make her (genealogically) the aunt-like figure of Zeus and Hera, and the great-aunt of the younger Olympians, including Hephaestus and Ares.
- While Homer mentioned Hephaestus as the husband of Aphrodite in The Iliad, their marriage is seemingly over, since the wife of the god of crafts is Charis (or Aglaea, as Hesiod called her), a minor goddess of beauty and adornment. Both stories agree that Aphrodite is the lover of the god of war, Ares, and in the musical they are portrayed together.