Short answers, pulled from the story.
Aphrodisias was named after Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, who had a unique cult image there known as the Aphrodite of Aphrodisias. The city had been known by at least three earlier Greek names before adopting this one around the 3rd century BC.
Aphrodisian sculptors were renowned across the Roman world because of the abundant supply of white and blue-grey Carian marble quarried from slopes adjacent to the city. Their work spread as far as Pax Julia in Lusitania, on the western edge of the Roman empire.
Gaius Julius Zoilos was a former slave of Gaius Julius Caesar who was freed by Octavian and returned to his native Aphrodisias wealthy and well-connected. He funded the city's lavish civic building programme and directed the city's political support toward Octavian, which earned lasting financial privileges from the future emperor.
The 7th century earthquake destroyed much of the city and it never recovered its former prosperity, being reduced to a small fortified settlement on the site of the ancient theatre. Around the same time it was renamed Stauropolis, meaning City of the Cross, to remove pagan associations, and by the 8th century it was known simply as Caria.
The first formal excavations were conducted in 1904-5 by Paul Augustin Gaudin, a French railroad engineer. Ongoing modern excavations began in 1962 under Kenan Erim, sponsored by New York University.
The Sebasteion, also called the Augusteum, was a monument jointly dedicated to Aphrodite, the Divine Augusti, and the People, according to a 1st-century inscription on its propylon. It expressed the political connection between the city's goddess and the Roman imperial family, whose Gens Julia claimed divine descent from Venus, the Roman counterpart of Aphrodite.