Aphrodite Greek Goddess Quotes

Aeneas' mother is a star?" "No; a goddess." I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus." He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. "So do we, he said. "But Venus also became more...With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite...There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light..." It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy.

The others want to coerce her. I want her to want me... so he prayed to Aphrodite, goddess of love.

Aphrodite (‘foam-born’) is the same wide-ruling goddess who rose from Chaos and danced on the sea,

Poseidon was also the father of Percy (Perseus) in the Percy Jackson series

The moon’s three phases of new, full, and old recalled the matriarch’s three phases of maiden, nymph (nubile woman), and crone. Then, since the sun’s annual course similarly recalled the rise and decline of her physical powers – spring a maiden, summer a nymph, winter a crone – the goddess became identified with seasonal changes in animal and plant life; and thus with Mother Earth who, at the beginning of the vegetative year, produces only leaves and buds, then flowers and fruits, and at last ceases to bear. She could later be conceived as yet another triad: the maiden of the upper air, the nymph of the earth or sea, the crone of the underworld – typified respectively by Selene, Aphrodite, and Hecate. These mystical analogues fostered the sacredness of the number three, and the Moon-goddess became enlarged to nine when each of the three persons – maiden, nymph, and crone – appeared in triad to demonstrate her divinity. Her devotees never quite forgot that there were not three goddesses, but one goddess; though, by Classical times, Arcadian Stymphalus was one of the few remaining shrines where they all bore the same name: Hera.

Here’s the thing about true love. If there are seven billion people on the planet, there are seven billion different ways to see it. There is no such thing as the most beautiful woman in the world. What looks like love for one person doesn’t for another. Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, could become any woman because any woman could be the most beautiful woman in the world to someone. I’ve always loved that about Aphrodite. Even though she'd picked her favourite, she knew that every face was worthy of adoration.

Aphrodite is still outside the ranks of the Olympian deities, and continued to be so, as far as this story is concerned, even after she was received amongst them. One reason why she remained aloof from Olympus was her great sphere of dominion elsewhere: as, for the same reason, did Hekate, to whom she becomes closely similar when she is found, under the name of Aphrodite Zerynthia on the Thracian coast, or of Genetyllis on the Attic coast, receiving sacrifices of dogs. For the Athenians she was “the oldest Moira”.{162} Elsewhere, too, she was thought to resemble the Moirai and the Erinyes, in being, like them, a daughter of Kronos.{163} On the other hand, the tale of her being directly begotten by Ouranos connected our great love-goddess for all time with the sea. For us she was the Anadyomene, the goddess who “emerges” from the salt waves; and she also had the additional name of Pelagia, “she of the sea”.

Hera said that Hephaestus was the one who made the lovely chariots for Zeus, Poseidon & Hades. Also the one for Helios, the Sun God. And if she married him, he might make one for her too. But she did not tell the young Goddess of Love why none of the Goddesses wanted to marry him in the first instance & that he was ugly & a cripple. She also omitted to tell her that Hephaestus, having created the first woman, Pandora, from clay, had neither the patience nor the inclination to woo & pamper women, let alone put up with the changing moods of the young lovely Goddesses at Olympus. And that even the warlike & down-to-earth Athena had dropped him like a ton of bricks. As Aphrodite did not appear to have any choices, she nodded her head & thus accepted Hera as her future mother-in-law. And this explains one of the greatest mysteries in Greek Mythology: why the loveliest & most beautiful of the Goddesses would agree to marry the ugliest of the Gods. For this mismatch would not have happened if not for Hera.

April. It teaches us everything. The coldest and nastiest days of the year can happen in April. It won’t matter. It’s April. The English word for the month comes from the Roman Aprilis, the Latin aperire: to open, to uncover, to make accessible, or to remove whatever stops something from being accessible. It maybe also partly comes from the name of Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love, whose happy fickleness with various gods mirrors the month’s own showery-sunny fickleness. Month of sacrifice and month of playfulness. Month of restoration, of fertility-festivity. Month when the earth and the buds are already open, the creatures asleep for the winter have woken and are already breeding, the birds have already built their nests, birds that this time last year didn’t exist, busy bringing to life the birds that’ll replace them this time next year. Spring-cuckoo month, grass-month. In Gaelic its name means the month that fools mistake for May. April Fool’s Day also probably marks what was the old end of the new year celebrations. Winter has Epiphany. Spring’s gifts are different. Month of dead deities coming back to life. In the French revolutionary calendar, along with the last days of March, it becomes Germinal, the month of return to the source, to the seed, to the germ of things, which is maybe why Zola gave the novel he wrote about hopeless hope this revolutionary title. April the anarchic, the final month, of spring the great connective.

