Aphrodite

• 1. Introduction

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  Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love, has two birth stories that contradict each other, and the people who told them knew it. In Homer's Iliad and Sappho's Ode to Aphrodite, she is simply the daughter of Zeus and Dione. In Hesiod's Theogony, she has no mother at all. There, Cronus severs the genitals of his father Uranus and throws them into the sea off the coast of Cythera. From the foam, a girl grows. Plato could not reconcile the two accounts. So in his Symposium he split her into two separate goddesses, one heavenly and one common. How did a single goddess come to hold love, lust, beauty, war, and the patronage of prostitutes all at once? Why did her cult arrive in Greece carrying the fingerprints of a Phoenician goddess named Astarte? And why does she keep turning up, naked, in the most argued-over paintings in Western art? The seashells, myrtles, roses, doves, and swans are only the surface. Underneath sits a deity stitched together from the Near East, Greece, and Rome.

• 2. The Imported Goddess

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  Astarte stands behind Aphrodite, and behind Astarte stands Ishtar, and behind Ishtar stands the Sumerian Inanna. The Greek geographer Pausanias, writing in the second century AD, traced the chain plainly. The first to establish a cult of Aphrodite were the Assyrians, then the Paphians of Cyprus, then the Phoenicians at Ascalon, who taught her worship to the people of Cythera. Aphrodite absorbed Inanna-Ishtar's links to sexuality and procreation. She also took the title Ourania, meaning heavenly, which echoes Inanna's role as Queen of Heaven.

  Nineteenth-century scholars resisted the idea that Greek religion owed anything to the Near East. Even Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, who argued such influence was confined to material culture, conceded that Aphrodite was clearly of Phoenician origin. Her name itself is now generally accepted as likely Semitic, though its exact derivation cannot be pinned down. Martin West reconstructs a Cyprian Canaanite form and cautiously suggests it meant She of the Villages. Aren Wilson-Wright proposes a Phoenician form meaning unique, excellent, sublime.

  The orientalizing period of the eighth century BC is where this influence is now placed. Archaic Greece then sat on the fringes of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. The same period left another inheritance: in Hesiod's account, Aphrodite emerges after Cronus castrates Uranus, a sequence probably drawn from The Song of Kumarbi, a Hittite epic in which the god Kumarbi bites off the genitals of Anu, the sky god, and becomes pregnant with Anu's children, among them Ishtar.

• 3. The Warrior In Chains

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  In Sparta, Aphrodite was worshipped as Aphrodite Areia, the warlike. Pausanias recorded that her most ancient cult statues in Sparta and on Cythera showed her bearing arms. Other statues showed her bound in chains. This is not the soft goddess of later paintings. 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 roots.

  Her epithets multiply into something far stranger than a goddess of beauty. Across the Greek world she was Melainis at Corinth, the Black or Dark One; Skotia, the Dark One; Androphonos, Killer of Men; Anosia, Unholy; and Tymborychos, Gravedigger. The Spartans also called her Potnia, Mistress, and Ambologera, She who Postpones Old Age. At Cape Colias on the Attic coast she was Genetyllis, protectress of births. In Athens she was Aphrodite en kepois, Aphrodite of the Gardens.

  In the city of Amathus on Cyprus, worshippers honored a male version of the goddess called Aphroditus. He was depicted with the figure and dress of a woman, but with a beard, lifting his dress to reveal an erect phallus. The gesture was thought to convey good fortune on whoever saw it. As the fully feminine Aphrodite grew more popular, Aphroditus faded, though traces of his cult survive in the later legends of Hermaphroditus.

• 4. Two Aphrodites

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  Plato's Symposium turns a quirk of local cult practice into a theology. The character Pausanias argues that Ourania and Pandemos are not two epithets but two separate goddesses. Aphrodite Ourania, the celestial and older one, is born from the sea foam after Cronus castrates Uranus. She partakes not of the female but only of the male, inspiring love between men and having nothing to do with the love of women. Aphrodite Pandemos, the younger, is born from Zeus and Dione. Plato calls her wanton, the inspiration of love between men and women and the lesser of the two loves.

  Pandemos means For All the Folk. In that role Aphrodite was paired with Peitho, persuasion, and could be prayed to for help in seduction. Among the Neoplatonists and their later Christian interpreters, the split hardened into spiritual love versus physical desire. A figure of Ourania resting her foot on a tortoise came to stand for discretion in conjugal love. Phidias made a chryselephantine sculpture of exactly this for Elis, known now only from a passing remark by Pausanias.

  Her literary epithets pull in yet another direction. Philommeides means smile-loving, and it runs through both Homeric epics and the First Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Hesiod uses it once, in the context of her birth, but reads it as genital-loving instead. Monica Cyrino notes the smile reading may simply reflect how often artists showed her smiling.

• 5. Festivals And Courtesans

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  The Aphrodisia was Aphrodite's main festival, celebrated across Greece but especially in Athens and Corinth. In Athens it fell on the fourth day of the month of Hekatombaion, honoring her role in the unification of Attica. Her priests purified the temple of Aphrodite Pandemos on the southwestern slope of the Acropolis with the blood of a sacrificed dove. The altars were then anointed, and the cult statues of Aphrodite Pandemos and Peitho were carried in procession to be ritually bathed.

