Venus (mythology)

• 1. Introduction

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  Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty, desire, sex, fertility, prosperity, and victory, was so deeply woven into Roman life that the luckiest roll you could throw in a dice game was simply called "Venus." She was the divine ancestress of the Roman people through her son Aeneas, the Trojan prince who survived the fall of his city and founded the lineage that would build Rome. Julius Caesar himself claimed her as his personal forebear. How did a goddess whose name traces back to a Proto-Italic word meaning "desire" come to be the mother of an empire, the patron of generals, the protector of sailors, and the subject of paintings still hanging in museums today? What does it mean that her cults simultaneously served Rome's most aristocratic matrons and its prostitutes, often at different temples in the same city? And why, of all things, was she depicted with a beard in Cyprus? The answers reach from a battle against the Samnites in 295 BC to Botticelli's workshop in Renaissance Florence, and they reveal a goddess far stranger and more powerful than the familiar image of a nude woman stepping from the sea.

• 2. The Name and Its Roots

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  The Latin theonym Venus and the everyday noun venus, meaning "love" or "charm," both descend from a Proto-Italic form reconstructed as wenos-, meaning "desire." That form itself traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root wénh1-os, the same root that produced the Old Indic word vánas and the Messapic word Venas. What is unusual is that the cognates of her name in other Indo-European languages generally do not refer to goddesses at all. Scholars take this as a sign that the term was applied specifically and innovatively to an Italic divinity, one that did not have a direct counterpart elsewhere in the broader family of related cultures.

  The same root produced a surprising cluster of Latin words that illuminate her character. Venustus means "attractive" or "charming." Venerare means "to worship" or "to revere," and is the ancestor of the English word venerate. Veneratio means "adoration." The root also connects to Latin venia, meaning "favour" or "permission," and even to venor, meaning "to hunt." Perhaps most striking is the link to venenum, meaning "poison," which derives from a form meaning "love drink" or "addicting substance." The ambivalence built into the very root of her name, between charm and poison, between desire and its corrupting pull, runs through every aspect of her cult.

• 3. A Goddess Without a Birth Story

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  Scholars have described Venus as perhaps "the most original creation of the Roman pantheon," and also as "an ill-defined and assimilative" native goddess, combined "with a strange and exotic Aphrodite." Before her identification with the Greek goddess, she had no origin myth of her own. Once that connection was made, she inherited Aphrodite's: Venus-Aphrodite emerged, already fully adult, from the sea foam generated by the severed genitals of Caelus-Uranus, the sky god.

  Roman theology gave her a role that went well beyond love. She was the watery, yielding female principle, essential to the generation and balance of life. Her male counterparts in the Roman pantheon, Vulcan and Mars, represented fire and active force. Venus absorbed and tempered those male qualities. The scholar Varro identified her specifically with water as an aspect of the female principle, arguing that the watery matrix of the womb required the virile warmth of fire to generate life, and that life could only be sustained when the two were held in balance.

  This cosmological role made her unusually flexible. She could grant military victory, sexual success, good fortune, and prosperity. In one context she was a goddess of prostitutes; in another, she turned the hearts of men and women away from vice and toward virtue. Prospective brides offered her a gift before the wedding, though Roman sources do not agree on what that gift was or when precisely it was given. Girls who came of age were said by some sources to offer their childhood toys to Venus, though others say the offering went to the Lares instead. Roman theology seems to have been comfortable leaving these details unresolved.

• 4. Epithets and Their Worlds

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  Venus Obsequens, "Indulgent Venus," holds the distinction of being Venus's first attested Roman epithet. It was used in 295 BC when the consul Quintus Fabius Maximus Gurges vowed her temple in the heat of battle against the Samnites, dedicating it near the Aventine Hill. The temple was supposedly funded by fines collected from Roman women found guilty of adultery.

  Venus Verticordia, "Venus the Changer of Hearts," was invented in 220 BC after a Sibylline oracle warned of divine displeasure at sexual offenses across Roman society, including infractions by three Vestal Virgins. A committee of Roman matrons selected the most sexually pure young woman in Rome to dedicate the new statue. During the rites of her festival, the Veneralia, the statue was carried to the men's baths, undressed, washed in warm water by female attendants, and garlanded with myrtle.

  Venus Barbata, "Bearded Venus," is attested by the ancient writer Macrobius, who describes a statue from Cyprus with male genitalia but female attire and figure. Macrobius records that the philosopher Aristophanes called this figure Aphroditos. The Latin poet Laevius wrote of worshipping "nurturing Venus" whether female or male. The worshippers at this cult cross-dressed. The gesture associated with statues of this type, lifting one's clothing to reveal what lay beneath, held apotropaic power in ancient belief.

  Venus Caelestis, "Heavenly Venus," holds another distinction: she is the earliest known Roman recipient of a taurobolium, a ritual bull sacrifice, performed at her shrine in Pozzuoli on the 5th of October 134 AD. Venus Erycina began as a Punic statue of the goddess Astarte, captured from the Sicilian city of Eryx during Rome's wars with Carthage, and installed on the Capitoline Hill. A later, separate temple to Venus Erycina was established outside Rome's sacred boundary and was considered suitable for common women and prostitutes, while the Capitoline cult served elite matrons.

