How was Aphrodite born?

Hesiod: born from the foam

Hesiod, around 700 BC, puts her birth at the very start of the gods’ family history. Kronos attacks his father, Sky, with a sickle, and what he cuts away is thrown into the sea. It drifts for a long time, and a white foam spreads around it:

and in it there grew a maiden. First she drew near holy Cythera, and from there, afterwards, she came to sea-girt Cyprus, and came forth an awful and lovely goddess, and grass grew up about her beneath her shapely feet.

“Awful” here means awe-inspiring. Hesiod then explains her names. Gods and men call her Aphrodite because she grew in the foam, aphros in Greek; Cytherea because she reached Cythera, an island off the southern Peloponnese; and Cyprogenes, Cyprus-born (Theogony 195–199). Eros and Desire go with her from the start, and her share of honor among gods and mortals is “the whisperings of maidens and smiles and deceits with sweet delight and love and graciousness” (203–206).

That makes Hesiod’s Aphrodite older than Zeus. She belongs to the first generation of powers, born before Kronos ever swallowed a child.

Homer: a daughter of Zeus

Homer tells a family story instead. In the fifth book of the Iliad, Aphrodite is wounded on the battlefield while carrying her son Aeneas, the hero of Rome’s founding legend, out of danger, and she escapes to Olympus. Samuel Butler’s translation calls her by her Roman name:

Venus flung herself on to the lap of her mother Dione, who threw her arms about her and caressed her

Her father Zeus then tells her, kindly, to leave the fighting to others and attend to marriage (Iliad 5.426–430). For Homer she is simply one of Zeus’s children, younger than her father.

The poets disagree

Greeks kept both stories, and some tried to reconcile them. In Plato’s Symposium, one speaker argues that there are two Aphrodites: a Heavenly one, Urania, the motherless daughter of Uranus, and a Common one, Pandemos, the daughter of Zeus and Dione (180d–e).

The short sixth Homeric Hymn sides with the sea. It sings how “the moist breath of the western wind wafted her over the waves of the loud-moaning sea in soft foam” to Cyprus, where the Hours welcomed her, dressed her in gold and brought her to the gods (Hymn 6.3–18).

Cyprus, her name and a painting

Cyprus was her island. Her great sanctuary stood at Paphos, and a sea rock off that coast, Petra tou Romiou, is still pointed out as the spot where she came ashore. Hesiod’s link between Aphrodite and aphros is a poet’s etymology. Many scholars suspect the name is older than the story and perhaps came from the East, where goddesses such as Astarte had much in common with her. No one knows for certain.

Painters followed Hesiod and the Hymn. Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, in the Uffizi in Florence, shows the west wind blowing her to shore and a figure usually identified as one of the Hours waiting with a cloak. The shell under her feet is in neither poem; Roman artists had already set her in one. Her later adventures include a golden apple and a contest of beauty: the apple of discord.