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00:09At 10 o'clock on March the 10th, 1914, a suffragette called Mary Richardson
00:16walked through the front door of the National Gallery in London.
00:22A meat cleaver was hidden in her clothing.
00:30For 90 minutes she wandered the museum, waiting for a lapse in security, before making her
00:37way to the gallery's latest acquisition, the celebrated Rokeby Venus by Velazquez.
00:47The gallery had recently raised the princely sum of £45,000 to save the painting for the
00:53nation and people had come from all across the country to see it.
00:57But Mary Richardson took the weapon that she'd been hiding in her sleeve and started to
01:04slash furiously at the canvas.
01:09If you look carefully, you can just about make out the marks where it's been repaired.
01:18I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history,
01:23she said.
01:24I couldn't stand the way men stood and gawked at it all day long.
01:31And you can understand why.
01:33This painting's previous owner, a Yorkshire MP, described it as his fine picture of Venus's
01:40backside.
01:41This is the deity who led Greek heroes to their deaths, whom Roman generals honoured with sacrifice
01:48before battle, who was the incarnation of the ecstasy and agony of lust and love reduced to
01:57a showgirl, bearing herself for a viewing public.
02:03Venus, Aphrodite, while other gods of the past fade into obscurity, she's a goddess we think we all know.
02:12We remember her now for her beauty, for Cupid's bow, words like aphrodisiac and venereal.
02:21But in this film, I want to shatter that illusion, travelling to her haunts, both ancient and modern.
02:29Every turn, there's a Venus or an Aphrodite.
02:32To her deep origins as a shape-shifting spirit of creation and destruction.
02:39They needed her to, because in those times, life was hard.
02:43The force ancient people saw behind all lusts and urges.
02:47If you violently desire somebody physically, sexually, that's likely to cause the bad kind
02:54of strife.
02:56Her story has far more to offer us today than just the beautiful curve of her bottom.
03:04Now, I've got no intention whatsoever of being carted off to prison for vandalising a priceless
03:10artwork, but I do want to take a knife to the idea of Venus as a bit of divine totty.
03:17It's time to get back to the goddess as the ancients understood her, an elemental creature whose
03:25domain was the complex power of human desire.
03:39Venus has been called many names through history.
03:43The ancient Greeks knew her as Aphrodite.
03:48It was they who first told the iconic story of her birth, arising fully formed from the sea.
04:02It happened, they thought, not in some mythical land, but in a real place.
04:09The sea off the island of Cyprus.
04:15These balmy surroundings are at odds with what's actually a pretty lurid story.
04:23Into the sea, the myth says, the severed genitals of the sky god Uranus were flung by his son,
04:32Kronos.
04:34The god's genitalia landed with a surging splash, and out of the foam rose an awful and lovely maiden,
04:43the goddess Aphrodite.
04:51What's striking is how violent this imagery is.
04:57Aphrodite.
04:58The ancient myths are often pretty vivid, but this one really is extraordinary.
05:05Aphrodite's gruesome origins give her one of her epithets.
05:08She was Philomedes, a lover of male genitals, and indeed her name.
05:15Aphrodite, the Greek word Aphros means foam, so Aphrodite was foam-born.
05:27When she stepped ashore, they believed this elemental creature brought fertility to the barren earth.
05:38For centuries, those who worshipped her would commemorate this vivid seaside scene.
05:49Her intimate connection to the sea meant that she was often honoured with seashells,
05:54scallop shells in particular.
05:56We find them in her temples and in graves right across the eastern Mediterranean, and they're
06:02often pierced, so we think that worshippers would have worn them around their necks, a representation
06:07of female sexuality.
06:14The ancients really believed this Cypriot birth story.
06:18They often called Aphrodite Kypris, the Lady of Cyprus.
06:23But what evidence is there that this is where her cult began?
06:30In the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia are stored thousands of finds, unearthed from the island's prehistory.
