What the cult of Aphrodite reveals about ancient attitudes towards love—and desire
A mix of ancient divinities, Aphrodite was patron over love, beauty, fertility, and war. But the venerated Greek deity has a more complex rise to fame than one might think.
The Greek Olympian gods were a wild, dysfunctional, divine family. Believed to live on the beautiful slopes of Mount Olympus in northern Greece, these supernatural creatures were thought to look like humans–only bigger, brighter, and stronger. The Olympian gods and goddesses incarnated human qualities such as wisdom (Athena), reason (Apollo), and love (Aphrodite), but they were far from perfect. They drank, had affairs, and spitefully meddled in the lives of humans. Capable of shape-shifting, they could turn up where you least expected them, disguised as a stranger at your door or as a rainbow, appearing as a breath of wind around the corner or as a monster in a raging sea. From Zeus, the king of the gods, downward, they were not to be messed with.
(Dionysus, Greek god of wine and revelry, was more than just a 'party god'.)
The creation of a goddess
The birth of Aphrodite, the ancient goddess of sexual love, was a gruesome affair. Aphrodite’s story, sung by ancient Greek poets and set down in some of the earliest prose from the Greek world, is a myth to remember, a dreadful tale. The Greeks believed that before the beginning of the world, there was an endless, formless, primordial night. And that from this nothingness came extraordinary power. The great earth goddess Gaia had married her own son, the looming sky god Uranus, but it was not a happy union. The two deities made loveless love. Uranus, hating the children they conceived (the Titans, Cyclopes, and Hecatoncheires), trapped them inside Gaia’s belly of the earth. Sick of this eternal copulating, one day Gaia persuaded another of her sons, Cronus, to help. Taking up a serrated sickle—some poets said it was made of adamite, others of flint—Cronus frenziedly hacked off his father’s penis and testicles. Roaring with unimaginable pain, Uranus violently broke off his incestuous embrace, separating earth and the heavens. Uranus’s bloody, spurting, amputated sex plummeted into the seas below. This visceral, broiling mass drifted east from the island of Kythera, in southern Greece, toward the wild seas around Cyprus. And here, the archaic Greek author Hesiod tells us in his catalogue of creation myths, Theogony, from the foaming mess arose “an awful and lovely maiden.” This maiden-goddess was Aphrodite, or Venus as she would come to be called in the Roman world.
As this radiant teenager stepped onto the barren earth, grasses and flowers sprang up from beneath her “shapely feet.” Her arrival generated some of the most beautiful accounts in ancient Greek literature. The following is an extract from Kypria, an ancient epic poem about Aphrodite (translation by Barbara Breitenberger):
She set on her skin the garments which the Graces and the Seasons had made and dyed in the flowers of spring-time, garments such as the Seasons wear, dyed in crocus and hyacinth and in the blooming violet and in the fair flower of the rose and fragrant, and in ambrosial flowers of the narcissus and lily.
So, we think we know Aphrodite. We think we know that she is a sweet-smelling goddess of love who pops up once a year on Valentine’s Day cards. But psychologically, historically, archaeologically, she is more than that: Aphrodite is a creature of potency and influence across time and space. As investigations in Europe, Asia, and North Africa reveal, her worship tells us much about attitudes toward desire, taboo, love, lust, and the complex challenges of civilization.
Unearthing Aphrodite’s ancestors
My historical detective hunt began in the east. When I was last in Cyprus, in the Larnaca District Museum, researchers were scanning a tiny necklace of golden pomegranates, 3,500 years old, recently excavated from the grave of a young child. Pomegranates have long been Aphrodite’s fruit, their color symbolizing both fertility and death. A golden pendant was found nearby, engraved with the image of the Bronze Age eastern deity of fertility, pleasure, and pain, Astarte. Along with the delicate jewelry were curious, female figurines—women with the faces of birds—very similar to those found in Syria and the Levant, just 250 miles east across the Mediterranean Sea. We know that sailors and traders came from the east to Cyprus from at least 2500 B.C. onward, bringing ideas and cultural influence as well as goods and gifts. Critically, in the case of Aphrodite, these travelers imported the idea of a deity who was responsible for desire of all kinds—not just love, but also lust for war, conquest, and control. Because in a region that spans modern-day Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Anatolia, and Egypt, during a time when the skeletal evidence (shins hacked with axes, arrows in eye sockets, shoulder blades sliced with machetes) tells us that intertribal and interclan violence was almost constant, communities dreamt up the notion of a tempestuous, divine entity. This sublime, fickle female god, called variously Inanna, Ishtar, and Astarte, was the incarnation of the desire for conflict and carnal relations.