The problem is that we who are badly wounded in our relation to the feminine usually have a fairly successful persona, a good public image. We have grown up as docile, often intellectual, daughters of the patriarchy, with what I call ‘animus-egos.’ We strive to keep up the virtues and aesthetic ideals which the patriarchal superego has presented to us. But we are filled with self-loathing and a deep sense of personal ugliness and failure when we can neither meet nor mitigate the superego’s standards of perfection. But we also feel unseen because there are no images alive to reflect our wholeness and variety. But where shall we look for symbols to suggest the full mystery and potency of the feminine and to provide images as models for personal life. The later Greek goddesses and Mary, Virgin Mother, and Mediator, have not struck me to the core as have Innana-Ereshkigal, Kali, and Isis. An image for the goddess as Self needs to have a full-bodied coherence. So I have had to see the female Greek deities as partial aspects of one wholeness pattern and to look always for the darker powers hidden i their stories—the gorgon aspect of Athena, the underworld Aphrodite-Urania, the Black Demeter, etc. Even in the tales of Inanna and other early Sumerian, Semitic, and Egyptian writings there is evidence that the original potencies of the feminine have been ‘demoted.' As Kramer tells us, the goddesses ‘that held top rank in the Sumerian pantheon were gradually forced down the ladder by male theologians’ and ‘their powers turned over to male deities. This permitted cerebral-intellectual-Apollonian, left brain consciousness, with its ethical and conceptual discriminations, to be born and to grow.

Gods in The Lost Hero Aeolus The Greek god of the winds. Roman form: Aeolus Aphrodite The Greek goddess of love and beauty. She was married to Hephaestus, but she loved Ares, the god of war. Roman form: Venus Apollo The Greek god of the sun, prophecy, music, and healing; the son of Zeus, and the twin of Artemis. Roman form: Apollo Ares The Greek god of war; the son of Zeus and Hera, and half brother to Athena. Roman form: Mars Artemis The Greek goddess of the hunt and the moon; the daughter of Zeus and the twin of Apollo. Roman form: Diana Boreas The Greek god of the north wind, one of the four directional anemoi (wind gods); the god of winter; father of Khione. Roman form: Aquilon Demeter The Greek goddess of agriculture, a daughter of the Titans Rhea and Kronos. Roman form: Ceres Dionysus The Greek god of wine; the son of Zeus. Roman form: Bacchus Gaea The Greek personification of Earth. Roman form: Terra Hades According to Greek mythology, ruler of the Underworld and god of the dead. Roman form: Pluto Hecate The Greek goddess of magic; the only child of the Titans Perses and Asteria. Roman form: Trivia Hephaestus The Greek god of fire and crafts and of blacksmiths; the son of Zeus and Hera, and married to Aphrodite. Roman form: Vulcan Hera The Greek goddess of marriage; Zeus’s wife and sister. Roman form: Juno Hermes The Greek god of travelers, communication, and thieves; son of Zeus. Roman form: Mercury Hypnos The Greek god of sleep; the (fatherless) son of Nyx (Night) and brother of Thanatos (Death). Roman form: Somnus Iris The Greek goddess of the rainbow, and a messenger of the gods; the daughter of Thaumas and Electra. Roman form: Iris Janus The Roman god of gates, doors, and doorways, as well as beginnings and endings. Khione The Greek goddess of snow; daughter of Boreas Notus The Greek god of the south wind, one of the four directional anemoi (wind gods). Roman form: Favonius Ouranos The Greek personification of the sky. Roman form: Uranus Pan The Greek god of the wild; the son of Hermes. Roman form: Faunus Pompona The Roman goddess of plenty Poseidon The Greek god of the sea; son of the Titans Kronos and Rhea, and brother of Zeus and Hades. Roman form: Neptune Zeus The Greek god of the sky and king of the gods. Roman form: Jupiter

