The Greeks thought that the oldest cult place of Aphrodite in their lands was the island of Kythera, where an ancient sanctuary of Aphrodite Ourania was attributed to Phoenician founders by Herodotus (1.105) and others. Archaeology provides no support for the hypothesis of Phoenician influence on the island, though the sanctuary itself remains unexcavated, and the murex shells exploited by the Phoenicians for purple dye were locally abundant. Certainly this cult was well established by the time of Hesiod (Theog. 191-99), who mentions Aphrodite’s brief sojourn there before her emergence from the sea at Cyprus. The remains of a fifth-century Doric temple survive on the island, and the cult statue was an armed Aphrodite who recalled the warlike goddesses Ishtar and Astarte.6 The goddess probably made her way into mainland Greece during the tenth and ninth centuries from three locations: Cyprus, Kythera, and Krete. Excavations have revealed that the Kretan sanctuaries are among the oldest after those of Cyprus. At Kato Symi, the Archaic sanctuary devoted to Hermes and Aphrodite had a history of continuous use stretching back to Middle Minoan times, though the Minoan predecessors of the pair must have had different names. Again, at Olous there was a Geometric temple of Aphrodite and Ares. (Ares is not attested at the site until the double temple of the Roman period, but in other parts of Krete the pair was worshiped from an early date.) All over the Greek world, Aphrodite is regularly found with a cult partner, either Hermes or Ares, and this appears to be an archaic feature of her worship rather than a later development.7
World History
