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Aphrodite: Gods
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In ancient Greece, especially in Sparta, Aphrodite was worshipped as a warrior, as attested by the epithet Areia. As Graz has pointed out, this cult was considered strange by the Greeks themselves: "The armed Aphrodite of Sparta challenged the wits of Hellenistic epigrammists and Roman students of rhetoric: for both, she was a puzzling paradox."72 Yet the Spartan cult finds a parallel on the island of Cythera, where Aphrodite Urania was represented as armed. And this cult, it will be remembered, was esteemed the oldest cult of the goddess. Farnell's conclusion seems perfectly warranted: "We may believe that the cult of the armed Aphrodite belongs to the first period of her worship in Greece."73
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* Aphrodite caused the Kyprian princess Myrrha fall in love with her own father, as punishment for her mother's boast that the girl was more beautiful than the goddess. Later Aphrodite, pitying the girl's fate, transformed her into a myrtle tree.
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Aphrodite was very beautiful, which made Zeus, the god of the gods, afraid that she would be the cause of fights between the other gods. He therefore married Aphrodite to Hephaestus. Hephastus was happy to be married to Aphrodite and made her lots of jewelry. Aphrodite... failed to reciprocate, and went looking for other men. She spent most of her time with Ares, but was also linked with Adonis and Anchises.
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In ancient art Aphrodite was at first represented clothed, sometimes seated, but more frequently standing; then naked, rising from the sea, or after the bath. Finally, all idea of the divine vanished, and the artists merely presented her as the type of a beautiful woman, with oval face, full of grace and charm, languishing eyes, and laughing mouth, which replaced the dignified severity and repose of the older forms. The most famous of her statues in ancient times was that at Cnidus, the work of Praxiteles, which was imitated on the coins of that town, and subsequently reproduced in various copies, such as the Vatican and Munich. Of existing statues the most famous is the Aphrodite of Melos (Venus of Milo), now in the Louvre, which was found on the island in 1820 amongst the ruins of the theatre; the Capitoline Venus at Rome and the Venus of Capua, represented as a goddess of victory (these two exhibit a lofty conception of the goddess); the Medicean Venus at Florence, found in the porticus of Octavia at Rome and (probably wrongly) attributed to Cleomenes; the Venus stooping in the bath, in the Vatican; and the Callipygos at Naples, a specimen of the most sensual type.
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This myth is set on the island of Cyprus, a place which was especially sacred to Aphrodite, because it was the first place she set foot on land after emerging from the sea. Thus she was especially offended to learn that the women of Cyprus were denying her worship; as punishment, the goddess turned them all into wicked, undesirable prostitutes.
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Graceful and gorgeously seductive, Aphrodite possessed a magic girdle that made Her irresistable to all who saw Her (and which She often lent out to other goddesses such as Hera). She was officially married to Hephaestos, the crippled god of the forge, though Her numerous affairs resulted in numerous children. By Ares she bore Phobos ("Fear") and Deimos ("Terror"); by Hermes, Hermaphrodite; by Dionysos, Priapos; and by Anchises, a mortal, the hero Aeneas.
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