Aphrodīté
（
Ἀφροδίτη; Lat.
Venus). The Greek goddess
of love. Her attributes combine, with Hellenic conceptions, a great many features of Eastern,
especially Phœnician, origin, which the Greeks must have grafted upon their native
notions in very old times. This double nature appears immediately in the contradictory tales
of her origin. To the oldest Greeks she was the daughter of Zeus and Dioné (and is
sometimes called by that name herself); yet from a very early time she appears as Aphrogenia,
the “foam-born” (see
Uranus), as
Anadyomené, “she who rises” out of the sea, and steps ashore on
Cyprus, which had been colonized by Phœnicians time out of mind; even as far back as
Homer she is Cypris, the Cyprian. (See
Cyprus.) The same transmarine and Eastern origin of her worship is evidenced by the
legend of the island of Cythera, on which she was supposed to have first landed from a
sea-shell. Other names applied to her are Pelagia (from
Πέλαγος), Anadyomené (as having risen from the water), Erycina (from
Mount Eryx in Sicily), Paphia, and Cypris, besides those mentioned below.
Again, the common conception of her as goddess of love limited her agency to the sphere of
human life. But she was, at the same time, a power of nature, living and working in the three
elements of air, earth, and water. As goddess of the shifting gale and changeful sky, she was
Aphrodité Urania (
Οὐρανία), the
“heavenly,” and at many places in Greece and Asia her temples crowned the
heights and headlands; for instance, the citadels of Thebes and Corinth, and Mount Eryx in
Sicily. As goddess of storm and lightning, she was represented armed, as at Sparta and
Cythera; and this, perhaps, explains why she was associated with Ares both in worship and in
legend, and worshipped as a goddess of victory.
The moral conception of Aphrodité Urania as goddess of the higher and purer love,
especially wedded love and fruitfulness, as opposed to mere sensual lust, was but slowly
developed in the course of ages.
As goddess of the sea and maritime traffic, especially of calm seas and prosperous voyages,
she was widely worshipped by sailors and fishermen at ports and on sea-coasts, often as the
goddess of calm, while Poseidon was the god of disturbance. Next, as regards the life of the
earth, she was the goddess of gardens and groves, of spring and its bounties, especially
tender plants and flowers, as the rose and myrtle; hence, as the fruitful and bountiful, she
was worshipped most of all at that season of the year in which her birth from the sea was
celebrated at Paphos in Cyprus. But to this, her time of joyful action, was opposed a season
of sorrow, when her creations wither and die—a sentiment expressed in her
inconsolable grief for her beloved
Adonis (q.v.), the
symbol of vegetation perishing in its prime, a myth derived by the Greeks from the Babylonian
worship of Adon or Thammuz, and akin to those of Linus , Hyacinthus, and Narcissus. (See
Mannhardt Wald- und Feldkulte, 274 [Berlin, 1886].) In the life of gods and men, she showed
her power as the golden, sweetly smiling goddess of beauty and love, which she knew how to
kindle or to keep away. She outshone all the goddesses in grace and loveliness; in her girdle
she wore united all the magic charms that could bewitch the wisest man and subdue the very
gods. (See
Cestus.) Her retinue consisted of Eros
(Cupid), the Hours, the Graces, Peitho (Persuasion), Pothos and Himeros (personifications of
longing and yearning). By uniting the generations in the bond of love, she became a goddess of
marriage and family life, and the consequent kinship of the whole community. As such she had
formerly been worshipped at Athens under the name of Pandemos (=all the people's), as being a
goddess of the whole country. By a regulation of Solon, the name acquired a very different
sense, branding her as goddess of prostitution; and then it was that the new and higher
meaning was imported into the word Urania. See
Meretrix.
In later times, the worship of Aphrodité as the goddess of mere sensual
love made rapid strides, and in particular districts assumed forms more and more immoral, in
imitation of the services performed to love-goddesses in the East, especially at Corinth,
where large bands of girls were consecrated as slaves to the service of the gods and the
practice of prostitution. And later still, the worship of Astarté
(“Star”), the Syrian Aphrodité, performed by eunuchs, spread
all over Greece. See
Aphrodisia;
Meretrix.
In the Greek myths Aphrodité appears occasionally as the wife of Hephaestus. Her
love adventures with Ares are notorious. From these sprang Eros and Anteros, Harmonia, the
wife of Cadmus, and Deinos and Phobos (Fear and Alarm), attendants on their father. By
Anchises she was the mother of Aeneas. The chief seats of her worship were Paphos, Amathus,
and Idalion (all in Cyprus), Cnidus in Dorian Asia Minor, Corinth, the island of Cythera, and
Eryx in Sicily. As mother of Harmonia, she was a guardian deity of Thebes. Among plants, the
myrtle, the rose, and the apple were specially sacred to her as goddess of love; among
animals, the ram, he-goat, hare, dove, sparrow, and other creatures of amorous nature (the ram
and dove being widely current symbols of great antiquity); as sea-goddess, the swan, mussel,
and dolphin; as Urania, the tortoise.
The various myths connected with the name of Aphrodité have inspired many
exquisite poems in modern literature. In recent English verse reference may be made to the
magnificent Chorus to Aphrodité in Swinburne's
Atalanta in Calydon;
Hake's
Birth of Venus; Morris's Aphrodité in his
Epic of
Hades; and Rossetti's
Ve-
 |
|
Aphrodité of Melos. (Louvre.)
|
nus Verticordia and
Venus Victrix.
In ancient art, in which Aphrodité is one of the favourite subjects, she is
represented in a higher or lower aspect, according as the artist's aim was to exhibit Urania
or the popular goddess of love. In the earlier works of art she usually appears clothed, but
in later ones more or less undraped—either as rising from the sea or leaving the
bath, or (as in still later times) merely as an ideal of female beauty. In the course of time
the divine element disappeared, and the presentation became more and more ordinary. While the
older sculptures show the sturdier forms, the taste of later times leans more and more to
softer, weaker outlines. Most renowned in ancient times were the statue at
Cnidus by Praxiteles (a copy of which is now at Munich), and the painting of
Aphrodité Anadyomené by Apelles. Of original statues preserved to us,
the most famous are the Aphrodité of Melos (see illustration), now at Paris, and
that of Capua at Naples, both of which bring out the loftier aspect of the goddess; and the
Medicean Venus at Florence, the work of a late Attic sculptor, Cleomenes, in the delicate
forms of face and body that pleased a younger age. On the identification of
Aphrodité with the Roman goddess of love, see
Venus.
