Aphrodite was known as the Greek goddess of love, beauty, sexual desire and fertility. According to Hesiod, she was born when Uranus, father of the gods, was castrated and his genitals thrown into the sea. Uranus's genitalia and the sea foam it mingled with are the supposed parents of Aphrodite, who rose from the foam and was carried by waves to Cyprus. This is why she was named Aphrodite, which literally means "foam-born", and is also known as Kypris and Cytherea. The goddess of love is depicted in many different ways; perhaps the most famous image of her is Botticelli's painting of the sea goddess standing naked atop a giant shell. Other paintings have depicted her as Asian, since ancient Greeks tended to agree that Aphrodite was of both Greek and foreign heritage.

The Graces also lived in Cyprus, and they were three sisters representing beauty, love and pleasure who served as attendants for Aphrodite. One version of the story says that the Graces were eternally joined by the hands in a circular dance that could not be broken; this doesn't seem likely, since the Graces were assigned tasks such as bathing and nursing Aphrodite when she was feeling lonely or depressed.

In Homer's version of her birth, Aphrodite is merely the offspring of Zeus and Dione, a minor goddess and one of his many mistresses. In both stories, Zeus quickly marries Aphrodite to the smith god Hephaestus, because Zeus is afraid that the rest of the gods will fight over the stunningly beautiful goddess. Like her father Zeus, Aphrodite was unable to remain faithful to her husband, and had her fair share of infidelities with such characters as Ares, god of war, and the beautiful mortal Adonis. Hephaestus made the mistake of fashioning a magic girdle for his wife, which caused every man she ever encountered to fall madly in love with her. This girdle was later lent to Hera, who wanted to win her god-king husband's affections during the Trojan War.

Because of his level of experience with women, the prince of Troy, Paris, was asked to name which of the Olympian goddesses was the most beautiful. Hera and Athena offered him power and strength in battle in return for his vote, but Aphrodite offered him the love of the most beautiful mortal woman, Helen of Sparta, who later became Helen of Troy when she ran off and eloped with Paris. Obviously, Paris opted for love and voted for Aphrodite. Aphrodite was blamed for making the Trojan War bloodier and more tragic than it needed to be, by meddling in the affairs of battle in order to spare the lives of Paris and her son Aeneas. Aphrodite went so far as to prevent Paris's death by a fatal blow, transporting herself and him to his bedchamber. She then went to Helen and warned her, "If you do not go to Paris, I will hate you as much as I love you now."

Athena hated her "sweetness and light" sister and commanded the warrior Diomedes to stab her. Aphrodite was wounded in the hand, and immediately returned to Mount Olympus to cry to her mother and father. Zeus instructed her to never again become involved in war, and instead to concentrate on the realms of love and marriage.

The affair of Aphrodite and Ares is very famous, and became quite well known to the rest of the gods after Hephaestus caught his wife and her lover in his own marriage bed. He had become suspicious of his wife and fashioned a trap to catch her and Ares the next time they were together. After being caught, Hephaestus demanded the return of the gifts he had given Aphrodite during their time of courtship. She then ran off to Cyprus and Ares left for Thrace. A line out of the Odyssey quotes Hermes saying that he'd suffer three times as much humiliation as Ares did in order to share the bed of the goddess of sex.

Methods of worshipping the goddess of love in ancient Greece included the Aphrodisiac festival. Priestesses representing Aphrodite were appointed, and sexual intercourse with one of them was considered as sacred as praying or making a sacrifice to the goddess herself.

In paintings and throughout literature, Aphrodite is depicted contradictorily. In some artworks she is shown as self-conscious, modest of her obvious good looks. In others she is shown as very self-aware and comfortable with the fact that she is the most beautiful creature in the world.

Αφροδιτη

The goddess of love, identified in Rome with the ancient Italic goddess Venus. There are two different accounts of her birth: sometimes she is said to be the daughter of Zeus and Dione, and sometimes a daughter of Uranus (the Sky) whose sexual organs, cut off by Cronos, fell in the sea and begot the goddess, 'she who was born of the sea' or 'she who was born of the god's seed'. Aphrodite had scarcely emerged from the sea when she was carried by the Zephyrs first to Cythera and then to the coast of Cyprus. There she was welcomed by the Seasons (the Horae), dressed and adorned and led by them to the home of the Immortals. Lucian records a legend which has it that she was first brought up by Nereus (compare Hera). Later Plato formulated the idea of there having been two Aphrodites, the daughter of Uranus, Aphrodite Urania and the goddess of pure love, and the daughter of Dione, Aphrodite Pandemia or Aphrodite of the populace, goddess of common love. But this distinction is a late philosophical concept, unknown in the early forms of the myths about the goddess.

