Marble relief from the temple of Aphrodite (20-60 A.D.), now in the Aphrodisias Museum, near modern Geyre, Turkey.
The Romans identified the Greek goddess Aphrodite with the Latin deity Venus. This goddess, like many other divinities of the Roman pantheon, derives her origin from an divinized abstract concept, represented in anthropomorphic shape only after the influence of Hellenic culture. The term venus was, in its origin, a neuter noun, from which derived the verb venerari (“to worship”), which indicates a particular attitude of man towards the gods. This implies an effort to captivate the benevolence of the god through a persuasive charm, of bringing someone toward oneself. The neuter noun was later utilized to design a goddess personifying this seductive attraction, which on its turn produced the symmetric notion of venia of the gods, in the sense of “grace” or “favor”. Under Etruscan and Greek influence, the goddess Venus became to incarnate not only the seductive power in its original religious sense, but also the seduction and power of eros, as they were personified by the Greek Aphrodite (Schilling 2005b).
The picture shows the encounter of Aphrodite with the shepherd Anchises, whose beauty resembled that of a god, so much so that he attracted the goddess’s fondness, represented by the little winged Eros that she holds in her arms. On the left appears the face of the Moon. From their union shall be born Aeneas, the Trojan hero that in the legends was regarded as the founder of what would become the city of Rome. For this reason the Romans worshipped Venus with the epithet of Venus Genetrix, the ancestress and mother of the city. The feasts in honor of the goddess were celebrated mainly in the month of April, regarded as sacred to her because it marked the beginning of springtime and the reawakening of the vital power of nature.

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