Aphrodite, known to the Roman world as Venus, was the goddess of love.
There are various traditions about her birth: according to one version she was the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Others claim that she was a daughter of Uranus whose sexual organs, thrown into the sea by Cronus, generated the goddess. When Aphrodite appeared she was carried by Zephyr first toward Cythera and then to the coast of Cyprus, where the Horae dressed her before presenting her to the Immortals. Accepted among the gods of Olympus, she became the adopted daughter of Zeus. In another version of the same myth, Aphrodite was born from a shell and rose naked out of the foam of the sea. In his philosophical interpretation of the myths, Plato imagined the existence of two different Aphrodites: Aphrodite Urania, the goddess of pure love, and Aphrodite Pandemia (Popular), the daughter of Dione and the goddess of ordinary love.
Various groups of legends arose from that of Aphrodite in which she played a leading or secondary role, though they were not consistent with one another. She became the wife of Hephaestus, but loved Ares and had affairs with other gods, including Dionysus, Hermes, and Poseidon. She did not disdain giving herself to ordinary mortals like Anchises and Adonis. Numerous children were born from these unions: to Ares she bore Harmonia, Phobos (Fright) and Deimos (Fear), Eros and Anteros; Dionysus fathered Priapus, Hermes, Hermaphroditus, and Anchises was father of Aeneas.
Wherever Aphrodite appeared, love was kindled. She even had this effect in effigy, as Pygmalion discovered. The scorning of love moved her to anger and famous curses. She punished the women of Lemnos, who did not worship her, by afflicting them with an unpleasant odor that prompted their husbands to seek solace in the arms of Thracian prisoners. The women of Lemnos then killed all the men on the island and created a society made solely of women, until the Argonauts arrived to correct the situation. Even her favor was dangerous, as the Trojans discovered when Paris, awarding her the palm of beauty, earned them the enmity of Hera and Athena, deities of much greater power and vindictiveness than the goddess of love. Yet Aphrodite, though she could not save Paris or Troy, managed to preserve the Trojan race by helping Aeneas to take the Penates to Italy. This is why she was venerated as Mother Venus in Rome.
The cult of the goddess of love undoubtedly grew out of a pre-Greek foundation. In particular, the tradition of her birth and her power over the hearts of men can be linked to Oriental myths and to deities like Ashtoreth or Ishtar, known in the West as Astarte-linked linguistically with the name Aphrodite. The many versions of the legend of her birth and the fact that she is sometimes placed among the daughters of Uranus, those of Cronus, or among the Oceanids, the Moerae, and the Erinyes, are further testimonies to the antiquity of her cult, in which several different myths are bound together by the theme of fertility and love.