Venus and Aphrodite by Bettany Hughes

Author:Bettany Hughes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474610391
Publisher: Orion

* Cicero, De Natura Deorum, 2.69 trans. Rackham

8

Eastern Queen

Hestiaea the grammarian says that the plain where Aphrodite’s temples stands is called Golden: that is why it is the temple of Golden Aphrodite*

North Africa and the Middle East, Egypt in particular, had never forgotten its love of the love goddess.

From the Ptolemaic period onwards, Aphrodite-Venus had become a hugely popular deity in Alexandria on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Walking the Alexandrian corniche today, under the drama of a winter electric storm or in the brilliance of summer heat, it is easy to imagine how Aphrodite-Venus was cherished as a patron of this cross-border, cross-boundary, headily ambitious and cosmopolitan city.

The goddess Isis had been adored here by the Ancient Egyptians and, come the reconfiguring of the city by Alexander the Great and his successors, her cult spaces were frequently modified so the Egyptian goddess came to look more like a Greek Aphrodite. Excavations at the nearby town of Naukratis (the home town of Athenaeus, one of our go-to sources for Aphrodite’s life story), just inland from Alexandria, show how seriously devotees invested in Aphrodite worship. One of the richest traders from one of the richest trading families in the Mediterranean, Sostratos of Aegina, dedicated to the goddess a beautiful bowl made on the Eastern Mediterranean island of Chios. A poorer pilgrim gave her a typical Egyptian offering spoon. We get a wonderful insight into the real passion with which she was adored thanks to a certain Herostratos, a trader based on the North African coast, who, having picked up a statuette of Aphrodite from Alexandria on a round trip to Paphos in Cyprus, and weathering a life-threatening storm with the help of the goddess, brought the figurine back to dedicate to Aphrodite and then invited ‘his relations and closest friends to a feast in her temple’. Sheep, goats or pigs would have been slaughtered and plenty of wine drunk. Eyewitnesses even reported, in the city’s great festival of Ptolemaia, which celebrated the Ptolemies’ royal succession, a 120-foot-wide, gem-encrusted myrtle wreath (representing both the goddess and female genitalia) accompanied by an eighty-foot-long gold, star-tipped phallus being processed along the streets in Aphrodite’s honour.

A statue of the goddess was recently rescued from the nearby waters at Canopus. This is officially an image of the Ptolemaic queen Arsinoe II, but in the guise of the goddess of love. The underwater find is an extraordinary thing. Close up, you can see the stone has been buffed to a satin sheen. Made of black granodiorite, the cloth is sculpted to appear wet – clinging enticingly to the divine queen’s lovely, taut body beneath. The sculpture’s nipples are just visible above the wet shift. For the regal goddess who saw sailors home safely to port and also protected the prostitutes they would meet when they arrived, this Aphrodite is a predictably fitting fantasy.

We find figurines of Aphrodite-Venus identified in the dowries of well-to-do young Alexandrian girls.No fewer than twenty-one cities bear her name across Upper and Lower Egypt. And

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