The Cult
Aphrodítē’s cults ranged from the aniconic to the notorious. At Palaepaphos, her oldest home, there stood no statue at all but a conical stone — the goddess as baetyl — and Tacitus marveled that the shrine’s altar stayed dry in the rain; Strabo names the Cinyradae, hereditary priest-kings who served the Paphian goddess. The calendar kept her everywhere: the Aphrodisia in Greek cities each summer, and the Adonia, when women raised ‘gardens of Adonis’ on rooftops and mourned the dead lover — Theocritus paints the Alexandrian version. Corinth’s temple on Acrocorinth was famous for hetairai consecrated to the goddess, a practice to which Pindar’s fragment on Xenophon’s hundred-girl vow and Strabo’s thousand testify, whatever scholars now say about the literal accounting. Votive terracottas by the thousand, perfume jars, and mirrors mark her sanctuaries’ debris: worship here was beauty’s economy, offerings and flowers circulating through one temple gate.