Aphrodite

Aphrodite governed love, beauty and sexual desire across the Greek world and, as Venus, across Rome’s. Her oldest and greatest cult sat at Paphos on Cyprus, where the shoreline was held to be the place she rose from the sea-foam; the goddess there was older than the Greeks, worshipped through a conical stone rather than a statue, with roots reaching back to the Near Eastern goddesses Ishtar and Astarte. Corinth was a second major centre. Around 340 BCE Praxiteles gave her the most famous body in antiquity: the Aphrodite of Knidos, the first monumental female nude in Greek sculpture, placed in a circular shrine so visitors could walk around her. Pliny the Elder judged it the finest statue ever made, and copies multiplied through the Roman world. Rome took her further still. Identified with Venus, she became a dynastic claim: on 26 September 46 BCE Julius Caesar dedicated the Temple of Venus Genetrix in his new Forum, honouring her as the mother of Aeneas and the divine ancestress of the Julian family, the line of Caesar and Augustus.

The cult was switched off by imperial law. The sanctuary at Paphos held unbroken worship until 391 CE, when Theodosius I outlawed every pagan religion across the empire; the temple was abandoned and decayed into the ruins that stand today, and the anti-pagan edicts of 391–393 ended public sacrifice to the old gods everywhere. Her image, though, never left. The Aphrodite of Milos — the Venus de Milo, dug up on a Greek island in 1820 and now in the Louvre — is among the most reproduced sculptures in the world, and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus puts her sea-foam arrival on classroom walls and tote bags. The face of love in Western art is still hers. No one prays to her.