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SUMMARY: Callimachus's Hymn to Artemis provides a useful intertext for tracing the development of Venus and Aeneas in Vergil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses. The Callimachean Artemis and Vergilian Venus each receive promises of future glory from their fathers, charm artisans into producing weapons that advance their divinity, and gradually emerge as powerful goddesses in their own right. Comparison with the Hymn furthermore shows how Aeneas's status as a future god is guaranteed by his divine armor.
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at aeneid 8.370-406 venus requests that her husband vulcan produce divine armor for her son Aeneas. Scholars have elucidated how Venus's supplication and seduction of Vulcan is modeled on two Homeric passages: Thetis's entreaty to Hephaestus to produce armor for Achilles in Iliad 18 and Hera's seduction of Zeus in Iliad 14.1 Venus's motivations, like those of Thetis, stem from her maternal concern for her child's welfare (exterrita mater, 8.370; genetrix nato, 8.383), yet the need for armor is not immediately clear in the Aeneid: Aeneas has not, like Achilles, lost his weapons.2 One aspect of the Venus/Vulcan scene that has puzzled or even troubled scholars is its humor, which has been attributed to the influence of the seduction of Zeus in Iliad 14.3 Though Aphrodite is frequently the object of humor in Homer, some scholars have suggested that in the Aeneid this humor detracts from Venus's stature as genetrix to the Romans, a role which is central to the epic and the gens Iulia.4 Lyne goes so far as to state that "Vergil is not fond of this goddess" (1987: 35), and the passage came under censure even as early as Macrobius (1.24.7), who suggests that the inappropriateness of Venus asking her husband for armor for a bastard child prompted Vergil to request upon his deathbed that the Aeneid be burned. In this paper I will examine Venus's seduction of Vulcan within a larger pattern of her actions not only in the Aeneid but also as developed by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, moving from the scene between her and her father Jupiter in Aeneid 1 to her role in the apotheosis of Julius Caesar in Metamorphoses 15. Specifically, I will examine the goddess's behavior and motivations in light of a non-Homeric...