A recent film, The Hours, presents Woolf in a way surely her contemporaries would have marvelled at. She is the very image of a sensitive suffering lady novelist. Where is the malicious spiteful woman she in fact was? And dirty-mouthed, too, though with an upper-class accent. Posterity, it seems, has to soften and make respectable, smooth and polish, unable to see that the rough, the raw, the discordant, may be the source and nurse of creativity. (...) How do we love female victims; oh, how we do love them.
— Doris Lessing in her foreword to the Virginia Woolf anthology Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches
Judging by the statues they carved and the way she was worshipped, Aphrodite was a full-on war god back when she first made landfall. Now, unsurprisingly, a goddess of beauty and sex simultaneously being a goddess of war was unlikely to bother the Spartans, because, you know, Spartans, but the rest of Greece didn't seem too keen on the concept - apparently, it was considered an inherent contradiction in values. The warlike Aphrodite is found almost exclusively On Kythera and in Sparta. And it's worth noting that in The Iliad, Zeus explicitly tells Aphrodite that she doesn't belong on the battlefield, which is the kind of overt character interaction that contemporary writers like to use to make firm political statements on controversial subjects. The fact that it needed to be stated at all implies it might have been something of a debate at the time.