06:41There are strong hints that sexual potency was in fact venerated here long before even the
06:48Greeks reached the island, as far back as 4000 BC.
06:56Right across the south of the island, archaeologists and local farmers kept on turning up these strange
07:04figurines.
07:05So far, over 200 of them.
07:07What you can't fail to notice is how sexual they are.
07:12There's focus on the vulva, and the neck and the head is distinctly phallic.
07:16We don't know exactly what these were used for.
07:20Some have suggested they were educational tools, but I think they were probably a kind
07:25of incarnation of the spirit of fertility that those prehistoric populations were desperate
07:31to keep on side.
07:35Spiritual beliefs must in some sense be the explanation for these figures, clearly something to do
07:42with the mysteries of sex and procreation.
07:46But one figure above all has attracted particular attention.
07:51Found lying on its back, surrounded by other smaller sculptures, some scholars speculate that this
07:59could be the deity, him or herself.
08:04She's 5000 years old, made of limestone, and is affectionately known as the Lady of Lemba.
08:13She might just be an early glimpse of the spirit that eventually becomes the great goddess Aphrodite.
08:23It's a tempting thought that this sexually charged Stone Age figure was where the whole story of Venus Aphrodite began.
08:32But the goddess was a more mixed up creature than that.
08:38Her origins lie not only in Cyprus, but in other places far further afield.
08:47Cyprus sits less than 100 miles from, arguably, the most creative cultural nexus of prehistory.
08:54The Fertile Crescent.
08:57The area that stretches from modern-day Iraq to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.
09:03A source of much of what would later constitute Greek and Roman culture.
09:12It's for that reason I keep coming back to countries like Jordan.
09:17This region has a special allure for an historian.
09:21The birthplace of so many of the ideas that have shaped civilisation.
09:26Agriculture.
09:27The city.
09:28And, of course, all kinds of religion.
09:35It's a story that goes back further than you'd think.
09:43We're used to the idea that the Middle East gave birth to the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
09:50But their relative newcomers, right back at the very birth of civilisation, around 5,000 years ago,
09:59these lands also generated this feisty creature.
10:05She's known as Ishtar, Astarte or Inanna.
10:11Ishtar was the goddess of sexual love, worshipped in various names and guises across the ancient Near and Middle East.
10:20Unlike the Stone Age figurines of Cyprus, her story was written down by the scribes of Sumeria, Babylon and Acadia.
10:27It's a story that seems to prefigure Aphrodite's.
10:31We hear from the Eastern epics that this regal divinity had a mortal lover, a shepherd boy called Dumuzi.
10:40Now, Dumuzi died tragically and the goddess was so distraught, she was given permission to bring him back to life
10:48for three months of the year.
10:53It's a fairly clear allegory for the cycle of life, but it's also fascinating as this is exactly the tale
11:00told later by Greeks about Aphrodite.
11:04Her shepherd boy lover, though, was called Adonis, not Dumuzi.
11:10It's strong evidence for the fact that Ishtar Inanna was early source material for Aphrodite.
11:19If that's true, the original Aphrodite wasn't to be messed with.
11:26Just listen to what one of her priestesses wrote about her.
11:30Lady of blazing dominion, clad in dread, riding on fire-red power,
11:38flood-storm-hurricane-adorned, battle-planner, foe-smasher.
11:49Ishtar and Inanna were warrior goddesses, often pictured in military attire, formidable queens of heaven and earth.
12:02Archaeologists now know that the story of Ishtar reached the island of Cyprus in the boats of travellers and traders.
12:11And there, she merged with the sexually charged ancient deity they already worshipped.
12:24When Eastern and Cypriot influences are combined, this is how the ancestor of Aphrodite ends up being represented on the
12:31island.
12:32She is a strange mixture of bird, beast and woman, a creature of both day and night.
12:41And just amazing to think of the world that those clay eyes would have looked out on.
12:51It's hard to pin down exactly who this sublime creature was so early in her history.
