Hi guys!
Welcome to my channel.
I’m telling you history
and mythology here.
In this video,
I’m going to tell you
about Aphrodite.
In ancient Greek religion
and mythology,
the goddess of love,
beauty, and fertility
was Aphrodite.
She was one of the
twelve chief gods
who lived on Mount Olympus.
The Romans
identified her
with their goddess Venus.
Let’s begin!
Homer and Hesiod
tell two different stories
about the origin of Aphrodite.
According to Homer,
Aphrodite was the daughter
of Zeus and the Titaness Dione,
thus making her a
second-generation goddess,
much like the most Olympians.
However,
Hesiod retells the much
more famous myth.
According to him,
Aphrodite was born
when Uranus’ genitals
fell into the sea
after he was castrated
by his son Cronus.
The goddess of love
emerged from the waters
on a scallop shell,
fully-grown, nude,
and more beautiful
than anything anyone had
ever seen before or since.
Aphrodite’s name is
usually linked to the
Ancient Greek word for
“sea-foam,” aphros,
which fits nicely with the
story of her birth.
However,
modern scholars think that
both Aphrodite and her name
predate Ancient Greece
and that the story
actually came because of the
goddess’ name.
If Apollo represented
the ideal of the perfect
male body to the Greeks,
Aphrodite was certainly
his most appropriate
female counterpart.
Beautiful and enchanting,
she was frequently
depicted nude,
as a symmetrically perfect maiden,
infinitely desirable and
as infinitely out of reach.
She was sometimes
represented alongside Eros
and with some of her
major attributes and symbols:
a pearl, a mirror,
a magical girdle and a shell,
a dove or a sparrow,
a swan, an apple roses,
and myrtles.
Aphrodite rode a
flying chariot
pulled by birds,
probably doves
or sparrows.
Aphrodite used a
swan-drawn car
to glide easily
through the air.
Aphrodite is a vain goddess,
proud of her looks
and disdains ugliness.
She is shallow,
arrogant
and jealous.
Aphrodite is also faithless
and has had relationships
with many gods like Ares,
Poseidon, Hermes
and Dionysus.
She can make anyone
fall in love with anyone,
even Zeus is not immune
to her power.
She has tremendous
power over lust.
She is often depicted
as a beautiful young woman,
in revealing clothes.
Aphrodite is the
Olympian Greek goddess
of love, sex,
and beauty.
And there are many tales of
how she could entice
both gods and mortals
to lust after her.
According to a version of
Aphrodite's story,
because of her immense beauty,
Zeus feared that
the other gods
would begin to fight
each other because of it.
To avoid this,
he forced her
to marry Hephaestus,
the blacksmith god,
humorless and ugly.
In another version
of the story,
Aphrodite marries Hephaestus
after his mother, Hera,
cast the Olympian,
considering the very ugly
and deformed to
live with the gods.
He enacted revenge
on his mother
by having a magical
throne built,
which trapped her.
In exchange
for the release,
he asked to be given
Aphrodite's hand
in marriage.
Hephaestus is happy
to be married to the
goddess of beauty
and forged for her
beautiful jewelry,
including cestus,
a gold belt that
made her
even more irresistible
to men.
Aphrodite's displeasure
with this arranged marriage
made men look for
her company,
most often Ares.
The sun god, Helios,
once spied Ares and Aphrodite
enjoying each other secretly
in the hall of Hephaestus.
He promptly reported the incident
to the Olympian spouse
of Aphrodite.
Hephaestus wanted to
catch the couple in flagrante,
and so,
he made a special, thin
and strong network of diamond
to catch the illicit lovers.
At the appropriate time,
this net was thrown,
trapping Ares and Aphrodite
in a passionate embrace.
Hephaestus was not yet satisfied
with his revenge,
however –
he invited the gods
and goddesses of Olympus
to see the unhappy couple.
Some commented
on the beauty of Aphrodite,
others eagerly expressed
their longing
to trade places with Ares,
but all mocked
and laughed at the two.
Once the couple were loosed,
Ares, embarrassed,
fled to his homeland,
Thrace, and Aphrodite,
embarrassed, fled to Cyprus.
As far as her legal
relationships are concerned,
Aphrodite is sometimes described
as being married to
the lame fire god Hephaestus
and sometimes to
the war god Ares,
with whom she had Eros,
Harmonia, Deimos (Fear)
and Phobos (Panic).
According to Homer,
Aphrodite was legally
married to Hephaestus,
but was unfaithful to him
with Ares.
