Deity

Venus

VEE-nus

Roman Deities

As the face of the planet Venus, the Roman Venus embodies love, beauty, and attraction. Venus is the Roman goddess of love, beauty, desire, sex, fertility, prosperity, and even victory. In myth she is the mother of the Trojan hero Aeneas and thus the divine ancestress of the Roman people and of the Julian family, so that Julius Caesar and Augustus claimed her as their forebear. She is the counterpart of the Greek Aphrodite and the consort of Mars, and she was revered under many cult titles, among them Venus Genetrix, the mother, and Venus Victrix, the bringer of victory. Sacred to her are the myrtle, the rose, the dove, the sparrow, and the scallop shell. She embodies love, beauty, and the magnetic power of desire.

Facts

Attestation

Era of Attestation

300 BCE to 391 CE 1

Veneration Today

Historically attested; no continuous cult 1

Historicity

Not a historical person: a divine or other-than-human being 2

Belief

Theology

Polytheistic: many gods 1

Cult

Principal Cult Centre

The temple of Venus Erycina at Eryx in Sicily 1

Principal Cult Centre

The temple of Venus Genetrix at Rome 1

Attributes and Iconography

Nude or half-draped with the mirror, the dove and the myrtle. 1

Worship and Practice

On the Veneralia, held April 1, Roman women bathed publicly at the shrine of Fortuna Virilis before ritually washing and redecorating Venus's own cult statue, a rite of purification undertaken ahead of the goddess's own festival day. 2

Attributions

Mythic Association

The Julian family claimed descent from Venus through her son Aeneas, a lineage that Virgil uses in the Aeneid to link the goddess to the founding of Rome. 2

Position Profile

Key Text

Julius Caesar and the Julian family claimed direct descent from Venus through her mortal son Aeneas and his son Iulus, a genealogy Caesar used to justify building a temple to Venus Genetrix, mother Venus, in his new forum at Rome, folding personal and imperial legitimacy directly into the goddess's own mythology. 2

Disputed

Origin of the Name

The origin of the name Venus is debated. One view derives it from an Indo-European root meaning desire or longing, cognate with words for winning favor, which would make her name transparently mean the goddess of charm. Another holds that Venus began as an obscure garden and vegetable deity whose name was only later reinterpreted to carry an erotic sense once she was identified with the Greek Aphrodite; the Oxford Classical Dictionary notes the second reading is favored by several Latinists. 1

Function

Domain / Function

Fertility and generation 1

Domain / Function

Love and desire 1

Domain / Function

Beauty 1

Identity

Gender

Female 1

History

Historical Note

Julius Caesar and, after him, Augustus promoted Venus Genetrix as ancestral mother of the Julian family and funded major temple building in her honor, tying the goddess's cult directly to the political legitimacy of the emerging imperial dynasty in a way distinct from her earlier republican era worship. 2

Sources

Textual Note

Ovid's Metamorphoses recounts Venus's grief over the death of her mortal lover Adonis, gored by a boar, and her transformation of his spilled blood into the anemone flower, a story Roman poets used repeatedly to explore the vulnerability that even a goddess of love and desire could not escape. 3

Learn More

More Than a Goddess of Love

Venus's cult at Rome was enlarged in a moment of real crisis. After the catastrophic defeat at Lake Trasimene in 217 BCE, early in the Second Punic War, the Sibylline Books were consulted and prescribed a new temple to Venus Erycina, imported from her ancient shrine on Mount Eryx in Sicily, a sanctuary with its own long tradition of ritual prostitution in service of the goddess. Quintus Fabius Maximus vowed the temple, and it was dedicated on the Capitoline itself within two years, an unusually rapid and prominent honour that shows how seriously Rome took a foreign form of Venus during its darkest military hour.

The choice was not arbitrary: Eryx sat near territory contested between Rome and Carthage, and adopting its goddess was also a claim on the ground she watched over. A second, more modest temple to Venus Erycina was later built outside the city walls for the goddess in her original, less respectable Sicilian character, physically separating the state-sanctioned Capitoline Venus from the folk cult of love and fertility that had crossed the sea with her name. The episode is a clear case of Rome absorbing a foreign deity for reasons of politics and war rather than theology, and Venus's several distinct cult titles more generally, Genetrix, Victrix, Verticordia and Erycina among them, functioned as effectively separate cults addressed to different facets of one goddess rather than as mere poetic variations on a single unified figure.

Mother of Aeneas, Ancestress of Rome

The standard image of a nude Venus with one hand modestly shielding her body descends from a single Greek original, Praxiteles's Aphrodite of Knidos, carved in the fourth century BCE and famous in antiquity as the first major cult statue to show the goddess fully undraped; the sculptor reportedly could not sell it to the city of Kos, whose citizens found it too immodest, and Knidos took it instead, where it became a pilgrimage attraction in its own right. No original survives, but Roman copies and adaptations of the pose, including the so-called Venus de' Medici and the Capitoline Venus, spread the modest-Venus formula across the Roman world and made it the default template through which later ages pictured the goddess undressed.