12:57But it's easy to read into these features a figure who combined exaggerated feminine sexuality
13:04with potential to inflict fear and terror on human beings.
13:12How was it that this ferocious figure became the heavenly beauty we picture as the classical Aphrodite?
13:25From the 12th century BC, Greeks from the mainland began arriving in Cyprus.
13:33The island became the lynchpin in an intercontinental exchange of goods and ideas.
13:40The Greeks, wowed by the great Cypriot goddess, adopted her into their own divine system.
13:48Eventually, giving her the name Aphrodite.
13:55Aphrodite, who loves laughter and smiles, went to Paphos on Cyprus and her precinct there.
14:01The graces bathed her and rubbed her with ambrosial oil that glistens on the skin of the immortal gods.
14:09And then they dressed her in beautiful clothes, a wonder to see.
14:14Epic poems by Homer, the very first works of European literature, describe her vividly.
14:20And where there were just inscrutable figurines, there is now a character with a story.
14:33Aphrodite is part of a family of gods, with Zeus at the head.
14:38She's married to Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith god.
14:43But in an adulterous affair with the god of war, Ares.
14:49She has mortal lovers too, most notably the doomed shepherd boy Adonis.
14:56Her son is called Eros, which literally means desire.
15:01His Latin name is Cupid.
15:04While other goddesses are virgins or mother figures, Aphrodite is seductive, unpredictable, disruptive.
15:17The bird heads and the phalluses are gone.
15:21Aphrodite, the beautiful goddess, has arrived.
15:29One site more than any other is associated with that moment of rebirth.
15:35The sanctuary of Paphos.
15:38Hello, is that Jacqueline?
15:40Hello.
15:40Hello.
15:41So pleased to meet you.
15:43So pleased to see you.
15:46Thank you so much.
15:47French archaeologist, Jacqueline Karagiorgis, has spent a lifetime working here.
15:53It's wonderful to have you decode it for me.
15:55Why is this sanctuary so important in understanding the story of Aphrodite?
16:00Because it's here that the goddess became Aphrodite.
16:06When Greeks came in the 12th century BC from mainland Greece and settled in Paphos, they may have
16:13already found a previous goddess who was a goddess of fertility.
16:18They transformed her by giving her different qualities.
16:23Greeks added to the primitive goddess of sex and fertility, who had violence in her.
16:32They had more refined qualities of tenderness, of love, of desire, and especially they added beauty.
16:42And this sanctuary became little by little very important.
16:47And it was considered as important as Delphi.
16:51I mean, it's amazing when you come here just to think of what this place meant to the men and
16:56women who worshipped Aphrodite.
16:58Yes, she was called Æthea, the goddess.
17:02Or Æpaphia, the goddess from Paphos.
17:05There was no other in the place and she was helpful in every field of life.
17:12In the fertility for men, for nature.
17:17So people came here to worship her, bringing incense.
17:23But bloody sacrifices were forbidden here because she was essentially a goddess protecting life.
17:31And for the men and women of those days, this was all so important because she was absolutely real.
17:37They had to worship her and adore her to get her protection.
17:42Yes, without her, I think they felt helpless and they needed her because in those times life was hard.
17:52Full of dangers, full of diseases, with agriculture giving not so abundant crops.
18:02So they really needed help from somewhere.
18:05And this goddess was providing hope.
18:09And she added to the primitive act of generation, feeling and beauty and care.
18:18And this is the base of our European civilization.
18:23And I think this is why Aphrodite is very important.
18:27She teaches us the possibility of love.
18:32All this was made in Cyprus.
18:40In this site, we start to get a sense of the scale and significance of Aphrodite's cult here on Cyprus.
18:49The sanctuary at Paphos allows us to jigsaw puzzle together the evidence.
18:54Ancient sources tell us that it was protected by wonderful golden gates and shaded by fruit trees,
19:02that you could hear the sound of ritual purification and that the air was heavy with the smell of perfume
19:09and incense.
