"Detienne, taking as his key the well-known myth that Adonis' pregnant mother Myrrha or Smyrna (both Greek words for myrrh) was metamorphosed into a myrrh tree, from whose trunk the newborn in due time emerged, sees Adonis as essentially the fruit of an aromatic shrub, a perfume, an anti-agricultural product. His method is to find a counter-phenomenon in Attic society, in response to which the Adonia can take their significance: surely the Thesmophoria, the autumn festival in honor of Demeter at which the women of Athens celebrated the growth of food crops. Detienne finds a further, sociological opposition here: the Thesmophoria were celebrated only by the wives of Athenian citizens; the Adonia were notoriously celebrated by prostitutes. He positions Adonis and the data of his cult within various oppositional codes discernible in Greek culture-each illustrated by a diagram-that parallel one another quite precisely, replicating the same meaning in different terms: aromatically, Adonis stands for heady perfume; botanically, for profitless agriculture; socially, for seduction and extramarital pleasure. The Adonia, Detienne declares, were a celebration of infertility and fruitless sex, a spectacular illustration of the dangers of untrammeled female sexuality, serving to balance and emphasize the autumn celebration of fruitfulness and legitimate connubiality in the service of the polis.

But much evidence slips through Detienne's grid. In several versions of the birth of Adonis myrrh has no place: in our earliest his mother is one Alphesiboea ([Hes.], fr. 139 M-W); in another she is one Metharme ([Apollod.], Bibl. 3.14.3). Philostephanus of Cyrene made him the son of Zeus alone (ap. [Probus] on Verg., Ecl. 10.18).22 As for the carnival of whores, the Adoniac festivities in brothels in Diphilus, fr. 42.38-41 PCG and Alciphron 4.14.8 (based on fourth-century comedy), are to be supplemented by Aristophanes, Lys. 391-96, and Menander, Sam. 35-50, in which wives and daughters of citizens celebrate the Adonia. Most surprisingly, Detienne's theory takes only passing account of the ritual lamentation, which ancient sources make the most conspicuous feature of the festival, and in general ignores what the celebrants themselves thought of what they were doing-unless we are to imagine that the women of Athens climbed onto their roofs once a year deliberately to celebrate their own failings to the community. There was probably another reason, one which feminist studies of the cult have begun to seek.

Another assumption, however, more fundamentally flaws Detienne's interpretation. While proposing to tease an inherent meaning from Athenian cult practice by identifying the inherent correspondences and oppositions within it, Detienne fails to define a perspective more specific than a homogeneous Greco-Roman society. Adonis, for example, must have meant many things to many people at many times (even different things to the same people at different times), but Detienne's formula assumes that he meant essentially the same thing to everybody, no matter how many borders of nation, culture, language, gender, or time he may have crossed-as if any detail of the myth of Adonis tapped into one immanent meaning and could be adduced for the significance of the Athenian cult. Rhetorical motives are undifferentiated: a line of Sappho is treated equally with a line of Philodemus; the testimony of Aristophanes is put on a par with the testimony of St. Cyril. This method is programmatic and derives from Levi-Strauss, who articulates the principle thus vis-A-vis his interpretation of Oedipus: "[W]e define the myth as consisting of all its versions; or to put it otherwise, a myth remains the same as long as it is felt as such." Combining details from diverse myths of Adonis, regardless of date or provenance, Detienne treats the resulting conglomeration as a single sacred tale holding a precious key to the meaning of the ritual. But for whom does it hold meaning? For Detienne alone. Purportedly context-based, his method actually isolates phenomena from their diverse cultural uses and recontextualizes them into an artificial code that transcends the messy inconsistencies of Greek thought."

- The Sexuality of Adonis by Joseph D. Reed