WINTER. | SUMMER. | |
End pieces of the Ludovisi relief. | ||
In Cnidos Aphrodite was worshiped in three forms: as gift-giver (δωρῑτις), as goddess of the high places (ἀκραία) and as the lucky sailor (εὔπλοια), and we learn that bloody sacrifices were not permitted (Tac., Hist., II, 3), even on the main altar in Paphos.
Originally, Aphrodite was not only love, grace and beauty, but the mistress, the lady, the queen; and so she is represented in Cythera as fully armed. The same is true in Sparta and in Corinth where her temple was erected on the highest place of the city, called Acrocorinthus.
The sensual features of the Aphrodite cult were certainly not absent in ancient Hellas. We know that in Corinth there were large numbers of hierodules in the temple who helped to make the ceremonies gorgeous and impressive, but judging from the language used by Æschylus and Pindar they were highly respected and received public acknowledgment for their fervent prayers during the Persian wars.
In the early imperial time of Rome, the authority of Venus was promoted by the fact that she was the tutelary deity of Cæsar, who through the similarity of his name “Julius” with “Julus,” the son of Æneas, was encouraged to derive his legendary pedigree from Æneas, the mythical founder of the Latin race, the son of Anchises and Aphrodite.
With the rise of Christianity the worship of Venus naturally deteriorated very rapidly, and the fathers of the church referring to all the different versions of her love affairs maligned her in the eyes of the world by identifying the Venus Urania with the Venus Vulgaris, and their views have contributed a good deal to disfigure her picture in later centuries.
VENUS AND ANCHISES.
In the times of Cæsar she was still the great goddess whose domain was not limited to beauty and love nor even to the procreation of life, in which capacity she was called Venus Genetrix, but she was also Venus Victrix, or the goddess who in battle assures victory. Yea, more than all this, she was the goddess of life and immortality connected with the chthonian gods—the powers of death in the underworld. Her emblem, the pomegranate, is also found in the hands of Persephone, indicating a kinship between Aphrodite and the daughter of Demeter.