Certainly, we can no longer look upon the canon of Western art - Greco-Roman as revived, extended, and graced by the Renaissance - as -the- tradition in art, or even any longer as distinctly and uniquely -ours-. That canon is in fact only one tradition among many, and indeed in its strict adherence to representational form is rather the exception in the whole gallery of -human- art. Such an extension of the resources of the past, for the modern artist, implies a different and more comprehensive understanding of the term "human" itself: a Sumerian figure of a fertility goddess is as "human" to us as a Greek Aphrodite. When the sensibility of an age can accommodate the alien "inhuman" forms of primitive art side by side with the classic "human" figures of Greece or the Renaissance, it should be obvious that the attitude toward man that we call classical humanism - which is the intellectual expression of the spirit that informs the classical canon of Western art - has also gone by the boards.

Havna ye heard how the ancient Greeks associated sparrows with Aphrodite, the goddess of love?"... "Och, 'tis no story. 'Tis the truth I give: When sparrows mated, it was due to their abandoned nature." His head inclined so he could whisper a kiss to her neck, sending shivers from her shoulders to the soles of her feet. "Even Chaucer and Shakespeare wrote about the sparrow's lustful conduct.

The Titanomachy symbolizes the victory of Order over Chaos.” - Niall Livingstone[3] “the Greek word Mythos can indicate, amongst other things, a public utterance expressing the authority of its speaker.”[4] In fact, by the Classical Period, myths were principally instructive, hence Plato’s dim view of these stories being in the hands of anyone but philosophers. Myths helped crystallize beliefs and fashion a means of observing and categorizing patterns in daily life. According to Hesiod, the "Pre-World" was populated by personifications;[5] he painted the picture of the primordial geography of his worldview by dramatizing the personification of those elements he considered primal. This is a perfectly arbitrary folkloric trope, but in the case of the ancient Greeks, the antagonism was infused with strains of uncomfortable duality. Hesiod’s intention was to glorify Zeus, but in doing so, he created a melodrama that would last the ages.

The "Chasm" mentioned by Hesiod is a synonym for the ancient Greek word for Chaos, and "Earth" is the mighty mother-goddess Gaia, in whom was located the hellish Tartara (or Tartarus), where the Titans would ultimately meet their fate. Interestingly, Hesiod also places Eros, the embodiment of erotic love, at the conception of the cosmos too, thus providing the ancient Greek readers with a foundation for procreation and the lasciviousness of all deities. As a result, the act of creation begins with Chaos, Gaia (Mother Earth), and Eros (Erotic love), but these are no quaint grandparental figures or benign personifications. Chaos was capable of "giving birth" to the most macabre, inherently bleak, and "chaotic" elements of the world, without the need for a reproductive partner.

The following, then, were the daughters of Nereus:{157} Ploto, “the swimmer”; Eukrante, “the bringer of fulfilment”; Sao, “the rescuer”; Amphitrite (who, as I shall later tell, became the wife of Poseidon); Eudora, “she of good gifts”; Thetis (of whom I have spoken and shall speak again); Galene, “calm weather”; Glauke, “the sea-green”; Kymothoe, “the wave-swift”; Speio, “the dweller in caves”; Thoe, “the nimble”; Halia, “the dweller in the sea”; Pasithea; Erato, “the awakener of desire” (which is the name also of one of the Muses); Eunike, “she of happy victory”; Melite; Eulimene, “she of good haven”; Agaue, “the noble”; Doto, “the giver”; Proto, “the first”; Pherousa, “the bringer”; Dynamene; Nesaia, “the dweller on islands”; Aktaia, “the dweller on coasts”; Protomedeia, “the first ruleress”; Doris (who, like Eudora, whose name has the same meaning, is also one of the Okeaninai); Panopeia; Galateia (that Aphrodite-like sea-goddess who was wooed by the Kyklops Polyphemos—the enemy, later on, of Odysseus—and was loved by the beautiful Akis); Hippothoe, “swift as a mare”; Hipponoe, “unruly as a mare”; Kymodoke, “the wave-gatherer”; Kymatolege, “the wave-stiller”; Kymo, “the wave-goddess”; Eione, “the snore-goddess”; Halimede, “the sea-goddess of good counsel”; Glaukonome, “the dweller in the green sea”; Pontopereia, “the seafarer”; Leiagora and Euagora, “the eloquent”; Laomedeia, “ruleress of the people”; Polynoe, “giver of reason”; Autonoe, “giver of inspiration”; Lysianassa, “the redeeming mistress”; Euarne; Psamathe, “the sand-goddess”; Menippe, “the courageous mare”; Neso, “the island-goddess”; Eupompe, “she of good escort”; Themisto (a sort of double of the great goddess Themis); Pronoe, “the provident”; and Nemertes, “the truthful”, who in knowing and telling the truth resembles her immortal father.

