APHRODITE. - Greek goddess of love. Various scholars derive her name from the Indo-European languages and see in A. a Thessalian goddess who later spread to Boeotia, Arcadia and Cyprus, but the proposed etymologies are not convincing. At present it is the common opinion, though not accepted by all, that A. is an Oriental divinity and that the name derives from that of Astarte, a Semitic goddess of fertility. According to Herodotus and some moderns, A. would have come from Ashkelon to Cyprus, then to Cythera and Greece, while for others she would already have been received in the Mycenaean age. Some have wanted to see the oldest depiction of A. in a small gold leaf from Mycenae with a nude female figure, strongly accentuated sex, and doves. But even if it represents a divinity, it does not follow that the Mycenaeans venerated her, because the depiction is isolated and the leaf has a purely decorative purpose. It is an artistic scheme from Asia Minor that does not imply the acceptance of the cult.
In Homer A. is a Greek divinity, daughter of Zeus and Dione. For Hesiod she was generated from the foam of the sea, fertilized by Uranus: that is, he interprets the epithet Urania, frequent for A., an epithet in which some have wanted to see proof of a divinity of the sky, others, more rightly, of a foreign divinity. It is difficult to decide which of the two genealogies is the older; some lean toward the Hesiodic one, as cruder and less consonant with Greek ideas. The myth places the birth of A. in Cyprus.
The characteristics of A. that we find in Homer remain with her in the Greek world. However, we must distinguish between A. in cult and A. in art. In cult she had less importance than other great Olympian divinities: no city, apart from the Cypriot ones, had her as protector. Cyprus in this, as in other features of the cult, shows Semitic influence. In art, on the other hand, A. had an extremely wide diffusion, to the point of becoming the preferred and most depicted divinity. Artists admired in her beauty, grace and female perfection. Scenes of bathing and dressing are a frequent subject in vase painting and on mirrors, but they have no repercussion in the cult, just as the numerous Hellenistic statues have none, in which A. is no longer the goddess, but a very beautiful and often somewhat vulgar woman, who excites the imagination and the senses.
In cult A. is the goddess of love, and the Oriental "Great Mother" undoubtedly contributed to this aspect of her; under the influence of this divinity she herself becomes a lover, but her favorites are not Greek and do not emerge in Greek myth. Of Oriental influence, too, is sacred prostitution, rare in Greece but frequent in the East. In Greece it was practiced at Corinth, where the sanctuary of Aphrodite Urania had up to 2000 hierodules, whose earnings went into the temple coffers, and at Paphos, where however the cult has Semitic characteristics.
At Rome A. was identified with Venus, in Etruria with Turan. It has been claimed to see survivals of the cult of A. in the legend of St. Pelagia, but the proofs adduced are anything but exact and convincing.
Bibliography2 works
Luisa Banti