Aphrodite

The existing description already gives Aphrodite's birth from Uranus's severed remains falling into the sea, her marriage to Hephaestus and her love affairs with Ares and mortal men. Greek philosophy read a doctrine out of that same birth story that has nothing to do with any of those episodes. In Plato's Symposium, the character Pausanias argues that the poets and mythographers actually describe two separate Aphrodites under one name, distinguished by their parentage. The elder, born from Uranus alone with no mother involved, is Aphrodite Urania, heavenly Aphrodite, and Pausanias associates her with a higher love directed at the mind rather than the body. The younger, daughter of Zeus and Dione in Homer's own genealogy, is Aphrodite Pandemos, common Aphrodite, associated with ordinary desire. Pausanias uses the split to argue that love itself comes in a higher and a lower form depending on which goddess inspires it, a philosophical argument built from myth rather than a report of how Aphrodite was actually worshipped. Real cult practice did not honor Pausanias's distinction the way he described it. At Athens, Aphrodite Pandemos was the goddess worshipped by the city as a whole in her civic aspect, tradition crediting her sanctuary to Theseus at the unification of Attica, while Corinth's cult of Aphrodite Urania stood apart for different, older reasons than any philosopher's argument about types of love.

The atlas records Aphrodite's veneration status as historically attested with no continuous cult, and the concrete historic center behind that finding is Palaepaphos, Old Paphos, on Cyprus, already named in the Odyssey as the site of Aphrodite's own grove and altar, making it one of the oldest cult centers attested for any Greek deity in surviving literature. The sanctuary did not worship Aphrodite through a carved human image. Its cult object was a large conical stone, a baetyl, an aniconic representation of the goddess that Roman era coins minted at Paphos depict clearly, set within the sanctuary's courtyard where visitors could see it stand for the goddess herself rather than for any statue of her. The Romans, who traced their own ancestry through Aphrodite's son Aeneas to Venus, treated the old Cypriot sanctuary as ancestral ground and rebuilt it on a large scale after an earthquake in the late first century CE, adding stoas around a courtyard some seventy nine by sixty seven meters to receive the crowds of pilgrims the site drew under Roman rule. Nothing of that pilgrimage continues today. The sanctuary's ruins now sit inside the Paphos Archaeological Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1980, visited by tourists and studied by archaeologists rather than approached by worshippers, the stone that stood for a goddess for well over a thousand years now a museum exhibit rather than an object of devotion.