When Venus Met Aphrodite... The Origin of Venus in Rome and her Conflation with the Greek Aphrodite

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Abstract: On the lofty peaks of Mt. Eryx, situated on the North-Western tip of Sicily, a temple overlooked the land and sea below. This temple was the home of a goddess whose name was determined by those who stood within it. To the Phoenicians who founded the temple, she was Astarte. To the Sicilians who resided in nearby towns, she was Aphrodite. To the Romans who visited the goddess and returned with her to Rome, she was Venus. The Romans adopted and adapted this goddess in the third century, at the beginning of the Second Punic War, dedicating a temple to her and declaring the goddess to be their divine ancestor (Liv. 22.9. 9-10, 10.10). While it is commonplace nowadays to claim that Venus is simply the Roman Aphrodite, this conflation cannot stand on its own and must be examined further. Venus appeared in the historical record suddenly and with flair: a temple was dedicated to the goddess in 295, during the First Samnite War, using funds gathered from fines against adulterous women in Rome (Liv. 10.31.9). But who was this goddess and what exactly was she the goddess of? Our next sign of Venus, and the supposed answer to our query, occurs nearly 80 years later in the form of Venus of Eryx. This Venus Erycina is firmly situated within the mythological and religious origin of Aphrodite. Somehow in between these temples, through means unbeknownst to us, Venus and Aphrodite have become one. This paper’s aims are twofold: I wish to establish when and why the conflation of Aphrodite and Venus took place, resulting in a merging of religious and mythological aspects between the two goddesses. But before I can do that, we must establish who or what Venus was before her introduction to her Greek counterpart.

Bio: Madeline is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Ottawa, Canada. After completing her MA thesis on the changing role of Venus in Augustan Age poetry, Madeline's doctoral research turned to the origins of the goddess Venus in Roman religion. She uses theories of appropriation, third space theory, and networks to understand religious transmission, with Venus as a case study through trade routes, colonial practices, and peripatetic peoples. Her research focuses more generally on how people communicate, translate, navigate, and negotiate religious ideas when interacting with different cultures and how these interactions influence the religion and culture of each community.