19:11Being here, you really do feel close to those thousands of worshippers who came to the sanctuary to seek the
19:20power, the protection and the pity of the goddess.
19:32And nearby, we can lay eyes on further evidence of how Aphrodite was worshipped by the man and, critically, the
19:41woman on the street.
19:44Beautiful. What's the date of this vase?
19:47It's 8th century BC.
19:49So it's a very animated scene here.
19:51Yes, it's one of the rarest pictorial representations, compositions of a ritual dance.
19:58There are some women dancing, they are holding flowers.
20:02In the middle, there is a lyre player, he's playing music.
20:07And there is a tree, a kind of tree of life.
20:11So you can see the symbolism as well as the ritual dance.
20:16It is just fabulous to see this because then you think of the sight of Paphos and just imagine it
20:22filled with all this kind of activity.
20:24And you can imagine that this was happening in every sanctuary.
20:28And if you come round to this side, there's more to see.
20:32Oh yes.
20:34And what's this curious creature at the end?
20:36It's a sphinx. It's a mythical animal, which in this case, she's smelling a flower.
20:45And so this together with the bull mask shows that we are perhaps in a cultic environment.
20:50And you can see this lady holding several jugs and attending to another lady who is sitting high up on
20:58this maybe throne or high chair, her feet on a stool.
21:04And she's getting ready to drink some kind of liquid from a straw from this jar here.
21:12Maybe wine, maybe an alcoholic drink, we don't know.
21:15Because they made beer as well.
21:16They made wine, yes, they made alcoholic drinks.
21:20And who do we think this lady is?
21:21Well, she might be representing a priestess or even the deity herself, we don't know exactly.
21:27But the fact that we have some symbolic elements in this scene allows us to hypothesize, to infer that perhaps
21:37it wasn't an ordinary person.
21:39It must have been either a priestess or the deity.
21:44Fascinatingly, she's being worshipped not just by bearded priests, but by priestesses and crowds of devoted women.
21:55It's a tantalising glimpse of who it was back then who helped Aphrodite's cult flourish.
22:09The early Aphrodite was worshipped by everyone in the community, but she seems to have had a particular following amongst
22:16women.
22:17We know this not just from pictures on pots, but from the first named woman writer in European history, Sappho.
22:28This enigmatic figure lived on the island of Lesbos in the 7th century BC.
22:34It's from her that we get our terms lesbian and sapphic because her sensual love poetry was addressed not to
22:41men, but to other women.
22:43And she attributed that passion to her patron goddess, Aphrodite.
22:52I just love Sappho because she deals with Aphrodite in such an intimate, personal way.
22:58And she describes one of the goddess's temples with real joy, talking about it being surrounded by fruit trees and
23:06roses and spring flowers.
23:08And she turns the deity into someone that you can pray to directly for help.
23:14This is one of Sappho's hymns to Aphrodite.
23:19Oh, golden one, you come down from the heavens, my blessed goddess with a smile on your deathless face.
23:26And you asked me what the matter was this time, why I had called for you.
23:32Sappho's poetry brings vividly to life a world where women and young girls are joined in the worship of Aphrodite,
23:39enjoying the pleasures of desire, but also confronting the pain and suffering that desire can generate.
23:51If I had my way, I think I'd have Sappho's hymns to Aphrodite taught in all schools because she gets
23:57the experience of first love so perfectly.
24:00She describes fire creeping under your skin and the fact that you feel as though you're possessed.
24:06And she's actually the first person ever to describe love as being bittersweet.
24:11Although she's a bit more honest and she says it is sweet and then bitter.
24:20Through Sappho, we can hear the intimate agonies and yearning of a woman who lived two and a half thousand
24:27years ago.
24:29A rare and poignant portrait of Aphrodite in action.
24:36She reveals a deity with whom women felt a special connection and a driver of their intense homo-erotic relationships.
