Aphrodite () is an ancient Greek goddess associated with love and beauty. Aphrodite's main cult centers were Cythera, Cyprus, Corinth, and Athens. In Athens, she was celebrated annually during the Aphrodisia festival. In Laconia, Aphrodite was worshipped as a warrior goddess. She was the patron goddess of prostitutes, an association which led early scholars to propose the concept of sacred prostitution in Greco-Roman culture, an idea now generally seen as erroneous. Aphrodite had many epithets, many of which emphasized an aspect of her character or were used by local cults. Thus she was known as Cytherea (Lady of Cythera) and Cypris (Lady of Cyprus), because both places claimed to be the site of her birth. The origins of Aphrodite have been the subject of scholarly debate. Proposed influences on her origins have included Near Eastern love goddesses, an indigenous Cypriot goddess, and a Proto-Indo-European dawn goddess.
In Homer's Iliad, she is the daughter of Zeus and Dione. In Hesiod's Theogony she is born from the foam (, ) produced by Uranus's genitals, which his son Cronus had severed and thrown into the sea. In the Odyssey, Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus, the god of fire, blacksmiths and metalworking; she fornicates with Ares, the god of war, and is caught by her husband. In other sources, Ares is described as her consort. In the First Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, she seduces the mortal shepherd Anchises after Zeus made her fall in love with him. Aphrodite was the surrogate mother and lover of the mortal shepherd Adonis, who was killed by a wild boar. Along with Athena and Hera, she was one of the three goddesses whose feud resulted in the Trojan War; she plays a major role throughout the Iliad. Sappho's Ode to Aphrodite is one of the earliest poems dedicated to the goddess and survives from the Archaic period nearly complete. In his Symposium, Plato distinguishes between Aphrodite Urania, a transcendent "heavenly" Aphrodite, and Aphrodite Pandemos, who is common to "all the people".
The Romans identified Aphrodite with their goddess Venus. Aphrodite has been featured in Western art as a symbol of female beauty and has appeared in numerous works of Western literature.
Etymology
Hesiod derives the name Aphrodite from () , interpreting the name as "risen from the foam",Hesiod, Theogony, 190–197. but most modern scholars regard this as a spurious folk etymology. Early-modern scholars of classical mythology attempted to argue that Aphrodite's name was of Greek or Indo-European origin, but these efforts have mostly been abandoned. Aphrodite's name is generally accepted to likely be of Semitic origin, due to the believed Near Eastern origins of Aphrodite's worship, but its exact derivation cannot be determined with confidence. Some scholars, such as Fritz Hommel, have suggested that Aphrodite's name is a hellenized pronunciation of the name "Astarte"; other scholars, however, reject this as linguistically untenable. Martin West reconstructs a Cyprian Canaanite form of the name as either or , and cautiously suggests the latter as being an epithet with the meaning "She of the Villages". Aren Wilson-Wright suggests the Phoenician form as an elative epithet meaning "unique, excellent, sublime".
Scholars in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, accepting Hesiod's "foam" etymology as genuine, analyzed the second part of Aphrodite's name as *-odítē "wanderer"Paul Kretschmer, "Zum pamphylischen Dialekt", Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiet der Indogermanischen Sprachen, 33 (1895), 267. or as *-dítē "bright".Ernst Maaß, "Aphrodite und die hl. Pelagia", Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum, 27 (1911), 457–468.Vittore Pisani, "Akmon e Dieus", Archivio glottologico italiano, 24 (1930), 65–73. More recently, Michael Janda, accepting Hesiod's etymology, argues for the second interpretation, and claims the story of a birth from the foam as an Indo-European mytheme. Similarly, Krzysztof Tomasz Witczak proposes an Indo-European compound "very" and "to shine", also referring to Eos, and Daniel Kölligan has interpreted Aphrodite's name as "shining up from the mist/foam". Other scholars have argued that these hypotheses are unlikely, since Aphrodite's attributes are unlike those of both Eos and the Vedic deity Ushas.
Some non-Greek etymologies have been suggested. One Semitic etymology compares Aphrodite to the Assyrian barīrītu, the name of a female demon that appears in Middle Babylonian and Late Babylonian texts.Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, vol. 2, p. 111. HammarströmM. Hammarström, "Griechisch-etruskische Wortgleichungen", Glotta: Zeitschrift für griechische und lateinische Sprache 11 (1921), 215–216. looks to Etruscan, comparing (e)prθni "lord", an Etruscan honorific loaned into Greek as πρύτανις. This would make the theonym in origin an honorific, "the lady". Most scholars reject this as implausible, especially since Aphrodite's name actually appears in Etruscan in the borrowed form Apru (from Greek , a clipped form of Aphrodite).
In the Cypriot syllabary, a script used on Cyprus from the eleventh to the fourth centuries BC, Aphrodite's name is attested in the forms (a-po-ro-ta-o-i, read right-to-left), (a-po-ro-ti-ta-i), and finally (a-po-ro-ti-si-jo, "", "related to Aphrodite", in the context of a month).
Origins
The origins of the Greek Aphrodite have been extensively debated by scholars, leading to multiple theories concerning where and when the goddess originated.
