Aphrodite: The Origins and History of the Greek Goddess of Love

by Charles River Editors

After he cut off their genitals, Chronos threw them into the sea, where they floated in a "white foam." Out of this foam‒or "Aphros” in ancient Greek‒sprang forth the first goddess. Just as Eros had been present at the establishment of the first power system, Aphrodite, the more elaborate representative of love and desire, would be present to usher in the next.

Aphrodite and Eros brought love and passion to the cosmos, and thanks to them, the Titans and the Gods came together and populated the world. Seeing that she was without a husband, however, Zeus betrothed her to the lame smith god Hephaestus, who fell in love with her deeply at first sight of her loveliness. But laughter-loving Aphrodite found Hephaestus repugnant, and she turned her gaze to the other gods in search of a more fitting mate.

Though she is the goddess of love, Aphrodite’s part in bringing about the Trojan War cannot be overstated, and it was at the wedding of Thetis and Peleus where the dreaded die was cast.

Paris had heard of Helen of Sparta’s beauty, and though she was married to the warlike Menelaus, he immediately consented to awarding Aphrodite the apple. “Discord” was brought to the Mediterranean. 10 years later, the world was still feeling the effects of Aphrodite’s actions and Menelaus’s response. The Greeks and Trojans had been well matched, and the Greeks just could not bring down the magnificent walls of Troy. Then Agamemnon’s insult to Achilles tipped the balance in favour of the Trojans, and the gods found themselves embroiled in the mire too. Hera and Athena, still furious at Paris’s decision, chose to side with the Greeks, whereas Aphrodite sided with Paris’s countrymen.

According to Liddell & Scott’s Greek lexicon, the verb form “Aphrodisiazo” relates to both the act of sexual intercourse and also the act of “indulging in lust”. This would suggest a relative consistency with her name and her later character from her earliest appearances in the Greek language.

“From there they marched against Egypt: and when they were in the part of Syria called Palestine, Psammetichus king of Egypt met them and persuaded them with gifts and prayers to come no further. So they turned back, and when they came on their way to the city of Ascalon in Syria, most of the Scythians passed by and did no harm, but a few remained behind and plundered the temple of Heavenly Aphrodite. This temple, I discover from making inquiry, is the oldest of all the temples of the goddess, for the temple in Cyprus was founded from it, as the Cyprians themselves say; and the temple on Cythera was founded by Phoenicians from this same land of Syria.”[27] The idea that Aphrodite was originally an Eastern goddess appropriated by the ancient Greeks at the onset of their great cultural revolutions of the Archaic Period (ca. 8th century BCE) is one that has been corroborated by modern and ancient historians alike.

Here Herodotus can be of some help again. “As to the customs of the Persians, I know them to be these. It is not their custom to make and set up statues and temples and altars, but those who do such things they think foolish, because, I suppose, they have never believed the gods to be like men, as the Greeks do; but they call the whole circuit of heaven Zeus, and to him they sacrifice on the highest peaks of the mountains; they sacrifice also to the sun and moon and earth and fire and water and winds. From the beginning, these are the only gods to whom they have ever sacrificed; they learned later to sacrifice to the ‘heavenly’ Aphrodite from the Assyrians and Arabians. She is called by the Assyrians Mylitta, by the Arabians Alilat, by the Persians Mitra.”

but most scholars today believe that ancient Greek worship of her is most closely tied to the ancient Phoenician goddess of love Ishtar-Astarte. Again this ties in with Herodotus’s claims that the “oldest temple” to Aphrodite was in Syria, the home of the Phoenicians, and the character of Ishtar-Astarte corroborates this claim further. Ishtar-Astarte was not only the Phoenician goddess of love, but she was also the “Queen of Heaven”.

ashoreth in the Bible

The final similarity, it seems, between the two goddesses is their part in prostitution. Astarte-Ishtar was the goddess of the “Hetaerae”, whom historians today usually define as “companions” or “courtesans” and are distinguished from the more mundane “Pornai” by the fact that the Hetaerae were well educated and they often reserved their services for a select and smaller group of clients, with whom they had longer-term relationships.

Archaeological excavations have unearthed a gem of this goddess blowing on a Triton shell and none other than her tragic lover’s symbol, a sea anemone, set beside her altar. It seems that these two objects were especially sacred to this Aphrodite-esque goddess since many of these objects, or terracotta replicas, were found in late Minoan tombs.

The idea that Aphrodite was simply a representation of carnal lust is the product of much later representations of her. In fact, the representation of Aphrodite as nude and sensual in art lost favor amongst Greek artists in the 7th century BCE and only gained popularity again during the Roman period.[42] In the meantime, she was always represented with the finest clothing, and she was most commonly associated with necklaces and long, brightly colored robes such as the one in which she appeared to Anchises.

Hesiod’s comments, though certainly a product of a mindset that stretches back millennia, are undoubtedly misogynistic since he says that Philotes and Apate belong to Aphrodite and all women. This point of view is hardly surprising; after all, it was Hesiod who first documented the myth of Pandora, she who unleashed all evil on the world. In fact, prior to the creation of “woman”, humans did not know death. So, on the advent of woman’s entrance into the world, Hesiod writes that deceitful words and death accompanied her too.

Using the same terms Homer uses on the battlefield, he wrote that love has the power of breaking or weakening the knees, and that the look of a woman can have the same effect as a javelin that spills forth “life-blood” onto the battlefield. All of these terms employ the same verbs, and even Sappho, who was known to use Homeric language, used them too. In one of her poems, she wrote that Penelope’s suitors’ knees “are loosened under the charm of love,” a Homeric turn of phrase that is more often used to describe the final fall of a felled soldier in battle.

Her weapons, even more successful, are tenderness and charm. No creature in the heavens, on earth, or in the sea can escape the magic powers of the forces she mobilizes: Peithō (persuasion), Apatē (alluring charm), Philotēs (the bonds of love).”