THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Aphrodite is the goddess of love and beauty. In Hesiod's Theogony she is born from sea foam: when Cronus castrated his father Uranus with a sickle, the severed flesh fell into the sea and white foam gathered around it, from which the goddess rose, passing Cythera before stepping ashore at Paphos on Cyprus, grass springing up beneath her feet. Homer instead makes her a daughter of Zeus and Dione. Doves, swans, and myrtle are sacred to her, and the embroidered band at her waist kindles desire in gods and mortals alike.
Married to the smith god Hephaestus, she loved Ares; the eighth book of the Odyssey sings of how her husband snared the pair in an invisible net of gold, fine as spider silk, before the laughing assembly of the gods. Her promise of the world's most beautiful woman won her the golden apple over Hera and Athena in the Judgement of Paris, and Paris carried off Helen of Sparta in consequence. Her sanctuary at Paphos on Cyprus received worshippers from the late Bronze Age for over a thousand years, the most famous center of her cult in the ancient Mediterranean.
