Aphrodite

Hesiod tells in the Theogony (188-206) that Cronus castrated his father Uranus and cast the remains into the sea. From the foam (aphrós) that gathered around them a fully grown goddess was born, who came ashore first at Cythera and then at Cyprus. From that double landfall come her two oldest epithets, Cytherea and Cypris. Homer offers a different genealogy and presents her as the daughter of Zeus and Dione (Iliad V, 370-417), without either version displacing the other: the Greek tradition transmitted them together for centuries, and Apollodorus records both in his Library. The first explains her name and her bond with the sea; the second makes her a full member of the Olympian family.

Married to Hephaestus, the lame smith of Olympus, Aphrodite took Ares as her lover. Demodocus's song in the Odyssey (VIII, 266-366) tells how Helios betrayed them and how Hephaestus forged a net of chains so fine that they were invisible, spread it over the bed and summoned the gods to see the lovers trapped. The male Olympians laughed; the goddesses, the poem says, chose not to attend. From that union were born Phobos and Deimos, Panic and Terror, who accompany their father into battle, and Harmonia, who would marry Cadmus of Thebes. The episode fixes the trait that defines her in epic: her power obeys not even the bonds she herself contracts.

Her most dangerous attribute is not a weapon but an embroidered girdle, the kestós himás, into which love, desire and the words of seduction are stitched. In the Iliad (XIV, 214-221) Hera borrows it under a false pretext in order to lull Zeus and draw him away from the battle, and the loan works: not even the king of the gods resists. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite tells the reverse, when Zeus compels her to desire a mortal, the shepherd Anchises of Mount Ida, by whom she will conceive Aeneas. The goddess who bends everyone is subjected to her own dominion, and the hymn stresses the shame this causes her.

At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, Eris threw down a golden apple destined for the fairest. Hera, Athena and Aphrodite contended for it, and Zeus entrusted the judgement to Paris. Each offered a bribe: Hera power, Athena military victory, Aphrodite the most beautiful woman in the world. Paris chose her, and the price was Helen and the Trojan War. During the conflict she defends the Trojans, rescues Paris from his duel with Menelaus by wrapping him in mist and tries to save her son Aeneas, until Diomedes wounds her in the hand and forces her from the field (Iliad V). It is the reminder that war is not her ground.

Pausanias describes sanctuaries of hers throughout Greece, and the greatest stood at Paphos on Cyprus, where she was worshipped as a conical baetyl rather than in human form. Plato, in the Symposium, distinguishes two invocations that the cult already kept apart: Aphrodite Urania, the heavenly one, born of Uranus and bound to a love that transcends the physical, and Aphrodite Pandemos, the common one, of the city and of everyday desire. At Corinth her temple was famed for sacred prostitution, though the ancient sources disagree about its real extent. The Romans identified her with Venus, whom the gens Julia claimed as an ancestor through Aeneas.