The evening sky continues to be dramatic this week, with Venus and Jupiter moving closer and closer to one another, so it's time to consider love relationships between the worlds.
When you're looking at Venus and Jupiter in the night sky about 45 minutes after sunsetit's fun to remember that Venus is closer to us than the Sun, and Jupiter is further from us than the Sun.
Now for the Greeks, Venus was Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty; while Jupiter was associated with the god Zeus, leader of the Olympians. One of the stories associated with these two is about the Trojan Warrior Aeneas. Aeneas is the offspring of Aphrodite, but what happens is Zeus is angered by Aphrodite bragging and teasing about her power to make the gods fall in love with mortals. So Zeus, exercising his own great power, pushes Aphrodite into a love relationship with Anchises~out of this relationship between Aphrodite and Anchises, Aeneas is born.
Aeneas does become a hero of the Trojan War, but then in some renderings of his tale, there is a moment of great compromise, and he seems to betray his homeland by eventually migrating to Italy. The Romans were really excited about Aeneas because he is one of their deep ancestors, not necessarily a founding father, but he's the link in the chain between the Romans and the Classical Times of the Greeks, with which they were so enamored.
Aeneas was storied about in Virgil's epic poem "The Aeneid", from between 29 and 19 BC.
Looking into the night sky this week, we see Jupiter and Venus moving closer and closer together, it's easy to imagine this relationship between Zeus and Aphrodite, and the trickery around how the gods are tricked into falling in love with human beings on the Earth.
You can watch this drama all week long, they'll actually be closest the evening of June 30, at month's end.
Love between worlds
