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( Aphrodite)
Aphrodite (Greek ?f??d?t?; Latin Venus) (pronounced /?æfr?'da?ti/; Ancient Greek IPA&_160;[ap??o'di?t??], Modern Greek [af?o'ðiti]) is the classical Greek goddess of love, lust, beauty, and sexual reproduction. She was also called Kypris and Cytherea after the two places, Cyprus and Cythera, which claimed her birth. Her Roman equivalent is the goddess Venus. Myrtle, dove, sparrow, and swan are sacred to her. Aphrodite has numerous equivalents&_160; Inanna (Sumerian counterpart), Astarte (Phoenician), Turan (Etruscan), and Venus (Roman). She has parallels to Indo-European dawn goddesses such as Ushas or Aurora. According to Pausanias, the first men to establish her cult were the Assyrians, after the Assyrians the Paphians of Cyprus and the Phoenicians who live at Ascalon in Palestine; the Phoenicians taught her worship to the people of Cythera.[1] It is said Aphrodite could make any man fall in love with her by them just laying eyes on her. The name ?f??d?t? was connected by popular etymology with ?f??? (Aphros) "foam", interpreting it as "risen from the foam" and embodying it in an etiological myth that was already known to Hesiod[2]. It has reflexes in Messapic and Etruscan (whence April), which were probably borrowed from Greek. Though Herodotus was aware of the Phoenician origins of Aphrodite,[3] linguistic attempts to derive the name Aphrodite from Semitic Aštoret, via undocumented Hittite transmission, remain inconclusive. A suggestion by Hammarström[4], rejected by Hjalmar Frisk, connects the name with p??ta???, a loan into Greek from a cognate of Etruscan (e)pruni, "lord" or similar. An etymology from Indo-European abhor "very" + dhei "to shine" is offered by Mallory and Adams.[5]. The epithet Aphrodite Acidalia was occasionally added to her name, after the spring she used to bathe in, located in Boeotia (Virgil I, 720). She was also called Kypris or Cytherea after her alleged birth-places in Cyprus and Cythera, respectively. The island of Cythera was a center of her cult. She was associated with Hesperia and frequently accompanied by the Oreads, nymphs of the mountains. Aphrodite had a festival of her own, the Aphrodisiac (also referred to as Aphrodisia), which was celebrated all over Greece but particularly in Athens and Corinth. At the temple of Aphrodite on the summit of Acrocorinth (before the Roman destruction of the city in 146 BC) intercourse with her priestesses was considered a method of worshiping Aphrodite. This temple was not rebuilt when the city was reestablished under Roman rule in 44 BC, but it is likely that the fertility rituals continued in the main city near the agora.
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