24:47Because the ancients knew that desire wasn't confined to one gender.
24:53This figurine was found here at Amethyst. The original dates from the 6th century BC and it seems to show
25:01a bearded Aphrodite.
25:04The goddess has got a woman's body and a man's face and facial hair.
25:10Now, this is really interesting because there's a historian from Amethyst, called Pion of Amethyst, who tells us that the
25:17Cypriot goddess sometimes took on the form of a man.
25:22Evidence like this has led some archaeologists and historians to suggest that the worshippers of Aphrodite were androgynous or sexually
25:31ambivalent.
25:32Well, maybe, but what this says to me is that by being both male and female, Aphrodite was nourishing sexuality
25:43in whatever form as a surging life force.
25:52And the bearded lady was by no means the oddest Aphrodite on Cyprus.
25:57There's another from the same time that reminds us that the ancients still saw Aphrodite as something dark and ineffable.
26:10This volcanic rock is the form that the goddess was worshipped in here at Paphos.
26:15Access to the stone was highly restricted. It was originally painted white and it would be oiled and decorated with
26:22flowers.
26:24It does feel very primordial and otherworldly, almost sci-fi, and frankly a bit weird.
26:32But it's not just us who feel that way. The Roman author Tacitus, when he visited the site, said that
26:38the origins of the worship of Aphrodite in this form are obscure.
26:47The Greek poets might have made Aphrodite sensual and beautiful, but they hadn't extinguished the sometimes sinister ways that people
26:57imagined her.
27:04She's adored in a myriad of different forms, as Aphrodite harmonia, Aphrodite of union, Aphrodite harmonia, Aphrodite of harmony, but
27:17also as Aphrodite epistrophia, Aphrodite the deceiver and Aphrodite melanis, Aphrodite of the dark night.
27:31She was a creature of summer and winter, of life and of death.
27:40In the minds of the ancients, her power pulsed through the natural and supernatural world, creating and destroying at will.
27:51They saw her in the miracle of human and animal reproduction, the glue of mutual love and respect that hold
27:58societies together, but also the malignant desires that can destroy lives and pull communities apart.
28:13One example was the disturbing story of the Cypriot hero, Kinneras.
28:20Kinneras was a priest and a king and somehow his daughter offended Aphrodite.
28:25And in retribution, she punished her in the most awful way, by making her fall in love with her own
28:33father.
28:35Kinneras was tricked into sleeping with his daughter, and learning the horrific truth, he then advanced on her in a
28:43murderous rage.
28:45Just as he was about to kill her, Aphrodite took pity on the young girl and intervened and turned her
28:51into a tree.
28:53Now, this does something very typical of the classical myths.
28:56It makes men and women face up to the more troubling aspects of human society, to deal head-on with
29:05the darker and disturbing issues of being human.
29:12The myth of Kinneras is no exception.
29:15Aphrodite was more often than not a menacing figure who destroyed lives by inflicting perverse infatuations.
29:31I've come to meet Professor Paul Cartlidge to try to thrash out what the Greeks meant by these disquieting stories.
29:40Well, she embodies a kind of love which isn't necessarily bad, but it has a risk of becoming divisive.
29:47And the Greeks were very conscious that Aphrodite and ta-aphrodisia, sexual activity, was potentially dangerous as well as profitable.
29:55Because they talk about Aphrodite's love as being maddening, creating this limb-loosening desire.
30:02And as you say, that's not a good thing, because you're losing control.
30:05That's right. I mean, the basic Greek word for lust or desire was sometimes mistranslated love.
30:12It's eros, and it's where we get erotic from.
30:15But for them, eros was potentially quite damaging if you lose control, if you direct your lust at the wrong
30:23object.
30:24If you violently desire somebody physically, sexually, that's likely to cause the bad kind of strife.
30:31So Greeks tended to have a slightly, you could say, realistic, or you could say rather pessimistic notion of the
30:38relationship between love and hate.