It is interesting
to note the symbolism
behind the birth of Harmonia,
daughter of Aphrodite
and Ares:
Their union symbolizes the idea
that harmony is a blend of
harsh and tender,
or wild and tame characteristics.
In other words,
it represents the concept
that love and hate,
as well as as
disaster and creation are
the necessary elements
of life, which coexist.
Poseidon,
with whom she was delighted
and grateful because
he persuaded Hephaestus
to release her and Ares,
as he took the two together.
Aphrodite, with Poseidon
had Rhode and Herophile.
The fertility god Priapus
was usually considered
to be Aphrodite's son by Dionysus,
but he was sometimes
also described as her son
by Hermes, Adonis,
or even Zeus.
According to a myth,
while Aphrodite was pregnant
with Priapus,
Hera learned that
Aphrodite was pregnant by Zeus,
and envied her
and applied an evil potion
to her belly
while she was sleeping
to ensure that
the child would be hideous.
This made her child
born deformed.
Hermes didn’t have
many consorts,
but he did have Aphrodite
at least once,
as the very name of
their offspring,
Hermaphrodite,
as suggests.
Adonis was the son of Myrrha,
who was cursed by Aphrodite
with insatiable lust
for her own father,
King Cinyras of Cyprus,
after Myrrha's mother bragged
that her daughter was
more beautiful
than the goddess.
Driven out after
becoming pregnant,
Myrrha was changed
into a myrrh tree,
but still gave birth to Adonis.
She was transformed
into a myrrh tree after
having had intercourse with
her father and
given birth to Adonis
as a tree.
According to legend,
the aromatic exudings
of the myrrh tree
are Myrrha's tears.
Among her mortal lovers,
the most famous was Adonis.
Once while Aphrodite
and her son, Eros, were kissing,
one of Eros' love arrows
cut her.
She pushed him away
thinking it to be nothing.
However,
she saw a mortal
named Adonis,
and fell deeply in love with him.
But Adonis was later
killed by a boar.
His death was caused
by his arrogance and foolishness,
since he refused to
take Aphrodite’s advice.
Aphrodite then
turned him into a flower.
In later retellings,
however,
Aphrodite, somehow, someway,
managed to go to the underworld
and entrusted him to
Persephone, to raise him.
But when Aphrodite came back,
Persephone refused
to return him.
Either because
she became infatuated with him too,
or because
she was an
overprotective mother.
In any case,
they went to Zeus,
and Zeus decided that
Adonis would spend
four months with Persephone,
four months with Aphrodite,
and four months with
whoever he wanted.
He chose Aphrodite.
His death was either caused by
Ares, Artemis, Apollo,
or by Persephone herself.
Another time,
Anchises, Prince of Troy,
was another famous love,
and some versions of the myth
say that Aphrodite
fell in love with him
as punishment Zeus
that she had made the gods
fall in love with mortal women.
Pretending to be a princess herself,
she seduced him
and slept with him.
Only afterward
she revealed herself,
promising him a noble son
and warning him
to keep the affair to himself.
Anchises wasn’t able to,
so he was struck by Zeus’ thunderbolt
which blinded him.
And he wasn’t able
to see his son, Aeneas,
found the mighty Roman Empire.
When the goddess Eris
was turned away
from a party,
she tossed a golden apple
among the other goddesses
that said "To the Fairest"
on it.
The goddesses Hera,
Aphrodite,
and Athena
all wanted the apple.
Zeus decided that a mortal
named Paris would decide
who deserved the apple.
The three goddesses
visited Paris and
he had to decide
who was the
most beautiful.
All three goddesses
offered him something
if he would chose them.
Hera offered him power,
Athena offered him
wisdom and fame,
and Aphrodite offered him
the love of the most beautiful
mortal woman in the world,
Helen.
Paris chose Aphrodite.
However,
when Paris stole Helen
from a Greek king
and took her to Troy,
he started the Trojan War.
In the Troy destruction,
Aphrodite spoke to
her son Aeneas
pick up his father,
his wife and
go to Troy.
Aeneas did
as his mother said,
and traveled,
guided by Aphrodite,
with the Roman name
of Venus,
wandering in the
Mediterranean to reach
the Italian peninsula,
where his descendants
built Rome.
This is reported
in the epic poem by
Virgil, Aeneid,
maximum work of
Latin literature.
From this Roman epic,
Venus (Aphrodite in Greek)
is now considered the
guardian goddess of Rome.
One myth recounts that
when Juno (Hera in Greek)
tried to open the doors of Rome
to an invading army,
Venus sought to
thwart her plans
by blocking the way
with water.
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