The hymn's plot, Aphrodite's enforced infatuation with the mortal Anchises, matters beyond Greek religion because their son, born of that union, is Aeneas, the Trojan hero whom later Roman tradition made the mythical ancestor of the Roman people and, through Julius Caesar's family's claimed descent from Aeneas's son Iulus, the divine ancestor of the Julian clan specifically. A Greek hymn composed, on the usual dating, in the seventh century BCE therefore became, centuries later and in a completely different political context, part of the genealogical mythology Augustus and the Julio Claudian emperors used to claim descent from Venus, Aphrodite's Roman counterpart, a use its anonymous composer could not have anticipated and that had nothing to do with the hymn's original religious function honoring Aphrodite among her fellow Olympians.
Authorship remains unknown, as with nearly all the Homeric Hymns, and the collection's ancient association with Homer is a traditional ascription modern scholarship treats as almost certainly false for individual compositions likely produced by different poets across a considerable span of time. What can be said with more confidence is genre and purpose: like the other longer Homeric Hymns, it was very likely composed as a prelude, a proem performed before a longer recitation of heroic epic at a public festival, explaining its narrative, self contained shape and its focus on a single episode rather than a comprehensive account of the goddess's whole mythology.