A structuralist analysis is given by M. Detienne. For him the myth is concerned with marriage, and with
excess and mediation. Adonis, irregularly conceived, is precociously attractive and dies in adolescence.
The 'gardens of Adonis' which were planted in his honour consisted of shallowly rooted plants which
similarly were quick growing and sterile, soon withering. As his sexual career was opposed to the fruitful
norm of marriage, so his gardens were the opposite of true agriculture. His festival was held in the sultry
and sensuous Dogdays. The perfumed spices associated with his mother mediate between gods and men,
in sacrifice-ritual; and also play a part in attraction between the sexes, which in marriage can be good, but
which can also threaten to turn into mere sensuality. And incense is the food of the gods, on which men
cannot subsist: the Phoenix is the creature associated with them, and it is solitary and sexless. Detienne
finds four 'codes' in the story: botanical, zoological, alimentary, and astronomical. The whole account, to
which so short a summary cannot do justice, is worked out with great brilliance.
W. Burkert has also analysed the Adonis myth. He begins, 'If we take the "Adonis myth" to be the story
about his death by the boar ...' This story is descended from a myth of the ancient Sumerians, about a
hunter named Dumuzi. The contest between Aphrodite and Persephone for the boy is a conflict between
love and death; Adonis is a hunter, and the mourning for him is in reality a means by which hunters work
off their feelings of guilt and anxiety about killing animals.
We look at these two able and learned accounts of the same myth, and we see that they have nothing in
common. They seem to be explaining two different stories, and to start from totally different positions,
which reflect the interests of the two scholars. It is impossible to imagine a process of argument which
would make one prevail over the other. That, of course, raises the question of the logical status of this sort
of theory. What are these accounts of Adonis, if they are not really susceptible to argument? The answer, I
think, must be that what we have here is two more myths. Frazer's Dying God had a great vogue in poetry
and novels; although now despised and rejected by anthropologists, he was a powerful myth for modern
men. Few scholars write as well as Frazer, but the mythopoeic faculty does live in some of them. Some
myths are, I have suggested, simple to analyse; but others are elusive, complex, many-faceted. Different
minds see different patterns in them, as they do in the interpretation of dreams. In antiquity itself the
myths were often reinterpreted. For many myths we may indeed find suggestive and even poetical flashes
of insight; but to grasp for 'the' meaning may be as hopeless as to grasp the evanescent shadows of the
dead.
Hesiod
The first author of a systematic mythology is also the first personality in Greek literature, the poet Hesiod.
It is likely that he was composing his poems about 700 B.C. The impersonal manner of the Homeric epic
admitted no personal revelations at all by the poet, but Hesiod goes out of his way to tell us a number of
facts: that his father came from Cyme (on the coast of Asia Minor, slightly south of Lesbos), leaving
home-
Not running away from prosperity, nor from wealth and ease,
But from the ills of poverty, which Zeus gives if he please.