Aphroditus

Also Known As: Greek Aphroditos, the name of Aphrodite given a masculine ending; called the bearded Venus, Venus barbata, by the Latin commentator Servius
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Cyprian Mythology, Greek Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Aphroditus was a Cypriot form of Aphrodite held to be male and female at once, shown with a beard, a sceptre and a woman’s dress.
Role in Mythos: The figure was the object of a cult at Amathus on Cyprus that later reached Athens, where the Athenian historian Philochorus identified the deity with the moon.
Relation to Humans: Worshippers honoured Aphroditus by crossing the line the deity itself crossed, men sacrificing in women’s clothing and women in men’s. In Athens the images were garlanded in private houses on set days of the month, with mulled wine, myrtle, incense and cakes.

The statue stood somewhere on Cyprus, and the people who described it never settled on a pronoun. It wore a woman’s dress. It held a sceptre. It had a beard, and under the drapery, the Roman writer Macrobius reports, it had a man’s sex. The Cypriots, he adds, believed the deity it showed was male and female both. The Athenian comic poet Aristophanes had a name for the figure: not Aphrodite but Aphroditos, the goddess’s own name fitted with a masculine ending, as though the grammar had changed its mind halfway through the word.

That name is most of what survives. Aphroditus lives in a scatter of quotations, glosses and asides, nearly all of them kept by later writers who were chasing something else. Macrobius mentions the statue in his Saturnalia while arguing over a single word in Virgil: when Aeneas escapes burning Troy, the poet writes that he goes with the god leading him, not the goddess, though the deity guiding him is Venus. The commentator Servius, glossing the same line, describes the same image: a bearded Venus in Cyprus, with a woman’s body and dress, a sceptre and a male nature, which they call Aphroditos. The two late Latin scholars were drawing on one learned tradition, so they are closer to one witness speaking twice than to two. Behind them stand older voices.

The Greek lexicographer Hesychius keeps the thread that leads back to the island. Under the headword Aphroditos he records that the philosopher Theophrastus called the figure Hermaphroditos, and that Paion, the man who wrote about Amathus, said the goddess had been given the form of a man in Cyprus. Amathus was a city on the island’s south coast, and Paion’s history of it is lost. Plutarch quotes him elsewhere, and the passage shows what kind of place Amathus was. In Paion’s telling, Theseus left a pregnant Ariadne ashore on Cyprus, the island women nursed her and comforted her with forged letters from her lover, and she died there. The Amathusians showed her tomb in a grove they called the grove of Ariadne Aphrodite, and at her sacrifice in the month of Gorpiaeus one of their young men lay down and imitated the cries and movements of a woman in labour. That rite belongs to Ariadne, not to Aphroditus, and nothing joins them except a city and the man who wrote both down. It does establish that at Amathus a man playing a woman could stand at the centre of worship.

The worship of the bearded goddess ran on the same logic. Servius says men sacrificed to Aphroditos in women’s clothing and women in men’s. Philochorus, the Athenian antiquarian whom Macrobius quotes from his history of Attica, says the same of rites in Attica, and adds that the deity was the moon, reckoned both male and female. From those two sentences a scene assembles itself: men at an altar in borrowed dresses that pull tight across the shoulders, women in cloaks cut for someone broader, and smoke rising toward an image that was also two things at once. The Roman poet Laevius, quoted in the same chapter, prayed to Venus as nurturing, whether female or male, just as the Night-shiner, the moon, is nurturing. He gave Venus a masculine adjective to do it.

In Athens the figure moved indoors. Theophrastus, sketching the Superstitious Man in his Characters, has him order the household to mull the wine on the fourth and seventh days of the month while he goes out to buy myrtle, incense and holy cakes; home again, he spends the whole day hanging garlands on his images of Hermaphroditus. It is a comic portrait of a man who cannot stop placating gods, and it is also the best glimpse anywhere of how these images were treated: the warm spiced smell of the wine, the green myrtle sprigs, a small household statue patiently decked out one garland at a time. If Hesychius is right that Theophrastus’s Hermaphroditos is Aphroditos, then this fussy Athenian is the only named devotee the god has. Vern and Bonnie Bullough, in their 1993 history of cross-dressing, place herms of Aphroditus in fifth-century Athens, pillar statues with a phallus and a woman’s head, and have the Cypriot cult itself reaching the city in the fourth century.