Another aspect of Aphrodite, with which the buck also must have had something to do, is expressed in such surnames as Melaina and Melainis, “the black one”, and Skotia “the dark one”. In so far as this refers to the darkness that love seeks, this aspect is connected with the aspect already described. But the black Aphrodite can equally well be associated with the Erinyes, amongst whom she was also numbered. Such surnames as Androphonos, “Killer of Men”, Anosia, “the Unholy” and Tymborychos, “the Gravedigger”, indicate her sinister and dangerous potentialities. As Epitymbidia she is actually “she upon the graves”. Under the name of Persephaessa she is invoked as the Queen of the Underworld. She bears the title of Basilis, “Queen”. Her surname of Pasiphaessa, “the far-shining”, associates her also with the moon-goddess. All these characteristics are evidence that at one time there were tales which identified the goddess of love with the goddess of death, as a being comparable to the Venus Libitina of the Romans.

The idea that Aphrodite was simply a representation of carnal lust is the product of much later representations of her. In fact, the representation of Aphrodite as nude and sensual in art lost favor amongst Greek artists in the 7th century BCE and only gained popularity again during the Roman period.[42] In the meantime, she was always represented with the finest clothing, and she was most commonly associated with necklaces and long, brightly colored robes such as the one in which she appeared to Anchises.

After he cut off their genitals, Chronos threw them into the sea, where they floated in a "white foam." Out of this foam‒or "Aphros” in ancient Greek‒sprang forth the first goddess. Just as Eros had been present at the establishment of the first power system, Aphrodite, the more elaborate representative of love and desire, would be present to usher in the next.

Aphrodite and Eros brought love and passion to the cosmos, and thanks to them, the Titans and the Gods came together and populated the world. Seeing that she was without a husband, however, Zeus betrothed her to the lame smith god Hephaestus, who fell in love with her deeply at first sight of her loveliness. But laughter-loving Aphrodite found Hephaestus repugnant, and she turned her gaze to the other gods in search of a more fitting mate.

Though she is the goddess of love, Aphrodite’s part in bringing about the Trojan War cannot be overstated, and it was at the wedding of Thetis and Peleus where the dreaded die was cast.

Paris had heard of Helen of Sparta’s beauty, and though she was married to the warlike Menelaus, he immediately consented to awarding Aphrodite the apple. “Discord” was brought to the Mediterranean. 10 years later, the world was still feeling the effects of Aphrodite’s actions and Menelaus’s response. The Greeks and Trojans had been well matched, and the Greeks just could not bring down the magnificent walls of Troy. Then Agamemnon’s insult to Achilles tipped the balance in favour of the Trojans, and the gods found themselves embroiled in the mire too. Hera and Athena, still furious at Paris’s decision, chose to side with the Greeks, whereas Aphrodite sided with Paris’s countrymen.

Should I also be glad of our unwanted guest?" "Unwanted?" Her eyes widened as her voice rose. "She's the goddess of love, fertility, beauty, and desire. Who could be more perfect for a wedding? Although..." She tapped her lush lips, considering. "She does have a bad side, but you can't blame her. Who wouldn't have issues if you'd been born from the sea foam created from Uranus's blood after his youngest son, Cronus, castrated him and threw his genitals into the sea?" The woman in pink choked on her food. The man with the goatee barked a laugh. Jay crossed his legs, although his family jewels weren't under threat. "She also had many adulterous affairs," Zara continued to her now rapt audience of singles. "Most notable with Ares. So maybe cutting off her head is a good thing." She lifted a forkful of biryani. "Did you know her name gave us the word aphrodisiac? Or that her Latin name, Venus, gave us the word venereal for venereal dis----" Jay cut her off with a raised hand. "Not something I really wanted to think about over a meal.

