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APHRODITE (later identified with the Roman VENUS) embodies the overwhelming power of human sexual attraction. Her constant companion was Eros, "love" or "desire" (the Roman Cupid), who emerged from Chaos at the same time as Gaia/Earth and Tartarus, according to Hesiod. In later myths, howeer, Eros was said to be the son of Aphrodite by Ares, Hermes, or Zeus. In art he is shown as a beautiful winged boy with bow and arrows or a flaming torch, a mischievous, irresponsible child, showering his arrows randomly and without regard for the harm born by the sexual passion which he arouses. He plays a major role in a folktale from the Roman Period, the story of Cupid and Psyche.
Hesiod derives Aphrodite by false etymology from the Greek word aphros, *foam," but the name must in reality be a distortion of the name of the Eastern goddess of fertility variously called Inanna, Ishtar, or Astarte. The goddess evidently came to Greece through Cvprus, a frequent point of transmission of Eastern culture to the West. At Paphos, in southwestern Cyprus, she was worshiped as early as the twelfth century B.C.E. in the form of a polished conical stone. Her cult was also important on the island of Cythera, south of the Peloponnesus, where Phoenicians had a settlement; here, as in many parts of the Mediterranean, they processed purple dye from a shellfish. Other important temples were built to her in Eryx in western Sicily, also a Phoenician colony, and in Corinth, a gathering place for seafarers of various nationalities.
Greek myth preserves a clear sense of Aphrodite's connection with Cyprus and Cytherea. According to Hesiod, it was in these places that the goddess first came to land after rising from the sea foam, and she was often referred to in myth as Cytherea or Cypris. A striking feature of the worship of Aphrodite and Inanna/ Ishtar/Astarte was temple prostitution. Women, often of good birth, voluntarily served in her temples, where they had intercourse with men who paid in the form of offerings to the goddess. Such service guaranteed the favor of the goddess and ensured large families to the devotee, once she married. The sometimes prissy Greeks did not like the practice, but it did occur in temples to Aphrodite at Corinth and Cythera.
Aphrodite's sphere of activity is immediately and sensibly apparent: the joyous consummation of sexuality. To "Aphrodize" as a verb denotes quite simply the act of love. The old abstract noun for sexual desire, eros, which is masculine by grammatical gender, becomes the god Eros, the son of Aphrodite. Yearning, Himeros, often stands by his side; both are portrayed as winged youths and later also as child putti in art. However impious the apotheosis of sexuality may seem in light of the Christian tradition, modern sensibility can nevertheless also appreciate how in the experience of love the loved one and indeed the whole world appears transfigured and joyously intensified, making all else seem insignificant: a tremendous power is revealed, a great deity.
The Greeks were not the first to name a goddess of this type and to worship her with a cult. Behind the figure of Aphrodite there clearly stands the ancient Semitic goddess of love, Ishtar-Astarte, divine consort of the king, queen of heaven, and "companion" in one. This Semitic, or more precisely Phoenician, origin is already asserted by Herodotus. The decisive evidence, however, comes from those correspondences in cult and iconography which go beyond mere sexuality: this deity is androgynous: there is an Ishtar with a beard and a male Ashtar beside Astarte just as there is a bearded Aphrodite and a male Aphroditos beside Aphrodite. Astarte is called Queen of Heaven just as Aphrodite is called the Heavenly, Urania; Astarte is worshipped with incense altars and dove sacrifices as is Aphrodite and Aphrodite alone.
Ishtar is also a warrior goddess, and again Aphrodite may be armed and bestow victory. If moreover there is prostitution in the Aphrodite cult, then the most notorious characteristic of the Ishtar-Astarte cult is taken over. The connection with the garden and with the sea is also present in both cases. In the process of transmission from East to West a part was probably played by frontal representations of the naked goddess, such as are encountered primarily in small objects, on ornamental pieces and gold pendants: perhaps it is for this reason that Aphrodite is called the Golden. In the Mycenaean texts there is no trace of Aphrodite.
