Aphrodite

Aphrodite was one of the main goddesses of Greek religion. The Greeks believed that she was the goddess of love, beauty, fertility and desire and related her to human sexuality. Aphrodite was representative of the female beauty standard among the Greeks and known for being able to seduce anyone, such beauty.

Traditionally, the island of Cyprus is her birthplace, and her origin was still a matter of controversy among the Greeks. That's because two great Greek poets, responsible for compiling much of the knowledge we have about Greek mythology, disagreed about how it had arisen.

These poets were Homer and Hesiod, the former claiming that Aphrodite was the daughter of Zeus and Dione and the latter, in turn, marking her birth during the revolt of Cronos (father of Zeus) against Uranus (father of Cronos). Cronos would have castrated his own father, Uranus, and decided to throw the organ in the ocean. From there began a foam that would have given rise to the goddess of love.

These disagreements were resolved by the philosopher Plato, who suggested that they existed because there were actually two goddesses. For Plato, the daughter of Zeus would be Aphrodite Urania, related to the celestial love that came from the soul; the goddess that emerged from the foam of the ocean would be Aphrodite Pandêmia, who was related to carnal pleasures, and therefore related to lascivious love. Historians believe that the name Aphrodite was derived from aphrós, a Greek word referring to the foam of the ocean from which the goddess arose. Regarding the origin of this goddess in Greek culture, historians believe that she was based on Astarte, a Phoenician goddess strongly related to fertility and sexuality.