Various legends formed round Aphrodite, consisting not of a coherent story but of different episodes in which the goddess played a part. Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus, the lame god of Lemnos, but she loved Ares the god of war. Homer tells how the two lovers were caught by surprise one morning by the Sun, who told Hephaestus of their affair. The latter set a secret trap in the form of a magic net which only he could handle. One night when the two lovers were both in Aphrodite's bed, Hephaestus closed the net over them and summoned all the Olympian gods, which caused them to rejoice exceedingly. At Poseidon's earnest request, Hephaestus agreed to draw the net back and Aphrodite, covered with shame, fled to Cyprus. The love affair between Aphrodite and Ares resulted in the birth of Eros and Anterus, Deimos and Phobos (Terror and Fear) and Harmonia (who later became the wife of Cadmus at Thebes). To these names is sometimes added Priapus, the god of Lampsacus (the protecting deity of gardens), for some traditions describe Aphrodite as the goddess of gardens, but this is true principally of her Italian character Venus.

The love affairs of Aphrodite were not confined to Ares. When Myrrha, who had become a tree, had given birth to Adonis, Aphrodite gave shelter to the child, who was very beautiful, and put him in the care of Persephone. But the latter would not give him back. The matter was submitted to Zeus to adjudicate and he decided that the youth should spend a third of the year with Persephone, a third with Aphrodite and a third where he wanted. But Adonis actually spent a third of the year with Persephone and two-thirds with Aphrodite. Soon afterwards Adonis was wounded by a wild boar and died, possibly a victim of the jealousy of Ares.

Aphrodite also had a love affair with Anchises, on Mount Ida in the Troad, and by him she had two sons, Aeneas and, according to some traditions, Lyrnus.

Aphrodite's outbursts of anger and her curses were famous. It was she who inspired Eos (the Dawn) with an irresistible love for Orion, in order to punish her for having yielded to Ares, and she vented her anger on the women of Lemnos for not honouring her by making them smell so horribly that their husbands abandoned them for Thracian slave girls. The women of Lemnos in their turn then killed all the men on the island and established a community of women, until the day came when the Argonauts arrived to enable them to beget sons (see Thoas). Aphrodite also punished the daughters of Cinyras in Paphos by compelling them to become prostitutes for strangers (see also Phaedra, Pasiphae, etc).

It was equally dangerous to be in Aphrodite's favour. One day Discord threw an apple intended to be given to whichever of the three goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, was the most beautiful. Zeus bade Hermes lead all three up to Mount Ida in the Troad, where they were to be judged by Alexander (known later as Paris). The three goddesses began to argue in his presence, each boasting of her beauty and promising him gifts. Hera offered him worldwide sovereignty; Athena offered to make him invincible in war; Aphrodite promised him the hand of Helen. He chose Aphrodite and thus it was that she was the underlying cause of the Trojan War. Throughout the war she granted her protection to the Trojans, and to Paris in particular. When Paris took on Menelaus in single combat and was about to yield, it was she who snatched him from danger and so caused the incident which reopened the general fighting. Later she similarly protected Aeneas when he was on the point of being killed by Diomedes, who actually wounded her. But the protection offered by Aphrodite could not avert the fall of Troy and the death of Paris. Nevertheless she succeeded in preserving the Trojan race and it was thanks to her that Aeneas, with his father and son and bearing the Penates of Troy, managed to escape from the burning city and seek a country where he could acquire a new fatherland. This was how Aphrodite-Venus became the special protectress of Rome. She was regarded as the ancestress of the Julii, who claimed descent from Iulus, his father Aeneas, and consequently the goddess. For this reason Ceasar built a temple in her honour under the protection of Mother Venus or Venus Genetrix.

Her favourite creatures were doves, a flock of which drew her chariot. Her plants were rose and myrtle.

{E2 DICTIONARY OF CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY}

Table of Sources:
- Hom. Od. 8, 266ff.; Il. 2, 819ff.; 3, 15ff.; 4, 10ff.; 5, 1ff.; 311ff.; 330
- Hesiod, Theog. 190ff.
- Antonius Liberalis, Met. 34
- Apollod. Bibl. 1, 9, 17; 1, 4, 4; 3, 2, 2; 3, 12, 2; 3, 14, 4; Epit. 4, 1
- Lucian, Podagra 87ff.