Aphrodite's origin remains as obscure as her name. Golden Aphrodite, the lovely goddess of love, is long familiar to epic poetry. The story of how Aphrodite outdid Athena and Hera in the Judgement of Paris and how this led to the abduction of Helen and to the outbreak of the Trojan War is undoubtedly an ancient legendary motif. This tale is re-echoed in the Iliad when the poet describes how Aphrodite swept Paris away from his defeat at the hands of Menelaus to his nuptial bedchamber in Troy and brought Helen to him. Helen recognizes the goddess by her exquisitely beautiful neck, her charming breasts, and flashing eyes; her resistance to the powerful will of the goddess is swiftly overcome.
Aphrodite, too, can be a terrible goddess. Aphrodite's intervention in battle is less successful when she tries to protect her son Aeneas from Diomedes: Diomedes wounds her in the hand, and as divine blood flows, Diomedes scoffs, shouting that she may fool feeble women but should keep away from war - Father Zeus agrees with this judgement, but expresses himself in much friendlier terms. He himself, of course, later succumbs to the magic of Aphrodite's embroidered girdle: it is love, yearning, fond discourse, and beguilement. In the song which Demodokos sings to the Phaeacians, the great seductress finally falls victim to her own wiles: Aphrodite, who is married to Hephaistos, is having a secret affair with swift Ares, but Hephaistos artfully sets up a net and catches them both inflagranti, while all the gods gather round to laugh their Homeric laughter at this precious sight.
Aphrodite is painted in more magnificent colours in the early hymn which tells how she sought out the herdsman Anchises on Mount Ida to become mother of Aeneas. Here she assumes traits of the Phrygian goddess Kybele, the Mother of the Mountain, a form of the Anatolian Great Goddess who is also equated with Aphrodite elsewhere. She moves across the wooded slopes of Ida followed by fawning grey wolves, bright-eyed lions, bears, and swift panthers; the goddess delights in her retinue and casts the yearning of love into their breasts: two by two they couple in their shady dens. This Aphrodite is a Mistress of the Animals, a Mistress of the dread beasts of prey, but under her sway they are forgetful of their nature and obey the higher law of sexual union. Depths more uncanny and disturbing are plumbed in the birth myth which Hesiod recounts. Ouranos, the sky, husband of Gaia, refused to allow his children to emerge into the light, and so, as Ouranos lay embracing Gaia, Kronos his son lopped off his father's genitals with a sickle and threw them backwards into the sea. As the sea swept them away, a white foam gathered about them and in it there grew a maiden; she was carried on the waves to Cythera and thence to Cyprus where she stepped ashore - an awesome and beautiful goddess, foam-born Aphrodite. Whereas in epic the formula "daughter of Zeus" is attached to Aphrodite and a Dione is mentioned as her mother, in this account she is older than all the Olympian gods; at the very first cosmic differentiation, the separation of heaven and earth, the power of union also emerged. Aphrodite is thereby caught up in a tradition of cosmogonic speculation which continued to be richly exploited through Orpheus down to Parmenides and Empedocles: begetting and the mingling of love is what drives the world onwards. Although it is ignored in the heroic epics, the birth myth is not a marginal extravagance of poetic fancy.
Castration and throwing into the sea are presumably connected with sacrificial rituals. The figure rising from the sea has, or course, left all this behind. The birth from the sea was a favorite subject for Greek art and is portrayed most beautifully on the Late Archaic Ludovisi Throne, which may perhaps come from the Aphrodite temple at Lokroi. The worship of Aphrodite finds its most personal and most complete expression in the poems of Sappho. The circle of maidens who are awaiting marriage is bathed in the aura of the goddess, with garlands of flowers, costly head-dresses, sweet fragrances, and soft couches. Aphrodite is summoned to the festival, to descend to her sacred grove where magical sleep reaches down from the trembling leaves, and to pour out nectar, mixed with festal joys, like wine.
Sappho's Hymn to Aphrodite describes how the goddess of the brightly coloured throne descends to earth on a bird-borne chariot from her father's golden home: she hears the entreaty of her votary, she will turn the heart of the loved one so that the love will be returned; love alone prevents life from being overtaken by cares and weariness.Unabashed acceptance of sexuality is, however, not a matter of course even in Greece. In the fourth century we find Aphrodite separated into two aspects: higher, celestial love, Aphrodite Ourania, and the love of the whoIe people, Aphrodite Pandemos, who is responsible for lower sexual life and in particular for prostitution. Both names of Aphrodite are old and wide- spread cult epithets, but the original meanings were quite different. The Heavenly One is the Phoenician Queen of Heaven, and Pandemos is literally the one who embraces the whole people as the common bond and fellow-feeling necessary for the existence of any state. Here, too, eastern tradition lies in the background with the all-embracing power of Ishtar, which is in particular a political power. In many places bodies of magistrates make communal votive dedications to Aphrodite, either as their guardian or by way of contrast to their official duties.
