Rich with implications for the history of sexuality, gender issues, and patterns of Hellenic literary imagining, Marcel Detienne's landmark book, first published in 1972, recast long-standing ideas about the fertil ity myth of Adonis. The author challenges Sir James Frazer's thesis that the vegetation god Adonis-whose premature death was mourned by women and whose resurrection marked a joyous occasion-represented the annual cycle of growth and decay in agriculture. Using the analytic tools of structuralism, Detienne shows instead that the festivals of Adonis depict a seductive but impotent and fruitless deity-whose physical ineptitude led to his in a boar after which his body was found in a lettuce patch. Contrasting the festivals of Adonis with the solemn ones dedicated to Demeter, the goddess of grain, he reveals the former as a parody and negation of the institution of marriage.

Detienne considers the short-lived gardens that Athenian women plant ed in mockery for Adonis's festival, and explores the function of such vegetal matter as spices, mint, myrrh, cereal, and wet plants in religious practice and in a wide selection of myths. His inquiry exposes, among many things, the ways in which women of various marital statuses were regarded and attitudes toward sexual activity ranging from "per verse" acts to marital relations.