Some scholars believe that the cult of Aphrodite in Greece was influenced by the cult of Astarte in Phoenicia, which, in turn, was influenced by the cult of the Mesopotamian goddess known as "Ishtar" to the East Semitic peoples and as "Inanna" to the Sumerians. Pausanias states that the first to establish a cult of Aphrodite were the Assyrians, followed by the Paphians of Cyprus and then the Phoenicians at Ascalon. The Phoenicians, in turn, taught her worship to the people of Cythera.Pausanias, Description of Greece, I. XIV.7 According to this view, Aphrodite took on Inanna-Ishtar's associations with sexuality and procreation. Furthermore, she was known as Ourania (Οὐρανία), which means "heavenly", a title corresponding to Inanna's role as the Queen of Heaven. Early artistic and literary portrayals of Aphrodite are extremely similar on Inanna-Ishtar. Like Inanna-Ishtar, Aphrodite was a warrior goddess; the second-century AD Greek geographer Pausanias records that, in Sparta, Aphrodite was worshipped as Aphrodite Areia, which means "warlike". He mentions that Aphrodite's most ancient cult statues in Sparta and on Cythera showed her bearing arms. Modern scholars note that Aphrodite's warrior-goddess aspects appear in the oldest strata of her worship and see it as an indication of her Near Eastern origins. Nineteenth-century classical scholars disliked the idea that ancient Greek religion was influenced by the cultures of the Near East, but even Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, who argued that Near Eastern influence on Greek culture was largely confined to material culture, agreed that Aphrodite was clearly of Phoenician origin. The influence of Near Eastern culture on early Greek religion in general, and on the cult of Aphrodite in particular, is thought by the theory's proponents to date from a period of orientalization during the eighth century BC, when archaic Greece was on the fringes of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
Some early comparative mythologists opposed to the idea of a Near Eastern origin argued that Aphrodite originated as an aspect of the Greek dawn goddess Eos and that she was therefore ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European dawn goddess *Haéusōs (properly Greek Eos, Latin Aurora, Sanskrit Ushas). Most modern scholars have now rejected the notion of a purely Indo-European Aphrodite, but it is possible that Aphrodite, who may have originated as an Semitic deity, was influenced by the Indo-European dawn goddess. Both Aphrodite and Eos were known for their erotic beauty and aggressive sexuality, and for their relationships with mortal lovers. Both were associated with the colours red, white, and gold. Michael Janda interprets Aphrodite's name as an epithet of Eos meaning "she who rises from the [ocean] foam" and points to Hesiod's account in the Theogony of Aphrodite's birth as an archaic reflex of Indo-European myth. Aphrodite rising out of the waters after Cronus defeats Uranus as a mytheme would then be directly cognate to the Rigvedic myth of Indra defeating Vrtra, liberating Ushas. Another key similarity between Aphrodite and the Indo-European dawn goddess is her close kinship to the Greek sky deity, since both of the main claimants to her paternity (Zeus and Uranus) are sky deities.
Stephanie L. Budin and Jacqueline Karageorghis argue for the importance of Cyprus's role in the goddess's origins. Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge writes that an oriental origin remained uncertain, with the ancient views of Herodotus and Pausanias depending on "the imaginative register" and a theorised process of cultural borrowing which in her view "will remain forever beyond our scope".
Forms and epithets
Aphrodite's most common cultic epithet was Ourania, meaning "heavenly", but this epithet almost never occurs in literary texts, indicating a purely cultic significance. Another common name for Aphrodite was Pandemos ("For All the Folk"). In her role as Aphrodite Pandemos, Aphrodite was associated with Peithō (), meaning "persuasion", and could be prayed to for aid in seduction. The character of Pausanias in Plato's Symposium, takes differing cult-practices associated with different epithets of the goddess to claim that Ourania and Pandemos are, in fact, separate goddesses. He asserts that Aphrodite Ourania is the celestial Aphrodite, born from the sea foam after Cronus castrated Uranus, and the older of the two goddesses. According to the Symposium, Aphrodite Ourania is the inspiration of male homosexual desire, specifically the ephebic eros, and pederasty. Aphrodite Pandemos, by contrast, is the younger of the two goddesses: the common Aphrodite, born from the union of Zeus and Dione, and the inspiration of heterosexual desire and sexual promiscuity, the "lesser" of the two loves.Plato, Symposium, 181a-d.Richard L. Hunter, Plato's Symposium, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 44–47For further discussion of Plato's passage, see Frisbee Sheffield, "The Role of the Earlier Speeches in the "Symposium": Plato's Endoxic Method?" in J. H. Lesher, Debra Nails & Frisbee C. C. Sheffield (eds.), Plato's Symposium: Issues in Interpretation and Reception, Harvard University Press, (2006). Paphian (Παφία), was one of her epithets, after the Paphos in Cyprus where she had emerged from the sea at her birth.
Among the Neoplatonists and, later, their Christian interpreters, Ourania is associated with spiritual love, and Pandemos with physical love (desire). A representation of Ourania with her foot resting on a tortoise came to be seen as emblematic of discretion in conjugal love; it was the subject of a chryselephantine sculpture by Phidias for Elis, known only from a parenthetical comment by the geographer Pausanias.Pausanias, Periegesis, vi.25.1; Aphrodite Pandemos was represented in the same temple riding on a goat, symbol of purely carnal rut: "The meaning of the tortoise and of the he-goat I leave to those who care to guess", Pausanias remarks. The image was taken up again after the Renaissance.Andrea Alciato, Emblemata / Les emblemes (1584).