Venus

← Encyclopedia

Venus is the Roman goddess of love, beauty, and sexual desire, and the name the Romans gave to the brightest of the planets. From early in the tradition she was identified with the Greek Aphrodite, whose myths, attributes, and cult Roman writers largely absorbed; the doves, the myrtle, the girdle that compels desire, and the attendant Eros all pass from one goddess to the other. Behind both stands a longer history. Scholars have long traced the figure eastward, to the Semitic Astarte and the Mesopotamian Inanna-Ishtar — herself a goddess of love and war whose star was the planet now called Venus — and the lines of descent, though debated in their detail, are real enough that the planet’s very name preserves an inheritance older than Rome.

In Greek myth Aphrodite was born of the sea, in one account from the foam that gathered around the severed parts of the sky-god Ouranos cast into the water — a birth out of violence that early made her something more unsettling than a patroness of romance. The Romans received her, but also made her their own: Venus was honored as ancestress of the Roman people through her son Aeneas, and so as mother of the Julian line, a claim Julius Caesar and Augustus pressed in temple and on coin. What had been a Greek goddess of desire became, in Rome, a goddess of the city’s own origin.

The planet carried the goddess’s name and, with it, a meaning. In the astrology that Hellenistic and later writers systematized, Venus is the lesser benefic — the gentler of the two fortunate planets — governing love, harmony, art, pleasure, and what draws things together. Practitioners read its placement as bearing on affection and union, on taste and on the capacity for delight; the attribution rests on the long identification of the planet with the goddess of love rather than on anything observed in the body itself.

The continuity is part of what makes the figure interesting. The same bright point in the evening and morning sky was read as a goddess of love across Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, and the readings, while distinct, kept circling the same cluster of meanings — desire, fertility, the force that joins. The resemblances are genuine and have invited the comparative eye for centuries. They are not identity: Ishtar’s war and Aphrodite’s sea-birth and Venus’s Roman ancestry each belong to their own world, and mean what they mean there. What survived all of it was the association of a light in the sky with the pull that brings bodies and lives together.

→ Related: Artemis · Dendera · Mesopotamia