  Corinth bound Aphrodite to the world of prostitutes. She was patron to every variety, from the pornai, cheap street prostitutes often owned as slaves, to the hetairai, expensive and well-educated companions. Corinth's hetairai were famous across the ancient world as the most skilled and the most costly, and the city held a major temple to her on the Acrocorinth. Successful courtesans left dedications to her preserved in poems and pottery inscriptions.

  These passages once fed a theory that her cult involved ritual prostitution. The idea rested on ambiguous texts, including a fragment of a skolion by the Boeotian poet Pindar mentioning prostitutes in Corinth alongside Aphrodite. Modern scholars now dismiss ritual prostitution in Greece as a historiographic myth with no factual basis.

• 6. Becoming Venus

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  Queen Arsinoe II of the Lagid dynasty was identified as Aphrodite's mortal incarnation. During the Hellenistic period the Greeks merged Aphrodite with the Egyptian goddesses Hathor and Isis, and she gained numerous temples in and around Alexandria. The Tessarakonteres, a gigantic catamaran galley designed by Archimedes for Ptolemy IV Philopator, carried a circular temple to her with a marble statue of the goddess on board. In the second century BC, Ptolemy VIII Physcon and his wives Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III dedicated a temple to Aphrodite Hathor at Philae.

  Rome folded her into Venus, originally a goddess of agricultural fertility, vegetation, and springtime. According to Livy, the two were officially identified in the third century BC, 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 the Trojan hero Aeneas, and Roman tradition made Aeneas the founder of Rome, Venus became Venus Genetrix, mother of the entire Roman nation. Julius Caesar claimed descent from Aeneas's son Iulus and championed her cult, a precedent followed by Augustus and later emperors.

  The syncretism flowed back into Greece. During the Roman era, Greek cults of Aphrodite began stressing her ties to Troy and Aeneas. They portrayed her as more maternal, more militaristic, and more concerned with administrative bureaucracy. Political magistrates claimed her as a divine guardian.

• 7. The Lovers And The War

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  The sun-god Helios saw Aphrodite and Ares in Hephaestus's bed. In Book Eight of the Odyssey, the blind singer Demodocus tells how Helios warned Hephaestus, who forged a fine, near-invisible net. The next time the lovers met, the net trapped them, and Hephaestus called all the gods to laugh at the captured pair. Apollo, Hermes, and Poseidon felt sympathy for Ares, and Poseidon agreed to pay for his release. Aphrodite returned to her temple in Cyprus, attended by the Charites.

  The First Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, probably composed in the mid-seventh century BC, turns her power against herself. Annoyed that she keeps making gods love mortals, Zeus makes her fall for Anchises, a shepherd in the foothills beneath Mount Ida near Troy. She comes to him disguised as a mortal virgin, claiming to be the daughter of a noble Phrygian family. After they sleep together she reveals her divine form and prophesies their son, the demigod Aeneas.

  Adonis, whose name comes from the Canaanite word adon meaning lord, was both her foster child and her lover. The earliest Greek reference comes from Sappho, who lived around 630 to 570 BC. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Adonis is the son of Myrrha, cursed by Aphrodite with lust for her own father, King Cinyras of Cyprus. Zeus settled a custody fight over Adonis between Aphrodite and Persephone by dividing his year in thirds. While hunting, Adonis was gored by a wild boar and bled to death in Aphrodite's arms.

  The Judgment of Paris set the largest tragedy in motion. Eris, uninvited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, threw a golden apple inscribed for the fairest. Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena all claimed it. Zeus handed the choice to the Trojan prince Paris. Hera offered him power over Asia and Europe, Athena offered wisdom and glory in battle, and Aphrodite promised him the most beautiful woman on earth. He chose Aphrodite, and the woman was Helen, already married to King Menelaus of Sparta. The slighted goddesses sided with the Greeks, and the Trojan War followed.

• 8. The Naked Goddess In Art

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  Around 364 to 361 BC, the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles carved the Aphrodite of Knidos, the first full-sized statue to show her completely naked. She covers her pubic region while leaning against a water pot draped with her robe. The people of Knidos bought it around 350 BC. Pliny the Elder later called it the greatest sculpture ever made. The original is lost, but over sixty copies, models, and fragments have been identified, and it shaped nearly every later image of her.

  Apelles of Kos, a contemporary of Praxiteles, painted Aphrodite Anadyomene, Aphrodite Rising from the Sea. According to Athenaeus, he was inspired after watching the courtesan Phryne untie her hair and bathe naked in the sea at Eleusis. The painting hung in the Asclepeion on Kos. It went unnoticed for centuries, yet Pliny the Elder records that by his own time it was regarded as Apelles's most famous work. More sculptures of Aphrodite have survived from antiquity than of any other deity.

  Renaissance painters tried to consciously rebuild Apelles's lost masterpiece from the written descriptions left by Cicero and Pliny. Sandro Botticelli made her the central figure of Primavera and painted The Birth of Venus around 1485, partly inspired by a description from Poliziano. Titian's biographer Giorgio Vasari labeled every Titian nude a Venus, including the Venus of Urbino from around 1534, even though it shows a woman in a contemporary setting with none of the goddess's traditional symbols. The argument over who Aphrodite is, and what her nakedness means, never quite ended.