The body is where the witnesses split. Macrobius, in the text as it has come down, makes the figure a man in build under women’s clothes. Servius gives it a woman’s body and dress. Both agree on the beard, the sceptre and the male sex, and both put the image in Cyprus. Nothing else about it is recorded: not its size, not its material, not which sanctuary housed it. The archaeologist Marie-Louise Winbladh built a 2012 book, The Bearded Goddess, around a bearded figurine from Ayia Irini on Cyprus, arguing that the island’s earliest images of Aphrodite were androgynous. That is a case about origins, made from clay, and the ancient texts about Aphroditus never mention Ayia Irini.

No story about Aphroditus survives. There is no birth, no lover, no quarrel among the gods, no journey. The later and far better known Hermaphroditus of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a son of Hermes and Aphrodite fused with the nymph Salmacis in a pool, is a myth with a plot; Aphroditus is a cult image with a name. The Victorian Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, following the German scholar Voss, treated the bearded Venus as an idea from a very late period of antiquity. Aristophanes, though, wrote in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, and Theophrastus in the fourth, so the name and the images were in Athens long before the Latin scholars who preserved the fullest descriptions.

What power the sources grant Aphroditus comes from that doubled nature. The deity held both halves of what the worshippers were, and the rite asked each of them to step briefly into the other half: to dress as the god was dressed, and to meet it on its own ground. Philochorus’s moon gives the same idea a place in the sky, a light that the Romans could call nurturing in either gender. The sceptre marks the figure as a ruler, though no text says over what.

The limits are plain. Aphroditus never slipped free of Aphrodite: the name is hers, bent at the ending, and every writer who mentions it does so while talking about her. Outside Cyprus the figure blurred into Hermaphroditus, so completely that a lexicographer had to note the two names as one. Even at home the record reaches the image only through Paion, whose book is gone, and through Latin commentators writing centuries later about a line of Virgil. What remains is a statue nobody can locate, a rite of exchanged clothes, and a single masculine ending that Aristophanes thought worth using.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Aphroditus?

Aphroditus is a male and female form of the goddess Aphrodite worshipped on Cyprus, especially at the city of Amathus, and later in Athens. The Cypriot cult image showed the deity with a beard, a sceptre and a woman’s dress. The name Aphroditos is simply Aphrodite’s name with a masculine Greek ending.

What did the statue of Aphroditus look like?

According to Macrobius and Servius, the statue of Aphroditus in Cyprus was bearded, wore women’s clothing, held a sceptre and had male genitals. Macrobius gives it a man’s build, while Servius says its body was a woman’s. No source records its size, material or the exact sanctuary where it stood.

How was Aphroditus worshipped?

Aphroditus was worshipped with rites in which men sacrificed wearing women’s clothing and women wore men’s clothing, according to Servius and to the Athenian historian Philochorus. Philochorus also identified the deity with the moon. In Athens, Theophrastus describes a superstitious man garlanding household images of Hermaphroditus on the fourth and seventh days of the month with myrtle, incense and cakes.

Is Aphroditus the same as Hermaphroditus?

Aphroditus and Hermaphroditus were linked but are not the same figure. The lexicographer Hesychius notes that Theophrastus called Aphroditos by the name Hermaphroditos, which shows the two names were already merging in ancient Athens. The Hermaphroditus of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a son of Hermes and Aphrodite fused with the nymph Salmacis, has a full myth, while Aphroditus is known only as a cult image and a name.

Are there any myths about Aphroditus?

No myth about Aphroditus survives. The deity is known from brief mentions by Aristophanes, Theophrastus, Philochorus, Paion of Amathus, Laevius, Macrobius, Servius and Hesychius. These describe the Cypriot statue and the cross-dressing rites but tell no story of birth, love or conflict.