That template resurfaced dramatically at the start of the European Renaissance. Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus, painted around 1485 for the Medici in Florence, revived the classical nude at a scale and prominence unseen since antiquity, borrowing the pudica gesture directly from the ancient sculptural tradition even though no large classical original was known to survive intact in his own time. The painting, now in the Uffizi, did more than any single work to fix Venus in the modern imagination as the archetype of the birth of beauty itself.

Correspondences & Relations

The Roman name for this planet has outlasted every other layer of the correspondence, and it descends through Greek Aphrodite from Babylonian Ishtar. Venus herself began as an Italic garden deity before absorbing Aphrodite wholesale.

Connections

Associated With

Sagittarius First Term: Jupiter

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Sagittarius Fourth Term: Saturn

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Sagittarius Second Term: Venus

This source names Venus directly: "This term spans 12 to 17 degrees of Sagittarius and is ruled by Venus."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Sagittarius Third Term: Mercury

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Scorpio Fifth Term: Saturn

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Scorpio First Term: Mars

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Scorpio Fourth Term: Jupiter

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Scorpio Second Term: Venus

This source names Venus directly: "This term spans 7 to 11 degrees of Scorpio and is ruled by Venus."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Scorpio Third Term: Mercury

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars (Susan Milbrath)

This source names Venus directly: "astronomical religion, tracing how Venus, the sun, the moon and the planets structure Maya art, ritual calendars and the Dresden Codex's Venus table, including the documented practice of timing..."

Source Star Gods of the Maya: Astronomy in Art, Folklore, and Calendars (Susan Milbrath)Susan Milbrath

Star of Ishtar

This source names Venus directly: "one: the goddess is identified with Venus, the morning and evening star."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Taurus Fifth Term: Mars

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Taurus First Term: Venus

This source names Venus directly: "This term spans 0 to 8 degrees of Taurus and is ruled by Venus."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Taurus Fourth Term: Saturn

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Taurus Second Term: Mercury

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Taurus Third Term: Jupiter

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Venus

This source names Venus directly: "The glyph of Venus is a circle set above a cross."

Source The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian CultureFrancesca Rochberg

Virgo Fifth Term: Saturn

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Virgo First Term: Mercury

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Virgo Fourth Term: Mars

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Virgo Second Term: Venus

This source names Venus directly: "This term spans 7 to 17 degrees of Virgo and is ruled by Venus."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Virgo Third Term: Jupiter

This source names Venus directly: "to most malefic, run Jupiter or Venus first through Mars or Saturn last."

Source TetrabiblosClaudius Ptolemy

Showing 51 to 72 of 72 in Associated With, page 2 of 2.

Children

Aeneas

Aeneas is the son of Venus (Aphrodite) and Anchises per his own lineage fact and the Aeneid; no honest edge target exists for Anchises.

Source The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th editionSimon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.)

Depicted In

Venus and Mars (Botticelli)

Source Venus and Mars, Botticelli (Web Gallery of Art)

Identified with (Interpretatio)

Aphrodite

Interpretatio romana: Greek Aphrodite identified with Roman Venus.

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price

Freya

Interpretatio germanica: Freya (widely conflated with Frigg) equated with Venus for dies Veneris (Friday).

Source GermaniaPublius Cornelius Tacitus

Frigg

Interpretatio germanica: Frigg equated with Venus; dies Veneris calqued as Frigedaeg (Friday).

Source GermaniaPublius Cornelius Tacitus

Taibai Jinxing

Taibai Jinxing is the Chinese face of Venus, set alongside the Roman Venus in the shared astrological figure of beauty, refinement and the evening star.

Source The Encyclopedia of TaoismFabrizio Pregadio (ed.)

Turan

Turan is identified with Roman Venus while keeping her own name and cult as patron goddess of the city of Velch, Vulci.

Source The Religion of the EtruscansNancy Thomson de Grummond and Erika Simon (eds.)

Married To

Mars

Venus's own description: "she is the counterpart of the Greek Aphrodite and the consort of Mars."

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price

Worshipped In

Ancient Romans

Venus, mother of Aeneas, was claimed as ancestress by Caesar's house and honored across the city.

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price

Roman Religion

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Sources

1. The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition

Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2012s.v. VenusView the Source

2. Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A History

Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price, Cambridge University Press, 1998View the Source

3. Metamorphoses

Ovid, (various editions)Metamorphoses, Book 1, lines 1-4 (Invocatio), tr. Brookes More

Quote, Metamorphoses, Book 1, lines 1-4 (Invocatio), tr. Brookes More

My soul is wrought to sing of forms transformed to bodies new and strange! Immortal Gods inspire my heart, for ye have changed yourselves and all things you have changed!

View the Source

Encyclopedia of Religion

Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. Venus; the cult titles and the descent of the Julian houseView the Source

Essays About This Entity (1 essay)

In the Atlas, One Planet Wears Five Faces

The morning and evening star, named five separate ways

Read the Essay

Take a Related Quiz

Gods of Ancient Rome: BeginnerIncludes a question about Venus.
Gods of Ancient Rome: ExpertIncludes a question about Venus.
Gods of Ancient Rome: IntermediateIncludes a question about Venus.

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