Aphrodite I
I’m a liar, to begin with.
Well, if I’m being exceedingly honest with you – and I am trying – I was nothing at all, to begin with. Then I was my father’s testicles. Then the weaver of Fate itself, which is when the lying started. After that, it all got a bit complicated.
I was the daughter of Ouranos. The daughter of Zeus. The daughter of no one at all. A winner, a loser, though never much in between. The world standard of beauty and a crone, both. Olympus’ very own it-girl. Maybe the worst wife in all of history. A lover, a friend, a co-conspirator. A snitch. Selfless – once or twice. A bitch – more than twice. A monster, a villain, a victim – if you must. A good mother, a bad mother, a really bad mother. Lonely and famous and beloved and alone. Precious and worthless. A rival, a cheat. Afraid, often, and terrifying, also often. Oh, and I started a war. That’s very important.
The goddess Aphrodite. I was that too. I don’t think I am anymore. Look, it’s all very knotted. Maybe I should start from the beginning.
First, there was Chaos, which meant something different then to what it does now. The time of Chaos was empty. It was a blank canvas for the optimists and an endless sinkhole for the pessimists. It was a time of absolutely nothing. I suppose I was nothing then, but we all were, so I won’t hold that against her.
Chaos was empty, until she met Nyx. I like to think that the two of them were in love, but I’ve never met my grandmothers, so I can’t say for certain. The two of them created the earth and the seas and the sky, and they had three children to gift them to.
Their daughters received the sea and the earth, and they were happy with them.
Their son wasn’t, as is the way of youngest children. He wanted to be the king of a world consisting of only five people, so they let him.
My father, given the world like a toy so he’d play nicely with his sisters. I suspect he was spoiled rotten, but then I quite like being spoiled, myself. And he did ask, before he took. He spoke with such conviction about the glittering future he would bring, the life he would spread across this world, that they believed him.
Ouranos became the first king of this world. He took his sister to be his wife and he made good on his promises. Together – let’s not give him all the credit; he didn’t carry their children – they filled the world with life. They brought forth the Titans, beings more powerful than even they were, who could control the elements around them more easily than breathing. And they brought forth the Cyclopes, and the Hecatonchires – the hundred-handed ones – who Gaia loved and who did not ask for power, only a life, which meant Ouranos did not respect them. He thought them irrelevant to the world, because they didn’t demand to own it. They lived between the oceans and created beautiful wonders with all the energy they saved from fighting.
I don’t know how many children they had together. It doesn’t matter. All that really matters is it was one child too many.
It’s always the youngest son who has the most to prove.
Their youngest was a Titan, Cronus. He wanted to be king too, only Ouranos wasn’t like his mothers. He didn’t want to give up what was his.
Cronus asked for power; his father said no. Cronus did not ask a second time.
So the world came to know a new word: war.
It didn’t last long, that first war. It couldn’t. All the Titans could be counted on fingers and toes.
Cronus armed himself. He went to the Cyclopes and asked for their support. He promised them positions in his new order, new lives beneath the sun instead of deep below the sea. He told them he would respect them as their father never did. And he let their conversation be heard just enough to build fear in his father.
It’s a bold strategy, to tell your enemy that you’re coming, but it works well with the men in my family. They’re so afraid of it, it eats away at them, into their very bones, and they forget that they’re anything other than the position they hold.
Ouranos ordered the Cyclopes sent to Tartarus, a prison in the underworld he’d had to create personally, because one had never been needed before.
(It’s a problem when you’re an immortal fighting other immortals. You have to be careful about who you piss off because there’s no getting rid of them. They’ll be there, hating you. Forever.)
How Cronus himself escaped being tied up in proto-damnation is beyond me, but he did. I suspect his mother helped. He promised her – how they promise! – he would free her sons, bring them to the power they deserved. When Cronus was king, everyone would live equally in a utopia, just below him. He had his people behind him. He had his shining vision for the future.
He had the weapons and the belief. It was only a matter of time.
He followed his father across the land, over the oceans, waited for the perfect storm to be whipping around them, for winds too loud for words – I know that for certain. I made my entrance soon enough.
I think it’s unlikely they’d have had much to chat about, anyway. When you get to weapons at dawn, what do you say?
I want power!
No, me!
No, me!
They were both armed, but Cronus’ reach was longer. That’s been true of every new generation I’ve seen, that they’re just a little bigger than their parents, trying to prove they’re better in the most pointless of ways.
Cronus carried a sickle. I don’t know what my father’s weapon was. He lost.
There was no point in aiming to kill. There never has been, for us. Instead, Cronus thought of the worst shame he could possibly imagine, and he castrated his father.
Chopped his balls off.
De-testicled him.
I’ve heard every possible variation of the phrase, some with great solemnity and some with a snigger, and I’ve never been able to explain why I’m not laughing.
I can tell you now, though.
Those balls were me.
I grew from them. I was born from them. They were me and I am them and that will always be the truth. That is my beginning.
I made my debut at the end of the first great war, in a storm unlike any other, as the world turned itself upside down trying to find its way in the new order. All of this is true, yet my birth is reduced to a punchline.
I hid it for so long, not wanting my entire existence to be reduced to one man’s shame, but I’m over that now. I’m much more famous than him, after all.
I’ve always wondered how Cronus managed to castrate him so neatly. It was only my father’s testicles that made me – call my knowing that feminine intuition, if you want – but Cronus used a sickle.
How? Were they hanging so low? Was Ouranos’ stance so wide because he needed the world to see his mighty balls? What possible physical arrangement leads to one man being able to castrate another with a weapon made for cutting wheat?
Cronus would have had to practise, but he can’t have. Surely he had better things to do in the war, and I’ve met some of his generals. I can’t imagine them offering themselves up for the chop.
That one is a mystery for the ages, I’m afraid, but it doesn’t matter, because now I’m here. That’s it. All of the relevant history before I arrived. Done.
Cronus lifted his arms in mighty victory and bellowed so that all around him could cheer and crown him the new king of everything. Like his father, he went home and married his sister, ready to fill the world with people who looked just like him.
Ouranos, newly ball-less, gave an anguished cry.
‘You think yourself so smart, so powerful, but one day you will be just like me, dethroned by your own children.’
Cronus looked at his father’s crotch. ‘I will never be just like you, will I?’
He ordered Ouranos tied and bound in Tartarus, that prison of his own making, never to be seen again.1
So distracted were they by their respective shouting that the testicles fell into the ocean, instantly swallowed by the swells of the waves, pulled down into utter blackness, presumed lost.
Wrong.
1 For a certain value of never. We are immortals, after all. —A
Excerpted from Aphrodite by Phoenicia Rogerson. © 2025 by Phoenicia Rogerson, used with permission from Hanover Square Press, an imprint of HarperCollins.