In the iconography, the naked oriental figure was supplanted as early as the first half of the seventh century by the normal representation of the goddess with long, sumptuous robes and the high crown of the goddess. Fine attire is Aphrodite's speciality, most notably necklaces and occasionally brightly coloured robes intended to give an oriental effect. It was not until about 340 that the statue of a naked Aphrodite apparently preparing to take a bath was created for the sanctuary in Cnidos by Praxiteles; for centuries this figure remained the most renowned representation of the goddess of love, the embodiment of all womanly charms. The Statue was displayed in the round so that it could be admired from all sides; Greek sources suggest that it excited more voyeurism than piety. Many famous Aphrodites followed in Hellenistic art, semi-naked and naked. These were multiplied by Imperial copies and are now prize exhibits in museums, but they can make little claim to a place in the history of religion. The appeal to the Aeneas tradition in Rome, made especially by Julius Caesar, gave impetus to a cult of Venus Genetrix, but as a result it was more the Phrygian Mother than the Greek Aphrodite who came to be worshipped.
VENUS AT ROME
Aphrodite has been celebrated in all ages as the goddess of the creative Nature. At Rome she was identified with Venus, the Italian goddess of neatness and fertility in dens; despite her limited status, one of the most joyous of hymns to Venus is the opening of Rerum Natura of Lucretius (ca. 55 B.C.E.), imitated by Spenser in the Faerie Queen (4. 10.44-47). Lucretius calls Venus "Mother of the descendants of Aeneas," anticipating the claim of Julius Caesar and Augustus to be descended from Venus. Caesar's family did most to promote Venus to the first rank of Olympian deities at Rome. He dedicated a temple to Venus in his new Forum lulium in 46 B.C.E., and Hadrian (emperor C.E. 117-138) dedicated a temple to Venus and Roma in 135, one of the largest temples in the city.
EROS / CUPID
Of the associates of Aphrodite, Eros is by far the most important. In archaic Greek literature, he is the creative force in nature, but potentially maddening and destructive, as Sophocles (in his Antigone, 441 B.C.E,) says in a chorus addressed to Eros. Around 400 B.C.E, he begins to be represented as a chubby infant, the Cupid of innumerable ancient and post-classical works. In Roman art, especially in the frescoes from Pompeii, Cupids are shown in all kinds of human activities, and they are the inevitable companions of Venus in post-classical art. Sometimes Eros appears with his opposite, Anteros, a variation on the duality of Sacred and Profane Love. Most often, however, Cupids (known as putti) signify the joy, energy, and hope of love, as is the case in almost every painting of Aphrodite and Venus mentioned earlier in this chapter. Cupid is shown in many guises: a mischief-maker who is punished or taught by his mother; a winged archer; a child stung by a bee; a mourner or a joyful celebrant. He is perhaps the commonest of all decorative personages from classical mythology to appear in post-classical art.
CUPID AND PSYCHE
The myth of Cupid and Psyche is an allegory of the union of the human with the divine. The lovers appear on Greek vases and reliefs in the fifth century B.C, and on more in the fourth and third centuries; Psyche is a winged female figure representing the soul. Plato in his Phaedrus similarly refers to the soul as winged. Apuleius (ca. C.E.. 160) made Psyche into a mythological figure with her own narrative in his Latin novel. Psyche often has butterfly wings, and in the Roman world she and Cupid are often shown embracing: the best-known example is the statue now in Rome, a Roman copy of the fourth century A.D. of a Greek original of the second century B.C.E., in which the lovers are children without wings. This work was especially admired in the eighteenth century and copied in many media, including Wedgwood porcelain. The myth of Cupid and Psyche is also common on funerary relief as an allegory of the soul's immortality.