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(In Cyprus, this is where you can find Aphrodite.)
These eastern Aphrodite equivalents were ardently adored. The goddess Inanna presided over 180 sanctuaries in Babylon alone. The Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep III asked for a statue of potent Ishtar to be brought from the city of Nineveh to help banish a mysterious sickness in his kingdom, and Astarte, often portrayed with horns, would decorate the prows of ships plied by Phoenician traders. A totemic figure to bring luck and protection, Astarte was fecund and feisty, and an inspiration for the voluptuous figureheads that became so popular on galleons beginning from the 16th century onward. All of these eastern goddesses were thought to inhabit the sky in the form of the “star” we still call Venus, now correctly classified as a planet. Cyprus too boasts fascinating fertility figures, dating back 5,000 years. These are also the eastern-island ancestors of Aphrodite.
Although the Greeks asserted that Aphrodite’s name derived from the Greek for “foam-born” (aphros is Greek for “sea foam”), it seems far more likely her name stems from the Phoenician Ashteroth, which was then Hellenized to become Astarte and adapted to become Aphrodite. The Aphrodite who emerged from the coasts of Cyprus was constitutionally a creature of both east and west. As an entrepôt for the prehistoric, international copper trade, Cyprus was a cauldron of cultural influence. Copper gets its name from the island of Cyprus, and Aphrodite herself came to be called Kypria, or the Kyprian goddess. Copper, when mixed with tin, fueled the advances of Bronze Age civilization. Boats piled with copper ingots plied their way to Cypriot ports from the Levant, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and mainland Greece. Greek Mycenaean influence brought to Cyprus the notion of a fertility deity who incarnated beauty of body and soul. As all these influences cross-fertilized on Cyprus, Aphrodite, both ferocious and fabulous, was truly born.
(Worship of this Egyptian goddess spread from Egypt to England.)
Sacrifices to the goddess
Since Aphrodite was a goddess whose purview was human relations of all kinds, romantic and antagonistic, she came to be a totemic protectress of cities. In Athens the entire Acropolis rock, crowned by the famous Parthenon temple (built for the goddess of wisdom, Athena Parthenos), was sacred not to Athena but to her sister Aphrodite. Citizens of the city would leave offerings to her in niches carved into the sides of the towering, pink-granite outcrop: pomegranates, scented oils, or cups of milk. Some young romantics in the city still honor the goddess of love at the Acropolis in the same niches, in the same way. There were shrines to Aphrodite in the Athenian Agora, where the birds she loved, doves (the Greek name for dove, peristera, almost certainly derives from the Semitic perah Ishtar, the bird of Ishtar), had their tongues cut out and blood sprinkled on altars in her honor. In this flagship democratic city, it was vital that the residents respected one another. Aphrodite was thought to offer a kind of cosmic glue for ancient society. This tradition continued. There is even an image of Aphrodite protecting the great Christian city of Constantinople, as she hovers in the corner of one of the earliest maps of the metropolis.
Long associated with flowers and perfumes, Aphrodite’s worship must have been a heady experience. In the great sanctuary of Old Paphos on Cyprus, close to where she was believed to have emerged from the sea, lilies, violets, and sweet myrtle were grown. There were ponds of lotuses and arches of roses; this is why we now exchange over 250 million roses on Valentine’s Day. The Sanctuary of Aphrodite at Old Paphos was one of the biggest in the ancient world. No blood sacrifice was allowed; only the burning of expensive incense from Arabia and libations of olive oil, honey, and wine. Local ceramic pots from the eighth century B.C. show a Cypriot goddess or high priestess drinking some kind of potent brew through a straw–quite possibly laudanum or opium-laced wine.
