Greek and Roman gods - plus their wives

That is it – some eminent Greek and Roman gods had wives! Just as some eminent goddesses had husbands. And please – you my dear friend over there – don’t ask me too soon why I am saying the gods/goddesses ‘had’ and not ‘have’ wives/husbands. 

For now, let us just concentrate on the fact or fantasy of immortal beings having or needing sex partners and having to produce offspring.

In Greek and Roman writings of long ago (i.e. of the pre-Christian era known as ‘classical’ times) that have survived up to our very generation, gods and goddesses were interestingly associated with supernatural as well as human-like doings – such as involvement in sex, lust and rape.

As a matter of fact, in some older universities around the world – for instance, Cambridge and Oxford in UK and Ibadan in Africa – these ancient writings, appropriately known as ‘Classics’, importantly feature on the academic programmes of the Faculties of the Arts / the Humanities. 

In those universities, ‘Classics’ are deemed to be as relevant an academic pursuit as any other, not any less significant than the current studies in ‘Oral Literature’ and/or ‘Folklore’ in various African and other universities.

And so here we go: on sex and procreation among the gods and goddesses. (But first, a whispered side observation: gods could even overthrow and depose one another! An example is the Greek god Kronos – the god of Time – who was overthrown by his son Zeus, who thereupon became the new ‘king of gods’, headquartered on Mount Olympus (in present-day Macedonia). Before that, Kronos himself had castrated – imagine that! – and deposed his father, Ounaros/Uranus – the god of the Sky.)

But back to the gods and goddesses plus their sexual and procreative carryings-on. And what could be a better opening scenario than that of three goddesses angrily arguing between themselves, each claiming that she is the most beautiful one among the trio? And the trio are none other than: Hera, wife of Zeus ‘the king of gods’; Aphrodite the goddess of love and valour; and Pallas Athena the goddess of wisdom and crafts. 

They agree to pick on a human being to act as judge in their beauty contest. So, they pick on Paris son of Priam the king of Troy, (on the ruins of which former Troy stands present-day Istanbul, capital of Turkey.)

For declaring Aphrodite the most beautiful of the trio, Paris was rewarded by Aphrodite with the most beautiful woman on earth – Helen, wife to one of the kings of the several kings within the Greek empire of that day. 

But the slighted Hera is so angry with Paris for his choice of Aphrodite that she happily gloats over the future destruction of Troy (as already irreversibly decreed by Fate!) – which utter destruction would take place after a 10 years’ protracted war as the Greeks wreak havoc on and annihilate Paris’s city in order to grab back Queen Helen – for the vain purpose of restoring the injured manly pride of her former husband, King Menelaus.

What is of particularly sexual and procreative interest in the above scenario, is that not only did gods and goddesses marry between themselves; but that occasionally a god married or even raped a human woman, and occasionally a goddess married a human man. For example, Dardanus, the son of Zeus and Hera, married a human woman; and one of the descendants of that line, Anchises, married the goddess Aphrodite – between whom the boy Aeneas was born, a cousin to Paris who was ill-fated to die in burning Troy; and it was this very Aeneas who would escape from burning Troy to become the founding father of Rome. 

But the sexiest of all the Greek gods was Zeus himself: in one episode, disguised as a bird, a swan, he raped human Queen Leda, irresistibly beautiful wife of human King Tyndareus of Sparta in Greece.

Prof Timothy Wangusa is a poet and novelist.

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