y calling Venus “Aeneadae genetrix” Lucretius both accepts a mythic inheritance and returns it to his reader strangely transformed. The phrase focuses our attention on the overwhelming nearness of Aphrodite to Anchises that produced Aeneas, and seeks to extend the brilliance and force of that strange and momentary relationship of the human and divine – “hominum divumque voluptas” – over the begetting of each of the Aeneadae. But, by an odd sort of logic, the poet’s extending her particular role in the birth of Aeneas over the births of men in general, Venus herself, the brilliant, dissembling, shame-faced goddess who shines in the Homeric hymn is allowed to recede farther from our sphere. The intimacy of Aphrodite’s union with Anchises is evoked mutedly here only to release her from it into the more general and metaphorical motherhood that befits the respectful distance Lucretius grants the gods. By “pluralizing” this union, this highest pleasure of men and gods – “hominum divumque,” Lucretius prepares us to let that “and” assume a more disjunctive and subdued force, in contrast to the conjoining violence at the meeting-point of gods and men which is the center of the Homeric cosmos.
