Ask a scholar what Pandemos means and you will get a literal answer first. It is built from two Greek words, pan, all, and demos, the people, the citizens of a place. Aphrodite Pandemos is the Aphrodite of the whole community, the goddess whom everyone shares. In its original sense there was nothing shameful about the title, and it may even have been quite grand.
How it came to carry a darker meaning is a good illustration of what happens to words over time. In the right hands, a title that meant public can quickly come to mean common, and common is only a short step from vulgar. The Greeks watched this happen in their own language, and the story of the epithet is in part the story of that slide.
A union of towns
The best evidence for the original meaning comes from Athens. Pausanias, the traveller, describes a shrine of Aphrodite Pandemos on the slope of the Acropolis, close to the entrance. He says it was established when Theseus, the hero-king, brought the scattered villages of Attica together into a single city. Before this, each little community had its own council and officials, and they sometimes quarrelled. Theseus, according to the legend, persuaded them to give up their separate governments and meet at Athens.
The cult, then, commemorated an act of unification. Aphrodite was the goddess of attraction, of whatever draws people toward one another. Alongside her, Pausanias says, the Athenians honoured Peitho, which means persuasion. The two went together, because Theseus had gained the people’s agreement by talking, and an alliance of towns depends on voluntary assent. A goddess of attraction and a goddess of persuasion made a perfect pair for the founding of a state.
That is the civic Pandemos: the Aphrodite who unites the whole people in a single community. It is a surprisingly political goddess, closer to the idea of civic harmony than to romance. Archaeologists have found remains of the sanctuary, along with inscriptions that name her. It was a real place with real worship, and in the classical period it was respectable.
The fall in meaning
By the fourth century BCE, though, the word was being used differently. In Plato’s Symposium, as we saw with Urania, one of the speakers contrasts the heavenly Aphrodite with the common one, and the common one is the goddess of casual and bodily desire. The philosophers had taken the neutral word of the public, pandemos, and turned it into a label for the lower kind of love. The idea was that this love was available to everyone, in a plain sense, and that what is available to everyone is worth less.
Other writers followed. The historian Xenophon, in his own Symposium, has Socrates draw the same contrast between the two Aphrodites. And some later writers pushed the idea further. They claimed that the shrine of Aphrodite Pandemos in Athens had been founded by the lawgiver Solon, using money earned from brothels, in order to provide cheap and legal companionship for the city’s young men. The story appears in ancient sources such as the comic poet Philemon and a writer named Nicander, quoted much later. Whether it is true is another matter, and modern historians doubt it. It looks more like a joke that grew into a tradition, once the word had a double life.
Two readings, one temple
It is tempting to say that the cult title was either lofty or low, but it probably carried both meanings all along. A goddess of all the people could be the goddess of civic unity, and she could also be the goddess who served the ordinary desires of ordinary citizens. That is not a contradiction. A city needs both marriage alliances and brief attractions, and a goddess who looks after everyone looks after both.
What changed was the attitude of the people describing her. To a philosopher fond of the idea of an elevated, intellectual life, the popular goddess was a little embarrassing. To someone writing comedy, she was a gift. Over the centuries the second view won, and the English word pandemic, which comes from the same Greek root, still keeps the sense of something that falls on everyone.
English has done exactly the same thing with its own words. Vulgar comes from the Latin vulgus, the common people, and for a long time it simply meant ordinary or popular, as in the vulgar tongue, the everyday language of a country. Only later did it turn into an insult. Pandemos took the same road two thousand years earlier, which shows how easily a word for the many turns into a word for the cheap.
Offerings and the ordinary person
The sacrifices to Pandemos were, like many in Athens, public occasions. A she-goat was a typical offering to Aphrodite, and a festival called the Aphrodisia was held in midsummer, with processions and feasting. Women had a large part in her cult. Unlike the cult of Athena, who stood for the state and its institutions, or Artemis, who watched over the margins, Aphrodite’s cult touched the private lives of everyone. Marriages were made and unmade under her eye.
You can see how this sits oddly with the idea of civic harmony. The same word that suggests a goddess presiding over a city’s unity also suggests a goddess presiding over the intimate business of people’s lives. For the Greeks, there was not a sharp line between the two. A city is made of households, and households are made of marriages, and marriage was Aphrodite’s particular gift.
What the epithet teaches
One lesson of this title is that status words are slippery. Pandemos was a compliment in one century and an insult in another, and the goddess herself had not changed. What changed was who was talking and what they wanted the word to do.
Another is that Greek religion did not divide neatly into high and low. The same deity could be honoured as the symbol of the whole community and mocked as the patron of cheap thrills, depending on whether you were sitting in an assembly or at a dinner party. When you hear Pandemos, try holding both meanings at once. It is the name of a goddess who belongs to everyone, and the Greeks knew that a thing which belongs to everyone can be either the greatest honour or the easiest thing to look down on.