After a brief absence, Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, has returned to her home at — not Mount Olympus — but the Parthenon Gyros restaurant on State Street.
According to a highly poetic Madison Police Department incident report, the three-foot statue of Aphrodite was taken from her perch at the Parthenon Gyros restaurant April 2 at around 2:45 a.m. After police intervention, her kidnapper returned her four days later.
“At 3-feet-high, the bronze statue bore witness to countless discarded tzatziki sauce-laden plastic wrappers, until early one morning this month, when she disappeared,” the incident report said.
The owners of Parthenon Gyros are not seeking to press charges, MPD spokesperson Joel DeSpain said.
DeSpain said there was video surveillance of a suspect taking the statue. The restaurant also had a credit card receipt from around the time the statue was taken.
An MPD officer ran the name on the credit card through databases and found the credit card owner’s contact information.
The officer contacted him and asked if he would reach out to the people he ate with the night the statue was stolen to see if they might know where the statue was.
A 22-year-old Madison resident called MPD shortly after this and told the officer he had the statue, DeSpain said.
The suspect said he was embarrassed about the incident and couldn’t recall how he managed to capture the goddess of love.
“He explained that he happened to be in possession of a three-foot-high statue,” the incident report said. “How the goddess of love, beauty, pleasure and procreation came to be with him, he could not say.”
Montana Leggett/The Badger Herald
DeSpain, a decade-old veteran of the department, has penned his fair share of captivating incident reports — now and again on transgressions of early-morning partiers.
Incidents like Aphrodite’s kidnapping are often the result of “poor decisions” in the early morning hours, DeSpain said.
“I don’t think that this was a true criminal,” DeSpain said. “[He] probably thought that this was something that was maybe even kind of funny in the moment, but in retrospect probably felt badly that he had taken it. I think it’s more of a life lesson.”
Incidents like Aphrodite’s abduction provide some humor and help the officers deal with the more serious issues they encounter on the job, DeSpain said.
“I think it also helps people to understand that police officers have to deal with numerous situations on a daily basis,” DeSpain said. “Some of them are sad and some of them are funny. They’re just out there trying to serve the public.”