Given the goddess’s delight in pleasures of the flesh, it’s unsurprising Aphrodite was also a patron of sex workers. One writer in the Roman Republic, Ennius, translating the Greek author Euhemerus, goes so far as to credit her with the invention of “the oldest profession.” Excavations in central Athens have unearthed a beautiful silver medallion in the brothel district of the city, Kerameikos. Here, narrow stalls housed female and male sex slaves of the Athenian Empire. We can only hope the protection of their love goddess offered them some comfort.
Historical accounts, such as that of Herodotus, Greece’s father of history, asserted that sacred sex workers operated at Old Paphos and at Aphrodite’s other sanctuaries, including the sanctuary of Mylitta in Babylonia. And because she was a goddess who historically traveled by sea, and who was all about mixing and mingling across borders and boundaries, Aphrodite was much adored in ports. With the influx and egress of international sailors, brothels were a regular feature of port cities.
(Revealing the hidden lives of ancient Greek women.)
The universality of Aphrodite
Aphrodite was adored in fine sanctuaries at Cnidus in Anatolia (“Aphrodite of Cnidus” by Praxiteles is one of the most famous statues of the goddess), at Syracuse in Sicily, and at Pompeii in the Bay of Naples. When Venus became the presiding deity at Pompeii in 89 B.C., the city was officially renamed Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeianorum.
(This missing statue inspired countless modern imitations.)
Venus, patroness of Pompeii
But Aphrodite was also believed to inhabit modest homes too, as a patron who presided over marriages and family relations. The great democratic reformer of Athens, Cleisthenes, had coins minted; the goddess Athena was on one side, and on the reverse was Aphrodite as Aphrodite Pandemos, meaning “of all the people.”
Ancient deities embody universal ideas, so unsurprisingly, early Romans did have their own homegrown goddess of fertility and procreation, whom they called Venus. Once Romans had conquered Greek territories after the fall of Corinth in 146 B.C., Venus and Aphrodite frequently became interchangeable. For the Romans, feisty Venus-Aphrodite’s domain of desire, ambition, and prowess in war made her the perfect deity to sit front and center of their mythical narrative. Venus, Romans said, had given birth to the Trojan hero Aeneas, who, fleeing the devastation of the Trojan War, then went on to establish the Julian dynasty. Descendants of the Julians, the twins Romulus and Remus, would found Rome. So, Venus was considered the godmother of the Roman Republic and of its imperial ambitions. In Virgil’s epic poem Aeneid, in a conversation with Venus, we hear that Aeneas’s destiny is to pursue “an empire without limits.” When Julius Caesar went into battle, he would sacrifice to Venus—as would his rivals Pompey and Crassus. The conquering Roman hero Sulla built sanctuaries in Venus’s honor. Julius Caesar erected a monumental temple to the goddess right in the heart of the Roman Forum.
Venus was honored with four major festivals in Rome a year: the springtime Veneralia; the Vinalia Urbana, when sacred sex workers carried garlands of myrtle and roses and downed amphorae of wine; a garden festival in summer; and from 46 B.C. onward, during Venus Genetrix, where Venus was adored as the mother and progenitor of the Roman people. Julius Caesar proudly wore a ring showing Venus in warrior dress, and, increasingly, Roman statues of Venus depicted her naked but armed, boasting helmet, sword, and sheath.
Aphrodite was many things to humankind. Also described as Kataskopia (“the spying one”) and Androphonos (“the killer of men”), she was not to be messed with. She was far more than just a pretty face.
Aphrodite, the goddess who later revealed all
An alternative version of that gory Greek origin myth tells us that Aphrodite was born from a union of Zeus and the sea nymph Dione. On the southwest coastline of Cyprus (called Aphrodite’s Isle) during the wintertime, storm waves hit the dramatic coast at 90 degrees, with rising high, curious, shape-shifting columns said to be Aphrodite herself. It is still possible to witness this strange phenomenon, a ghostly reminder that salty Venus-Aphrodite was believed to be immortal and responsible for the primal urges of humanity, as well as the delicate, complex business of human relations. In the first century B.C., the Roman author Lucretius described this intriguing, inspiring, influential deity as “the single guiding power of the universe.” Aphrodite Pandemos indeed.
