Aphrodite- Greek GodDeity"Foam-Born"

Born from the Sea

According to Hesiod's Theogony, when Kronos castrated his father Uranus with an adamantine sickle, he cast the severed parts into the sea. White foam (aphros in Greek, giving the goddess her name) gathered around them, and from this foam Aphrodite rose, fully grown. She floated across the waves, first touching land at Paphos on the island of Cyprus, which forever after was sacred to her.

The Horae and the Charites greeted her on the shore. They dressed her in divine garments and placed a golden crown upon her head. Where her feet touched the earth, grass sprang up beneath them. When she arrived on Olympus, every god desired her, and Zeus saw that war over her would tear the divine order apart.

Homer tells a different tale in the Iliad, making her the daughter of Zeus and the Titaness Dione. In Hesiod, she was older than Zeus himself, born before the Olympians existed.

The Power of Love

The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite opens by naming who is beyond her reach: Athena, Artemis, Hestia. Three goddesses in all of creation. The list is short because it needs to be.

Her most potent instrument was the kestos, a sash woven with every enchantment of desire. When Hera needed to distract Zeus during the Trojan War, she swallowed her pride and borrowed it. The moment Zeus saw her wearing it, he forgot the battlefield, forgot his plans, forgot everything but want. Even the king of the gods could not think straight.

Marriage to Hephaestus

To prevent war among the gods, Zeus married Aphrodite to Hephaestus, the lame smith god and the least likely to start a fight. Hephaestus loved his wife and poured his art into gifts for her: golden necklaces and brooches finer than anything mortal hands could shape.

But Aphrodite took Ares into her bed. Helios, the sun who sees all, witnessed them together and told Hephaestus. The smith god forged an unbreakable golden net, fine as spider silk but stronger than any chain, and set it above his marriage bed.

When Ares and Aphrodite next lay together, the net fell upon them, trapping them naked and entangled. Hephaestus summoned all the gods to witness. The goddesses stayed away out of modesty, but the gods came laughing. Hermes and Apollo joked that they would gladly take Ares's place, net and all. Only when Poseidon promised that Ares would pay compensation did Hephaestus release them. Ares fled to Thrace. Aphrodite went to Paphos, where the Graces bathed and anointed her anew.

Mortal Loves

Zeus, tired of Aphrodite mocking the other gods for their mortal infatuations, turned her own power against her. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite tells how he made her fall in love with Anchises, a Trojan prince herding cattle on Mount Ida.

Disguising herself as a mortal princess, Aphrodite came to Anchises in his mountain shelter. He sensed something divine in her, but she swore she was mortal, and they lay together. Only afterward did she reveal herself, already carrying Aeneas. She warned Anchises never to boast of their union, or Zeus would strike him down.

In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Adonis was born from the myrrh tree into which his mother Myrrha had been transformed after an incestuous union with her father Cinyras. Aphrodite found the infant beautiful and hid him in a chest, entrusting him to Persephone in the underworld. Persephone opened the chest, saw the child, and refused to return him. Zeus decreed that Adonis would spend part of the year with each goddess. A wild boar gored him while hunting. Aphrodite rushed to his side, but he bled out in her arms. From his blood sprang the anemone, red as the wound.

The Judgment of Paris

At the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, every god was invited except Eris. She came anyway and threw a golden apple among the guests, inscribed "for the fairest." Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite each claimed it.

Zeus sent Paris, a Trojan prince living as a shepherd on Mount Ida, to judge. Each goddess offered a bribe. Hera promised power and kingship. Athena offered wisdom and victory in battle. Aphrodite promised Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta.

Paris chose Aphrodite. With the goddess's help, he sailed to Sparta, was received as Menelaus's guest, and took Helen to Troy. A thousand ships followed. Troy burned for it.

Aphrodite in the Trojan War

Aphrodite protected her favorites openly. In the Iliad, she rescued Paris from single combat with Menelaus, snatching him off the field in a cloud of mist and setting him down in his own bedchamber. When Diomedes, empowered by Athena, rampaged across the battlefield, Aphrodite tried to carry her wounded son Aeneas to safety. Diomedes drove his spear into her wrist. Ichor, not blood, poured from the wound. She dropped Aeneas and fled to Olympus in tears. Dione consoled her. Athena and Hera mocked her. Zeus told her gently that warfare was not her province: she should attend to "the lovely works of marriage."

Aphrodite and Hippolytus

Hippolytus, son of Theseus, devoted himself to Artemis and rejected Aphrodite with open contempt. In Euripides' telling, Aphrodite struck his stepmother Phaedra with uncontrollable desire for him. Hippolytus recoiled. Phaedra hanged herself and left a tablet accusing him of assault. Theseus believed it and called on Poseidon to destroy his son. A bull surged from the sea, and Hippolytus's horses bolted. He was dragged over the rocks until he died.

Paphos

Aphrodite's most sacred sanctuary stood at Paphos on Cyprus, where her cult was older than the Olympian religion itself. Her image there was not a statue but a conical stone, uncarved. Pigs were never sacrificed at her altars because a boar had killed Adonis. Her offerings were roses and doves.

Each midsummer, women mourned Adonis in the Adonia. They planted quick-growing herbs in shallow pots on their rooftops. The green shoots sprouted fast and died within days.