Aphrodite[a] is an ancient Greek goddess associated with love, beauty,
pleasure, passion and procreation. She was syncretized with the Roman
goddess Venus. Aphrodite's major symbols include myrtles, roses,
doves, sparrows, and swans. The cult of Aphrodite was largely derived
from that of the Phoenician goddess Astarte, a cognate of the East
Semitic goddess Ishtar, whose cult was based on the Sumerian cult of
Inanna. Aphrodite's main cult centers were Cythera, Cyprus, Corinth,
and Athens. Her main festival was the Aphrodisia, which was celebrated
annually in midsummer. In Laconia, Aphrodite was worshipped as a
warrior goddess. She was also the patron goddess of prostitutes, an
association which led early scholars to propose the concept of "sacred
prostitution" in Greco-Roman culture, an idea which is now generally
seen as erroneous.In Hesiod's Theogony, Aphrodite is born off the
coast of Cythera from the foam (Î±Ï†Ï ÏŒÏ‚ aphrós) produced by
Uranus's genitals, which his son Cronus has severed and thrown into
the sea. In Homer's Iliad, however, she is the daughter of Zeus and
Dione. Plato, in his Symposium 180e, asserts that these two origins
actually belong to separate entities: Aphrodite Ourania (a
transcendent, "Heavenly" Aphrodite) and Aphrodite Pandemos (Aphrodite
common to "all the people"). Aphrodite had many other epithets, each
emphasizing a different aspect of the same goddess, or used by a
different local cult. Thus she was also known as Cytherea (Lady of
Cythera) and Cypris (Lady of Cyprus), because both locations claimed
to be the place of her birth.
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