Myths that we think we definitely know could appear in differing versions in the ancient one example is the marriage of Venus, Goddess of love, to Vulcan, the lame craftsman-God who forged Jupiter’s thunderbolts for him. Interestingly, they are shown as married to one another in the Odyssey, but not in the Iliad, a small but interesting snippet of potential evidence in the debate over whether the two poems were created by the same author. Anyway, by the time of Ovid and Augustus, and in Vigil’s Aeneid, the two were firmly spliced. Hear Ovid’s account of an adulterous affair between Venus and Mars, the glamorous war-God, here. (Could the trouble that Ovid got into with Augustus, leading to his exile to the back of beyond, have had something to do with the fact that the Emperor was campaigning against the looseness of morals in Rome, and that he claimed Venus as his many-times-great-Grandmother?)
A heavenly affair
