Aphrodite between Hesiod and Homer: the goddess born of the sea foam

No Greek goddess had as many homelands as Aphrodite. Cyprus and Cythera competed for the honour of having welcomed her first, Corinth and Cnidus kept famous sanctuaries of hers, and the poets offered different versions even of her birth. Following these versions means entering the very workshop of Greek myth, where older and newer stories lived side by side without cancelling each other out, and where a deity could be at once a cosmic force, a mistress of desire and the heroine of tales close to comedy.

The birth from the foam according to Hesiod

The most famous version is found in Hesiod's Theogony, probably composed between the eighth and seventh centuries BC. The poet tells how Cronus, urged on by his mother Gaia, mutilated his father Uranus with a sickle and threw his genitals into the sea. Around them a white foam formed, aphros in Greek, and from that foam a maiden grew. Hesiod links the name Aphrodite to this foam, following an ancient etymology that modern linguists do not consider reliable but which enjoyed enormous success.

Again according to the Theogony, the goddess first touched the island of Cythera and then came ashore on Cyprus, where grass sprang up beneath her feet. From this come two of her most common epithets, Cytherea and Cypris. Eros and Himeros, desire, joined her retinue at once, and she was given as her domain the whispers of maidens, smiles, deceptions, pleasure and the sweetness of lovers' union.

The daughter of Zeus in the Homeric poems

Homer knows another genealogy. In the Iliad Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and Dione, and she behaves as an Olympian fully integrated into the family of the gods. In the fifth book she comes down to the battlefield to save her son Aeneas and is wounded in the hand by the hero Diomedes; she then returns weeping to her mother, and Zeus reminds her with a smile that the works of war are not her business. It is an ironic portrait, which places her power on a ground other than strength.

In the Odyssey, in the eighth book, the bard Demodocus tells the Phaeacians of the secret love between Aphrodite and Ares. The betrayed husband, Hephaestus, forges an invisible net, traps the two lovers in bed and calls the gods to look. The episode, which provokes the famous unquenchable laughter of the immortals, shows how well the Greeks could tell light-hearted stories even about the most feared deities.

Paphos and the eastern roots

The most revered place of worship was Paphos, on the south-western coast of Cyprus, where the goddess's sanctuary was visited for more than a thousand years. Here Aphrodite was not represented by a statue in human form: the Roman historian Tacitus, in his Histories, describes a conical stone image that was the object of great veneration. A stone of this kind, believed to belong to the sanctuary, is now displayed in the museum at Kouklia, the village that grew up on the site of ancient Paphos.

Many scholars believe that the figure of Aphrodite absorbed features of Near Eastern deities such as Astarte and Ishtar, known on Cyprus through contact with the Phoenicians. Herodotus already reported that the oldest sanctuary of Aphrodite Urania stood at Ascalon, on the Syro-Palestinian coast, and that the cults of Cyprus and Cythera derived from it. The debate on her origins remains open, but the idea of a goddess born between different worlds suits the position of Cyprus well, a crossroads of the eastern Mediterranean.

In the fourth century BC Praxiteles carved for Cnidus a statue of the goddess naked, the first of its kind in major Greek sculpture according to ancient tradition; Pliny the Elder judged it the finest work not only of the artist but of the whole world. Since then the image of Aphrodite has never stopped changing, passing from Roman copies to Botticelli's Birth of Venus, but the stories of Hesiod and Homer remain the starting point for understanding her.