Two Births, and an Eastern Origin

The Greeks told two incompatible birth stories for Aphrodite, and both mattered. In Hesiod she is born from the sea foam that gathers around the severed genitals of Ouranos, cast into the water by Kronos, a violent, cosmic origin that makes her older than the Olympians and links her name, by ancient folk-etymology, to aphros, foam. In Homer she is simply the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Plato's Symposium later read the two births as two loves: Aphrodite Ourania, a higher or heavenly love, and Aphrodite Pandemos, common or bodily love. That philosophical split was a Greek interpretation laid over the older double tradition, not part of it.

Behind the Greek goddess stands an eastern one. Scholars connect Aphrodite closely with the Semitic Astarte and the Mesopotamian Ishtar / Inanna, goddesses of love and war whose cult reached the Greeks through Cyprus and the Phoenician world. Her chief early sanctuaries at Paphos on Cyprus and on Kythera mark that route, and Herodotus traced her oldest temple to Ascalon in the Levant.