My gift to man is love. Not only romantic love, but also of nature, of friendship,
between kin, of oneself. My gift to man is beauty. In the exotic, in the mundane.
With laughter, and with tears. My gift to man is strife. Strife born of jealousy.
Strife born of desire. My gifts to man are abounding. They bring pleasure. And they bring pain.
Aphrodite, the Olympian goddess of love, beauty, and sexual pleasure. The enchanting one,
the one who is infinitely desirable, but infinitely out of reach. To those who adore her,
she is known as the smile-loving, the merciful, and the one who postpones old age.
While to those who scorn her worship, she is known as the unholy one, the dark one,
the doom of men, and the killer of men. The goddess is identified by the Romans with the name Venus.
According to Hesiod, Aphrodite was born from the castrated genitals of Uranus,
which fell into the sea near the coast of Kithira. She had risen from the foam of the waters,
on a shell, fully grown, and more beautiful than anything or anyone in the universe.
However, according to Homer, Aphrodite was the daughter of Zeus and the Titaness, Diona. Thus,
the stepsister to the other Olympians, Athena, Artemis, Ares, Hephaestus, Apollo, Hermes,
and Dionysus. Whichever the story is, the goddess of love was the fairest of all the other goddesses.
She was a deity of flawless beauty, lovely, enchanting, and often appearing nude,
having a symmetrically perfect body. Sometimes, she is depicted alongside her children,
the erots, who were capable of sparking up passion in mortals and gods alike, at her will.
Her symbols are myrtles, roses, a dove, a magical girdle, and a shell.
So lovely was the goddess of love, that no man or god could resist her. Only the three
virgin goddesses, Artemis, Athena, and Hestia, were immune to her charms and power.
Thus, when Aphrodite arrived on Olympus, her beauty caused great confusion amongst the other gods,
as each of them wanted her for himself. So, to bring back peace and order, Zeus quickly
married her off to the least attractive Olympian, Hephaestus, god of the forge.
Although married to Hephaestus, Aphrodite had affairs with all the Olympian gods,
except Hades, the reserved, aloof god, and Zeus, who was supposedly her father.
Her most famous lover was the war god, Ares, whom she bore as many as eight children.
For Poseidon, she bore one daughter, Rhode. And for Hermes, she bore the hermaphrodites.
Her goddess also consorted with mortals, the most famous of whom were, Anchises and Adonis.
