Aphrodite is easily reduced to a goddess of romantic beauty, but her ancient reach was wider and sharper. She personified desire as a force, something that seizes gods and mortals against their will, a power the Greeks found as dangerous as it was sweet. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite turns this on the goddess herself: Zeus makes her fall for the mortal Anchises, so that she who humbles the gods with longing is humbled in turn, and from that union comes Aeneas.
Her eastern ancestry left her other faces. On Cyprus and at Sparta she was worshipped in armed form, Aphrodite Areia, a reminder of the love-and-war goddess she descended from. As Aphrodite Ourania she had astral associations; as a goddess born of the sea she was Pontia and Euploia, invoked for safe voyages. Her retinue, Eros, the Charites (Graces), Peitho (Persuasion), maps the social machinery of attraction, seduction and union.
The Romans identified her with Venus, and through the claim that Aeneas, her son, was the ancestor of Rome, the goddess of desire became a dynastic ancestress of the Julian family and, in Augustan poetry, of Rome itself.