A Stone, Not a Statue: Aphrodite's Historic Sanctuary at Paphos

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.