Aphrodite's major symbols include seashells, myrtles , roses, doves, sparrows, and swans. The cult of Aphrodite was largely derived from that of the Phoenician goddess Astarte , a cognate of the East Semitic goddess Ishtar , whose cult was based on the Sumerian cult of Inanna.
Aphrodite's main cult centers were Cythera , Cyprus , Corinth , and Athens. Her main festival was the Aphrodisia , which was celebrated annually in midsummer. In Laconia , Aphrodite was worshipped as a warrior goddess. She was also the patron goddess of prostitutes , an association which led early scholars to propose the concept of sacred prostitution in Greco-Roman culture, an idea which is now generally seen as erroneous.
A major goddess in the Greek pantheon, Aphrodite featured prominently in ancient Greek literature. In Homer 's Iliad , however, she is the daughter of Zeus and Dione. In his Symposium , Plato asserts that these two origins actually belong to separate entities; Aphrodite Urania a transcendent "Heavenly" Aphrodite and Aphrodite Pandemos Aphrodite common to "all the people".
Aphrodite had many other epithets, each emphasizing a different aspect of the same goddess or used by a different local cult. Thus she was also known as Cytherea Lady of Cythera and Cypris Lady of Cyprus , because both locations claimed to be the place of her birth.
Sappho 's Ode to Aphrodite is one of the earliest poems dedicated to the goddess and survives from the Archaic period nearly complete. In Greek mythology , Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus , the god of fire, blacksmiths and metalworking.
