The Beauty of the Luxury 

Aphrodite (Greek: Ἀφροδίτη; Latin: Venus) (pronounced /ˌæfrəˈdaɪti/; Ancient Greek: IPA: [apʰɾoˈdiːtɛː], Modern Greek: [afɾoˈðiti]) is the classical Greek goddess of love, lust, beauty, and sexual reproduction. She was also called Kypris and Cytherea after the two places, Cyprus and Cythera, which claimed her birth. Her Roman equivalent is the goddess Venus. Aphrodite was born of the sea foam near Paphos, Cyprus after Cronus cut off Ouranos' genitals and threw them behind him into the sea, while the Erinyes emerged from the drops of blood. Hesiod's Theogony described that the genitals "were carried over the sea a long time, and white foam arose from the immortal flesh; with it a girl grew" to become Aphrodite. This fully grown up myth of Venus (the Roman name for Aphrodite), Venus Anadyomene ("Venus Rising From the Sea") was one of the iconic representations of Aphrodite, made famous in a much-admired painting by Apelles, now lost, but described in Pliny the Elder Natural History. Thus Aphrodite is of an older generation than Zeus. Iliad (Book V) expresses another version of her origin, by which she was considered a daughter of Dione, who was the original oracular goddess ("Dione" being simply "the goddess, the feminine form of Δíος, "Dios", the genitive of Zeus) at Dodona. In Homer, Aphrodite, venturing into battle to protect her son, Aeneas, is wounded by Diomedes and returns to her mother, to sink down at her knee and be comforted. "Dione" seems to be an equivalent of Rhea, the Earth Mother, whom Homer has relocated to Olympus, and refers back to a hypothesized original Proto-Indo-European pantheon, with the chief male god represented by the sky and thunder, and the chief female god represented as the earth or fertile soil. Aphrodite herself was sometimes referred to as "Dione". Once the worship of Zeus had usurped the oak-grove oracle at Dodona, some poets made him out to be the father of Aphrodite.