30:40Really fascinating, because neuroscientists now tell us that the boundary between love and hate is very, very slim.
30:46But the Greeks got there 2,500 years ago.
30:49Yeah. Aphrodite is a wonderful teacher. That's to say, in her myths, all the various versions of her, you can
30:57learn that love is not any one simple thing.
31:00She herself, in Homer, is actually married. And not many gods and goddesses, apart from Hera and Zeus, are actually
31:07married to anybody.
31:09So it's quite interesting. There's almost a contradiction, that on the one hand, she is a free spirit, she commits
31:14adultery, she's a very bad girl.
31:17But on the other hand, she also is, if a couple are happy, sexually, as well as others, then she
31:23also can be their part of the household.
31:26And that seems to me why Aphrodite's story is so helpful, because it can help us all decode our lives
31:32and our world in the 21st century.
31:34I agree with that. I would like to think that we would privilege the gentle, the harmonious, the unanimity aspects
31:43of Aphrodite, rather than the heuristic, that's to say, the strife-torn version.
31:48But yes, it certainly should be a shaping force.
31:51I sometimes wonder whether Aphrodite is the wound and the bandage.
31:55Well, actually, that's a very ancient Greek thought, that the same god who causes damage is also the one that
32:00cures it.
32:06In our own society, we're used to thinking in terms of good and evil.
32:12But the Greeks saw the world in a different way, as the push and pull of multiple different forces, which
32:19could be good and bad, each represented by a god.
32:24In Aphrodite's case, that was the double-edged sword of humans' desire for one another.
32:30The ancients understood something about desire and lust that we can pussyfoot around a bit today.
32:38We celebrate desire when it gives us our first kiss, or a passionate relationship, or hot sex.
32:45But if you think about it, these are the same forces that can result in unrequited love, or abusive, obsessive
32:54relationships, or sex crimes like rape and incest.
32:59Desire lures us into doing crazy things that can really wreck lives.
33:05And the Greeks didn't pretend that this bad stuff didn't happen.
33:13Instead, they gave these urges, both malign and benign, a name and a face.
33:20Aphrodite.
33:24Human relationships are hard. The Greeks got that. They didn't romanticise desire.
33:32Arguably, they challenge us to think more honestly about the problems that come with trying to live together.
33:43But the Greeks also set in train a kind of prejudice that's proved worryingly tenacious.
33:59Increasingly in Greek myth, Aphrodite was turned into a kind of home-breaker.
34:05Inciting women, in particular, and men, to do dark deeds.
34:10As the divine ally of Helen of Troy, she was blamed for the dread suffering of the Trojan War.
34:17It was said that Aphrodite was desperate to be declared the fairest of all the goddesses.
34:24And so, she offered the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen, to the Prince of Troy, Paris.
34:30Suffusing Helen with himeros desire, she persuaded her to leave her home, her husband and her daughter,
34:37and to run off with Paris with his glistening love locks.
34:42A hero race of godlike men were destroyed by rich-tressed Helen.
34:48Aphrodite's plaything.
34:54There's an implication that sexual union with women is an inescapable curse that weakens men.
35:06Aphrodite and her son Eros drive men mad with their entrapping nets and poisoned arrows.
35:14And mortal women are credited with dangerous sexual appetites.
35:23Sex, or tar aphrodisia, the things of Aphrodite as it was called in the ancient world,
35:29was increasingly thought to be an inconvenient distraction from the manly business of fighting and empire-building,
35:36and a woman's fault.
35:42The root of much of the denigration of Aphrodite and then Venus lies in the ancient world itself.
35:50It was in ancient Greece that the goddess first became an object to ogle at, as well as idolise.
36:01The development of naturalistic sculpture offered human forms that you could lust after.
36:12In the 4th century BC, Praxiteles of Athens carved the legendary Aphrodite of Gnidos.
36:21The original is lost, but it was the first full-sized naked female stone sculpture in Greek history.
