Aphrodite is the goddess of love and beauty in the Greek tradition. She is the equivalent of the Roman Venus. An alluring figure, she protects marriage, promotes romantic relationship and fosters family and childbirth. But she can be fearsome as she also symbolises the passion that destroys lovers or tempts them into adultery, vice and pleasure. There are two versions of her birth: according to the first, she is the daughter of Zeus and Dione, one of the daughters of the sea. According to the second version, she comes from the seed of Uranus’s severed genitals which fertilised the sea after they were thrown into the sea by Cronos, his own son, who had castrated him.
She is the wife of Hephaestus, the lame God of blacksmiths, but also had many extramarital liaisons, principally with Ares, the reckless god of war.
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