Later in the day, Holly frowned at her reflection in the mirror. “This can’t be right!” Holly muttered to herself. She looked like a cross between a panda bear and a raccoon. She had tried to apply a more advanced version of makeup than she was used to, and it was not going well. “Smokey eye, my foot! I look like I have two black eyes.” She had not done the proper shading with her eye shadow, and now her large green eyes were encased with a deep black color that spanned her entire eyelid. “Maybe I should try a different one,” Holly mused aloud. She sat in William’s bedroom at his dresser. She already had on her pretty crushed velvet black dress and a small heart-shaped diamond pendant. It had been William’s birthday gift to her last year. “Let me re-read this article again to see if I can make sense of these instructions.” Holly read her magazine article out loud. “Which Greek Goddess are you? Athena, Venus, or Aphrodite? Check out our makeup tips below to turn heads at your next event!” “Hmmmm, that sounds soooooo good, if only I was better at applying makeup.” She had decided to try their Aphrodite look and had been trying to apply the eyeliner to give her a smoky eye effect. Holly had to wash her face four times already and start over because each time was worse than the last. “Concentrate, Holly, or you’ll be late for the gala. This is your last chance; it’s do or die time!” she warned her reflection in the mirror. “So, it says to put the light grey eyeshadow on the inner one-third of my eyelids. Hmmm, maybe that’s the problem. I don’t know where the inner third is.” She got an idea and went to William’s desk. Looking around, she found a ruler. “Ah-ha! Eureka, I got it!” She went back to her position at his dresser and closed her eyes for a quick, small prayer, then held the ruler up to measure her eye. “Ah-ha! Twenty-one millimeters. So, that means the inner one-third of my eye must be from my nose out seven millimeters . . . right about HERE!” Holly expertly applied the light grey eye shadow to the inner third of her eyelids. “What a big improvement already! Wow! I’m not a panda bear anymore! Ok, one-third down, two-thirds to go . . . I can do this!” Reading further, she said, “Ok, now apply the dark grey eye shadow to the next third of your eye, finishing with the dark brown eye shadow on the outer third of your eyelid.” Holly expertly followed the instructions and sat back in her chair, stunned. She looked beautiful! She had achieved the desired effect, and now her green eyes were enhanced to perfection. “Wow, wow, wow!” Holly felt encouraged to keep going. She read the next instructions. “‘Now, apply blush to your face with an emphasis on contouring your cheekbones.’” “‘Contouring my cheekbones? Who do they think I am, Rembrandt?” Holly said with a groan. Holly gingerly picked up her blush container as if it were about to bite her. She decided another quick prayer wouldn’t go amiss. With a deep breath she muttered, “Ok, I’m going in!” She glanced nervously at the picture in the magazine and tried her hardest to follow it along her cheekbones. “That turned out pretty good!” Holly turned her face this way and that, examining it. It may not have been exactly as in the picture, but the blush now accentuated her beautiful high cheekbones. “Whew! Only the lip left, thank goodness! You got this, Holly!” She encouraged her reflection in the mirror.

It is important to note in this respect that Venus, or in her Greek form, Aphrodite, is not a fertility goddess at all, such as are Ceres and Persephone; she is the goddess of love. Now in the Greek concept of life, Love embraced much more than the relationship between the sexes, it included the comradeship of fighting men and the relationship of teacher and pupil. The Greek hetaira, or woman whose profession is love, was something very different to our modern prostitute...In the temples of Aphrodite the art of love was sedulously cultivated, and the priestesses were trained from childhood in its skill. But this art was not simply that of provoking passion, but of adequately satisfying it on all levels of consciousness; not simply by the gratification of the physical sensations of the body, but by the subtle etheric exchange of magnetism and intellectual and spiritual polarisation. This lifted the cult of Aphrodite out of the sphere of simple sensuality, and explains why the priestesses of the cult commanded respect and were by no means looked upon as common prostitutes, although they received all comers. They were engaged in ministering to certain of the subtler needs of the human soul by means of their skilled arts. We have brought to a higher pitch of development than was ever known to the Greeks the art of stimulating desire with film and revue and syncopation, but we have no knowledge of the far more important art of meeting the needs of the human soul for etheric and mental interchange of magnetism, and it is for this reason that our sex life, both physiologically and socially, is so unstable and unsatisfactory. We cannot understand sex aright unless we realise that it is one aspect of what the esotericist calls polarity, and that this is a principle that runs through the whole of creation, and is, in fact, the basis of manifestation.

