The Aphrodisia festival (Ancient Greek: Ἀφροδίσια) was an annual festival held in Ancient Greece in honor of the goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite (Ancient Greek: Ἀφροδίτη Πάνδημος). It took place in several Ancient Greek towns, but was especially important in Attica and on the island of Cyprus, where Aphrodite was venerated with a magnificent celebration. The festival occurred during the month of Hekatombaion, which modern scholars recognize as starting from the third week in July to the third week of August on the Gregorian calendar. Aphrodite was worshipped in most towns of Cyprus, as well as in Cythera, Sparta, Thebes, Delos, and Elis, and her most ancient temple was at Paphos. Textual sources explicitly mention Aphrodisia festivals in Corinth and in Athens, where the many prostitutes that resided in the city celebrated the festival as a means of worshipping their patron goddess. Though no textual sources expressly mention an Aphrodisia festival in Cythera, Thebes, or Elis, it likely occurred since textual and iconographical sources indicate that Aphrodite Pandemos had a cult following in these areas. The Aphrodisia festival was one of the most important ceremonies in Delos, though not much is known about the details of the celebration. The inscriptions merely indicate that the festival required the purchase of ropes, torches and wood, which were customary expenses of all Delian festivals.
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Aphrodisia in the context of Aphrodite
Aphrodite (/ˌæfrəˈdaɪtiː/ , AF-rə-DY-tee) is an ancient Greek goddess associated with love, lust, beauty, pleasure, passion, procreation, and as her syncretised Roman counterpart Venus, desire, sex, fertility, prosperity, and victory. Aphrodite's major symbols include seashells, myrtles, roses, doves, sparrows, and swans. The cult of Aphrodite was largely derived from that of the Phoenician goddess Astarte, a cognate of the East Semitic goddess Ishtar, whose cult was based on the Sumerian cult of Inanna. Aphrodite's main cult centers were Cythera, Cyprus, Corinth, and Athens. Her main festival was the Aphrodisia, which was celebrated annually in midsummer. In Laconia, Aphrodite was worshipped as a warrior goddess. She was also the patron goddess of prostitutes, an association which led early scholars to propose the concept of sacred prostitution in Greco-Roman culture, an idea which is now generally seen as erroneous.
A major goddess in the Greek pantheon, Aphrodite featured prominently in ancient Greek literature. According to many sources, like Homer's Iliad and Sappho's Ode to Aphrodite, she is the daughter of Zeus and Dione. In Hesiod's Theogony, however, Aphrodite is born off the coast of Cythera from the foam (ἀφρός, aphrós) produced by Uranus's genitals, which his son Cronus had severed and thrown into the sea. In his Symposium, Plato asserts that these two origins actually belong to separate entities; Aphrodite Urania (a transcendent "Heavenly" Aphrodite, who "partakes not of the female but only of the male", with Plato describing her as inspiring love between men, but having nothing to do with the love of women) and Aphrodite Pandemos (Aphrodite common to "all the people" who Plato described as "wanton", to contrast her with the virginal Aphrodite Urania, who did not engage in sexual acts at all. Pandemos inspired love between men and women, unlike her older counterpart). The epithet Aphrodite Areia (the "Warlike") reveals her contrasting nature in ancient Greek religion. Aphrodite had many other epithets, each emphasizing a different aspect of the same goddess or used by a different local cult. Thus she was also known as Cytherea (Lady of Cythera) and Cypris (Lady of Cyprus), because both locations claimed to be the place of her birth. Sappho's Ode to Aphrodite is one of the earliest poems dedicated to the goddess and survives from the Archaic period nearly complete.
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