• 5. Generals, Emperors, and a Personal Goddess

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  The first known temple to Venus was vowed by Quintus Fabius Gurges during the Third Samnite War, but the more dramatic turn in her cult history came during the Second Punic War. After Rome suffered a catastrophic defeat at the battle of Lake Trasimene in 217 BC, a Sibylline oracle advised that Carthage might be beaten if the patron goddess of Carthage's Sicilian allies could be persuaded to change her allegiance. Rome besieged the city of Eryx, promised the goddess a magnificent temple, captured her image, and brought it to Rome as one of the twelve principal state gods. The reasoning was characteristically Roman: Venus was already the divine mother of Aeneas, and Aeneas was the ancestor of the Romans, so the goddess was simply coming home.

  By the late Republic, leading men were making personal claims on her favour in ways that moved well beyond state religion. The dictator Sulla adopted Felix, "Lucky," as a surname to acknowledge his debt to Venus Felix. His protege Pompey dedicated a large temple to Venus Victrix in 55 BC as part of his new theatre in the Campus Martius, and struck coins showing Venus crowned with triumphal laurels to mark his triumph of 54 BC.

  Julius Caesar went further still, claiming Venus Genetrix as a personal ancestress, a tradition that appears to have been long-standing among the Julian clan. He dedicated her temple in 46 BC during what the sources describe as an extraordinarily lavish quadruple triumph, and simultaneously held the office of pontifex maximus. When Caesar was assassinated, his heir Augustus inherited both claims. The Emperor Hadrian inaugurated a temple to Venus and Roma Aeterna on Rome's Velian Hill in 135 AD. It became the largest temple in ancient Rome, making Venus the protective mother of the entire Roman state and its imperial project.

• 6. Festivals, Wine, and Myrtle

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  April was Venus's sacred month, and Roman etymologists believed this derived from aperire, the Latin word meaning "to open," linking her month to the blossoming of spring. Through the interpretatio romana, the process by which Romans matched their gods to those of other cultures, Venus was identified with the Germanic goddess Frijjo during the early centuries AD, a connection that gave the world "Friday" as the loan translation of dies Veneris, the day of Venus.

  Myrtle was her plant above all others. Before entering Venus's cults, myrtle had been used in the purification rites of Cloacina, the Etruscan-Roman goddess of Rome's main sewer system, which began as an open stream and was later covered over. The plant's passage into Venus's symbolism pulled Cloacina into her orbit as well, and the two were eventually fused. Myrtle was thought a particularly potent aphrodisiac. It appeared in bridal bouquets because Venus presided over prenuptial rites and wedding nights, but it was excluded from the bridal crown itself, because marriage fell under the authority of Juno, not Venus. It was also explicitly banned from the rites of Bona Dea, goddess of female chastity, along with anything male and anything associated with Venus.

  The Vinalia Rustica, held on August 19th, was almost certainly Venus's oldest festival and was linked to her earliest known form, Venus Obsequens. Kitchen gardens, market gardens, and vineyards were dedicated to her on that day. The Vinalia Urbana on April 23rd was a wine festival shared with Jupiter; ordinary men and women drank non-sacral wine in honour of Venus, while upper-class women poured a libation of the previous year's sacred vintage into a nearby ditch. Common women and prostitutes gathered at the temple just outside the Colline Gate and offered Venus myrtle, mint, and rushes hidden in rose-bunches, asking to be made charming and witty. The proverb sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus, loosely meaning "without food and wine, Venus freezes," captures her place in daily life; the Roman playwright Terence used it, and it persisted well into the early modern era.

• 7. Venus in Art and After

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  Sandro Botticelli drew on the image of Venus Anadyomene, "Venus rising from the sea," for his famous painting of around 1485, which depicts the goddess emerging fully adult from sea-foam, supported by a large scallop shell. That image itself derived from a once-celebrated ancient painting by the Greek artist Apelles, showing the birth of Aphrodite in the same manner.

  In the Renaissance, Venus became a popular subject partly because her status as a goddess justified nudity in a way that representations of mortal women did not. The classification extended over time: venus came to refer to any artistic depiction of a nude woman in post-classical art, even when the figure had no connection to the goddess at all. The list of major works in this tradition runs from the Sleeping Venus of around 1501 through Titian's Venus of Urbino in 1538 and the Rokeby Venus of 1647-1651 to Manet's Olympia in 1863 and Alexandre Cabanel's and William-Adolphe Bouguereau's competing paintings both titled The Birth of Venus, also from 1863.

  In the field of prehistoric art, the name travelled further still. After the discovery in 1908 of the so-called "Venus of Willendorf," small Neolithic sculptures of rounded female forms became conventionally known as Venus figurines. The actual name of the deity these objects may have represented is not known. Scholars have noted the knowing contrast between the obese and fertile prehistoric figures and the classical conception of Venus, and some have resisted the terminology on those grounds. Giovanni Boccaccio had included Venus in his collection De Mulieribus Claris, composed in 1361-1362 and notable as the first collection in Western literature devoted exclusively to biographies of women, placing the goddess alongside historical figures in a lineage of female significance that the Renaissance would only deepen.