She walks on the beach, sifting her toes through the old cigarette butts and bottle caps, humming an old rock song she heard here once. The color of the sky dictates that this place is empty today, which is good; she isn't looking for company.

For the occasion she has donned a black bathing suit, maybe a little too ambitious for her age. Behind her is an aging amusement park, built out onto this humble peninsula by entrepreneurs decades before she was born but which she is still old enough to remember as a seedy teenage utopia. Now dilapidated past all relevance, it still opens on the first day of summer and draws a handful of curious visitors each year willing to ignore the peeling paint and concrete blotched by old gum.

On her left and growing closer is a rocky outcrop in the water, populated at the moment by some dormant seagulls. As a kid she climbed those rocks virtually all the time, thrilled by the adventure of slick handholds and a youthful desire to summit just about anything. At a later age she had been chased up its side by some boys (who meant her no harm) and it happened that she was somehow distracted and slipped near the top, crashing down onto the jagged rocks with her hip and opened an impressive gash in her side.

It hadn't been particularly painful and the salt water had rushed in to disinfect everything right away but she remembered how horrified everyone was as she surfaced from a murk of blood. They'd brought her straight to the hospital and when they sent her home the same day she was kept out of the water for the rest of the summer.

The following winter was the most dismal and academic of her entire life. When June rolled around again she had wasted no time in coming back here and climbing that stupid rock again, albeit in a much more discreet bathing suit.

Thinking about that particular bathing suit was enough to make her grin all by itself. It had left so much to the imagination that those same boys, who had been looking forward to doggedly pursuing her again, were shocked and dismayed by her new found humility. It took the most devoted of them the entire season to weasel her out of it and touch the long and livid scar that ran up her side. She'd grabbed his hand and attempted to coax him into repositioning but he had just hung on and laughed. It had been fantastic.

She can't remember his name now of course, nor his face. Like so many young lovers he is immortalized in just a few traits: his hair, his teeth, the sound of his voice on the phone when he woke up in the morning. Or maybe that had been another boy. Ugh. Those poor boys. She wrinkles her nose in sad disgust.

Those boys, the ones who hadn't left or died, are just bitter old men now. They have wives and jobs and all of them smoke either more or less than they want. They're dead on the inside, no; on good days they can still show her how capable they are of passion. They're still her friends. But, you know, she just can't stand sound of chains clanking in the back of their heads anymore, not even when they make love.

The woman exhales. She has now reached the head of the peninsula and the wind is picking up, blowing her long black hair around her face as she stands there and lets goosebumps raise on her skin. She is thinking about freedom now. She thinks freedom has a lot to do with it, this feeling she has in her chest all the time. Adult life is just too restrictive and takes you too far from the beach. You have to work and save and talk to your doctor and she talked to her doctor a little bit longer every year about bad habits and that feeling in her chest and how quickly she ran out of breath when she walked on the beach.

She wants a cigarette.

No, that's not right. She wants to be young again. That's the truth. When she was young she had been a swimmer. She had started here and kept on at school during the winter, shriveling her toes in the chlorine doing laps late into the night. It had made her strong and sleek. She wants to be strong and sleek again.

The woman steps out towards the ocean and the water washes over her feet. It's cold, always colder than she expects this time of year. It climbs up over her hips and then her breasts before she pushes forward and submerges herself completely, striking out from the shore.

It doesn't take long for her lungs to protest but she assumes an even, deliberate stroke. Thoughts dissolve in an athletic haze and all that's left is the sound of the water and the taste of salt. Somewhere behind that is the sound of her pounding heart.

By the time she stops for the first time she has long since lost track of time. The sky is getting grayer by the instant and the park has become so tiny that she can fit the Ferris Wheel between her fingers. This does not dissuade her in the slightest from swimming further.

By the time she stops again it is almost dark. The peninsula is a degraded cluster of shapes on the horizon and the wind is gusting. Her entire body burns in the sea. Then someone turns on the lights again at the old amusement park and she tries to swim back for one more year.

Aph`ro*di"te (#), n. [Gr. .]

1. Classic Myth.

The Greek goddess of love, corresponding to the Venus of the Romans.

2. Zool.

A large marine annelid, covered with long, lustrous, golden, hairlike setae; the sea mouse.

3. Zool.

A beautiful butterfly (Argunnis Aphrodite) of the United States.

 

© Webster 1913.

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