Aphrodite

Born from the sea foam

The early Greek poet Hesiod tells the best-known story of Aphrodite’s birth. The god Cronus cut off the genitals of Uranus and threw them into the sea. Foam gathered around the immortal flesh, and a goddess grew inside it.

She first came near the island of Kythira. Then she reached Cyprus and stepped ashore, and grass sprang up under her feet.

Hesiod takes her names from this journey. She is foam-born. She is Cytherea after Kythira and Cyprogenes after Cyprus. In his telling, the violence of one generation of gods produced the goddess who would unsettle every later family through desire.

The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, an early poem in her honour, tells it differently. It treats her as a daughter of Zeus.

Other routes to the islands

The history of her worship gives another way to explain her ties to these islands. Herodotus, a Greek historian, wrote about her sanctuaries, the sacred places set aside for her. He says the sanctuary of Heavenly Aphrodite in the city of Ascalon was older than her sanctuary on Cyprus. He also says that Phoenicians, a people from Syria, founded the sanctuary on Kythira.

Herodotus’s account does not decide whether Hesiod’s birth story is right. It shows that Greeks could link Aphrodite’s islands with the spread of her worship, as well as with the journey of the goddess herself.

The armed goddess of Kythira

Pausanias, a Greek traveller who described the places he visited, saw the sanctuary of Aphrodite Urania, or Heavenly Aphrodite, on Kythira. He calls it the oldest Greek sanctuary of the goddess. His claim covers Greek sanctuaries only, so it can stand beside what Herodotus says about Ascalon.

The cult image he saw there, the statue that worshippers honoured, was made of wood and carried arms. Later art usually showed Aphrodite as a nude figure of beauty. The armed image at Kythira does not fit that later habit. In Greek religion, desire had force. It could overrule good judgement, make a fool of a god and change the future through a child.

Zeus turns her power on her

The Homeric Hymn begins by measuring how far her power reaches. Aphrodite can mislead even Zeus, though he rules over the other gods. Only three goddesses cannot be swayed by her: Athena, Artemis and Hestia. Each is protected by a commitment that rules out marriage and sex. Everyone else, god or mortal, is within her reach.

The hymn then shows that power turned back on her. Aphrodite had often caused gods to sleep with mortals, and then she mocked them for it. Zeus decided that she would no longer stand apart from such unions. He placed in her a desire for Anchises, a mortal man who tended cattle on Mount Ida. She went to him disguised as a young woman and hid the difference between them until the next morning.

Morning on Mount Ida

At dawn Aphrodite showed herself as a goddess. Anchises was terrified, because a mortal who sleeps with a goddess may not survive what follows.

Aphrodite promised that their son, Aeneas, would be raised by the nymphs of the mountain and later brought to him. She also warned Anchises to say that the mother was a nymph. If he boasted that he had slept with Aphrodite, Zeus would strike him with a thunderbolt.

Her speech kept coming back to the shame Zeus had placed on her. Until then, the other gods had feared her taunts about the mortal lovers she had chosen for them. Now she carried a mortal man’s child herself. She could no longer mock them as someone who had never shared the experience.

Why Anchises stayed mortal

Aphrodite would not make Anchises immortal. She recalled the goddess Eos and her mortal lover Tithonus. Eos won endless life for Tithonus but forgot to ask for endless youth, so he shrank away in old age. Aphrodite refused to follow that example, and Anchises would grow old like any mortal.

In the hymn, desire can carry a goddess across to a mortal man. It cannot make their two conditions equal: he will age and die, and she will not.

The Aphrodite of the hymn learns about her power from the inside. She is still the goddess who moves others to desire. After Anchises, she can no longer pretend that the force belongs only to the people she strikes with it.