Two Aphrodites: Plato's Symposium and the Philosophy Behind the Birth Myth

The existing description already gives Aphrodite's birth from Uranus's severed remains falling into the sea, her marriage to Hephaestus and her love affairs with Ares and mortal men. Greek philosophy read a doctrine out of that same birth story that has nothing to do with any of those episodes. In Plato's Symposium, the character Pausanias argues that the poets and mythographers actually describe two separate Aphrodites under one name, distinguished by their parentage. The elder, born from Uranus alone with no mother involved, is Aphrodite Urania, heavenly Aphrodite, and Pausanias associates her with a higher love directed at the mind rather than the body. The younger, daughter of Zeus and Dione in Homer's own genealogy, is Aphrodite Pandemos, common Aphrodite, associated with ordinary desire. Pausanias uses the split to argue that love itself comes in a higher and a lower form depending on which goddess inspires it, a philosophical argument built from myth rather than a report of how Aphrodite was actually worshipped. Real cult practice did not honor Pausanias's distinction the way he described it. At Athens, Aphrodite Pandemos was the goddess worshipped by the city as a whole in her civic aspect, tradition crediting her sanctuary to Theseus at the unification of Attica, while Corinth's cult of Aphrodite Urania stood apart for different, older reasons than any philosopher's argument about types of love.