Short answers, pulled from the story.
Aphrodite is the ancient Greek goddess associated with love, lust, beauty, pleasure, passion, procreation, and as her Roman counterpart Venus, with desire, sex, fertility, prosperity, and victory. Her major symbols include seashells, myrtles, roses, doves, sparrows, and swans.
There are two competing accounts. In Hesiod's Theogony she is born from the sea foam off the coast of Cythera after Cronus severs the genitals of Uranus and throws them into the sea. In Homer's Iliad and Sappho's Ode to Aphrodite she is instead the daughter of Zeus and Dione.
The cult of Aphrodite was largely derived from that of the Phoenician goddess Astarte, a cognate of the East Semitic goddess Ishtar, whose cult was based on the Sumerian cult of Inanna. Near Eastern influence on her cult is now placed in the orientalizing period of the eighth century BC.
Aphrodite and Venus were officially identified in the third century BC, according to Livy, when the cult of Venus Erycina was brought to Rome from the sanctuary of Aphrodite on Mount Eryx in Sicily. Because Aphrodite was the mother of Aeneas, and Roman tradition made Aeneas the founder of Rome, Venus became Venus Genetrix, mother of the Roman nation.
After Eris threw a golden apple inscribed for the fairest, Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena each claimed it, and Zeus left the choice to the Trojan prince Paris. Aphrodite promised him the most beautiful woman on earth, Helen, who was already married to King Menelaus of Sparta, so Paris chose Aphrodite and the slighted goddesses sided with the Greeks in the Trojan War.
The Aphrodite of Knidos was a marble statue carved by the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles around 364 to 361 BC, and it was the first full-sized statue to depict Aphrodite completely naked. Pliny the Elder later praised it as the greatest sculpture ever made, and over sixty copies, models, and fragments of it have been identified.
In Sparta, Aphrodite was worshipped as Aphrodite Areia, meaning warlike, and Pausanias records that her most ancient cult statues in Sparta and on Cythera showed her bearing arms. Modern scholars note that these warrior aspects appear in the oldest strata of her worship, which they read as a sign of her Near Eastern origins.