Aphrodite – talk about a difficult birth. Her father the Sky (Ouranos) had come to resent the fertility of his wife/mother the Earth (Gaia). They’d had 18 children already – a gamesome brood that included Titans, Cyclopes, and the 100-handed Hecatoncheires. The last of these were so hateful that Ouranos convinced himself that he would be murdered by one of them and usurped as ruler on high.

Ouranos’s way of coping with his complex was to keep on having sex with his wife so as to hole up his offspring in the birth canal. Gaia urged her sons to save her, but only Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, was brave enough. While his father was still at it, Kronos went in and lopped off his genitals with a sickle. The divine bits plopped into the sea, and from the resulting froth emerged the goddess – beautiful, fully formed and, for a time, impervious to her family’s dire dysfunctionality. 

The ‘Capitoline Venus’ was so realistic a man ejaculated over it in the 4th century BC

The ‘Capitoline Venus’ was so realistic a man ejaculated over it in the 4th century BC

It was popularly believed that Aphrodite was named after that amniotic sea foam – aphros in Greek – but the debated etymology has also been linked to the Hebrew-Phoenician  Ashtoreth, which the Greeks rendered as Astarte. Astarte was the name of Aphrodite’s forebear, an ancient Near Eastern deity who, like her associated goddesses Inanna and Ishtar, served as patroness of beauty, sex and war. 

Astarte was sometimes worshipped as a Queen of Heaven; a beautiful double-statuette survives from the 2nd century showing a grey marble Aphrodite Ourania (‘Of the Heavens’) dressed in a star-spangled gown, alongside a more plainly dressed white Aphrodite Pandemos (‘Of all the people’). The sculpture comes from Cyprus, Aphrodite’s island. Having bobbed up on the sea, the goddess was said to have floated towards Kythera before arriving in Paphos – she would for ever be associated with seafaring as well as love. 

She stepped ashore gracefully, tentatively, as though treading ice. A number of enigmatic sculptures survive showing her placing one........

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