April was devoted to Venus and Ovid at once invokes this goddess in the fourth book of the Fasti. Aprilis may even have emerged from the Etruscan Aphru, which transcribes the Greek name Aphrodite

Aphrodite embodies sexuality free of ambivalence, anxieties and self-consciousness, a sexuality so natural and quintessential to her that no myth deals with her virginity or its loss.

The gods had some very strange ways of making mortals immortal or invulnerable.

Women had no power without a husband or father—a woman living in exile had nothing.

Banish play and laughter from the bed of love and you may let in a false goddess. She will be even falser than the Aphrodite of the Greeks; for they, even while they worshipped her, knew that she was "laughter-loving." The mass of the people are perfectly right in their conviction that Venus is a partly comic spirit. We are under no obligation at all to sing all our love-duets in the throbbing, world-without-end, heart-breaking manner of Tristan and Isolde; let us often sing like Papageno and Papagena instead.

Hesiod’s comments, though certainly a product of a mindset that stretches back millennia, are undoubtedly misogynistic since he says that Philotes and Apate belong to Aphrodite and all women. This point of view is hardly surprising; after all, it was Hesiod who first documented the myth of Pandora, she who unleashed all evil on the world. In fact, prior to the creation of “woman”, humans did not know death. So, on the advent of woman’s entrance into the world, Hesiod writes that deceitful words and death accompanied her too.[49]

Using the same terms Homer uses on the battlefield, he wrote that love has the power of breaking or weakening the knees, and that the look of a woman can have the same effect as a javelin that spills forth “life-blood” onto the battlefield. All of these terms employ the same verbs, and even Sappho, who was known to use Homeric language, used them too. In one of her poems, she wrote that Penelope’s suitors’ knees “are loosened under the charm of love,” a Homeric turn of phrase that is more often used to describe the final fall of a felled soldier in battle.[52]

Her weapons, even more successful, are tenderness and charm. No creature in the heavens, on earth, or in the sea can escape the magic powers of the forces she mobilizes: Peithō (persuasion), Apatē (alluring charm), Philotēs (the bonds of love).”[55]

According to Liddell & Scott’s Greek lexicon, the verb form “Aphrodisiazo” relates to both the act of sexual intercourse and also the act of “indulging in lust”. This would suggest a relative consistency with her name and her later character from her earliest appearances in the Greek language. Her

From there they marched against Egypt: and when they were in the part of Syria called Palestine, Psammetichus king of Egypt met them and persuaded them with gifts and prayers to come no further. So they turned back, and when they came on their way to the city of Ascalon in Syria, most of the Scythians passed by and did no harm, but a few remained behind and plundered the temple of Heavenly Aphrodite. This temple, I discover from making inquiry, is the oldest of all the temples of the goddess, for the temple in Cyprus was founded from it, as the Cyprians themselves say; and the temple on Cythera was founded by Phoenicians from this same land of Syria.”[27] The idea that Aphrodite was originally an Eastern goddess appropriated by the ancient Greeks at the onset of their great cultural revolutions of the Archaic Period (ca. 8th century BCE) is one that has been corroborated by modern and ancient historians alike.

Here Herodotus can be of some help again. “As to the customs of the Persians, I know them to be these. It is not their custom to make and set up statues and temples and altars, but those who do such things they think foolish, because, I suppose, they have never believed the gods to be like men, as the Greeks do; but they call the whole circuit of heaven Zeus, and to him they sacrifice on the highest peaks of the mountains; they sacrifice also to the sun and moon and earth and fire and water and winds. From the beginning, these are the only gods to whom they have ever sacrificed; they learned later to sacrifice to the ‘heavenly’ Aphrodite from the Assyrians and Arabians. She is called by the Assyrians Mylitta, by the Arabians Alilat, by the Persians Mitra.”[28]

but most scholars today believe that ancient Greek worship of her is most closely tied to the ancient Phoenician goddess of love Ishtar-Astarte. Again this ties in with Herodotus’s claims that the “oldest temple” to Aphrodite was in Syria, the home of the Phoenicians, and the character of Ishtar-Astarte corroborates this claim further. Ishtar-Astarte was not only the Phoenician goddess of love, but she was also the “Queen of Heaven”.