Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation. She is identified with the planet Venus; her Roman equivalent is the goddess Venus. Myrtle, roses, doves, sparrows and swans were sacred to her. In Hesiod's Theogony, Aphrodite was created from the sea foam (aphros) produced by Uranus's genitals, which had been severed by Cronus. In Homer's lliad, however, she is the daughter of Zeus and Dione. In Plato (Symposium, 180e), these two origins are said to be of hitherto separate entities: Aphrodite Ourania (a transcendent, "Heavenly" Aphrodite) and Aphrodite Pandemos (Aphrodite common to "all the people"). She had many other names, each emphasising 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), both of which claimed to be her place of birth. In Greek myth, the other gods feared that Aphrodite's beauty might lead to conflict and war, through rivalry for her favours; so Zeus married her off to Hephaestus. Despite this, Aphrodite followed her own inclinations, and had many lovers - both gods, such as Ares, and men, such as Anchises. She played a role in the Eros and Psyche legend, and was both lover and surrogate mother of Adonis. Many lesser beings were said to be children of Aphrodite. Hesiod derives Aphrodite from aphrós (ἀφρός) "sea-foam", interpreting the name as "risen from the foam". Interpreting the name as "risen from the foam". Michael Janda, accepting this as genuine, claims the foam birth myth as an Indo-European mytheme. The second part of the compound has been variously analyzed as *-odítē "wanderer" or -dítē "bright", the latter of which Janda agrees with and interprets the overall meaning as "she who shines from the foam (of the ocean)", supposing the name is a byname of Eos, the dawn goddess. Likewise, Witczak proposes an Indo-European compound *abʰor- "very" and *dʰei- "to shine", also referring to Eos. It has been argued that etymologies based on comparison with Eos are unlikely since Aphrodite's attributes are entirely different from those of Eos or the. Janda disputes this assumption. A number of improbable non-Greek etymologies have been suggested in scholarship. One Semitic etymology compares Aphrodite to the Assyrian barīrītu, the name of a female demon that appears in Middle Babylonian and Late Babylonian texts. Hammarström looks to, comparing (e)prϑni "lord", an Etruscan honorific loaned into Greek as. This would make the theonym in origin an honorific, "the lady". and reject this etymology as implausible, especially since Aphrodite actually appears in Etruscan in the borrowed form Apru (from Greek Aphrō, clipped form of Aphrodite).
The medieval (c. 1150) offers a highly contrived etymology, deriving Aphrodite from the compound habrodíaitos (ἁβροδίαιτος), "she who lives delicately", from habrós and díaita. The alteration from b to ph is explained as a "familiar" characteristic of Greek "obvious from the ", despite the fact that the name cannot be of Macedonian origin.