36:30It was so intensely sensuous that it became emblematic and was copied in its own time and for centuries after.
36:39The original statue is said to have attracted countless pilgrims,
36:43but also those with less high-minded intentions.
36:50The story goes that a young man broke into the sanctuary where the statue was standing,
36:55and copulated with it, permanently staining the marble thigh with his passion.
37:02I actually think this is a horrible story, because it disrespects and downgrades the goddess
37:09at a time when pretty much the same thing was happening to the flesh-and-blood women of the ancient
37:14world.
37:14Because there is no doubt that, by now, real Greek women were second-class citizens.
37:23They were fed half-rations, they were restricted indoors during daylight hours,
37:28and they were encouraged to be silent and restrained.
37:35The Aphrodite of Gnidos started a craze for seductive nudity that became the basis for all depictions of the goddess.
37:44It was as if Aphrodite's multi-faceted personality had been stripped to focus on physical beauty alone.
37:57But Aphrodite's warrior past was set to rise again.
38:03The Romans, the new masters of the ancient world, would take the goddess and transform her into one of the
38:10most powerful deities in their pantheon.
38:22In ancient Rome, they'd once worshipped a goddess of their own, Venus, who also governed desire and fertility.
38:36But the Greeks had such a cultural influence on Rome that, by the end of the third century BC,
38:42Venus and Aphrodite were officially declared to be one and the same.
38:49To the Romans, Venus was a key figure.
38:53She was the mother of Aeneas, Trojan hero and the founding father of Rome.
38:59So high-born Romans traced their lineage right back to the goddess.
39:05One high-born Roman in particular.
39:09Julius Caesar made a point of publicising and amplifying the fact that Venus had birthed Aeneas
39:15and that his own family were descended from Aeneas and therefore from the goddess.
39:21He actually had this coin minted with Venus on one side and his name Caesar there.
39:28And the picture is of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises, who was Venus' lover, as they escaped from Troy.
39:38Here in Rome, he pushed the point even further.
39:43The year that Caesar was made dictator, he built this massive temple to Venus Genetrix, Venus the mother or ancestor.
39:53Venus, Aphrodite, was becoming a political tool.
40:00Caesar was also the first Roman to give the goddess martial iconography.
40:06Because Aphrodite was the mother of Rome, she couldn't be a meek, gentle goddess, and so she was armed.
40:14She appears dressed in armour on coins and on an engraved ring that Caesar always wore.
40:21It feels as though Caesar's Aphrodite is a bit more like those ferocious Middle Eastern goddesses, Inanna and Ishtar,
40:29who were there right at the beginning of Aphrodite's story.
40:36And there was another connection with the East.
40:39In the first century BC, Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, lived in Rome as Caesar's lover.
40:46Already associated with the Egyptian goddess of fertility, Isis, she was immediately identified with Aphrodite Venus
40:53and a statue of her erected in the temple of Venus Genetrix.
40:58After the assassination of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony gave Cyprus as a love token to Cleopatra.
41:06The living embodiment of Aphrodite was given Aphrodite's isle.
41:13Cleopatra blatantly exploited her connection to the goddess of sex and fertility.
41:19She dressed as Venus Aphrodite, right down to her golden sandals and perfumed oils,
41:26and she even had coils of golden hair tendrilling down her neck.
41:31Actually, that became so popular that Roman ladies would replicate it.
41:35Although, rather gruesomely, they used the hair of captive Germanic slaves.
41:42Now, I'm sure that Cleopatra, who genuinely believed that she was the embodiment of Isis
41:49and of the fertility of Egypt, wasn't doing any of this cynically.
41:53But there's a problem.
41:54Because once looking like Aphrodite becomes a high-end fashion choice,
42:00inevitably, the goddess acquires the characteristics of a pin-up.
42:11By the time of Caesar's successor, Augustus, Aphrodite Venus had once again come to symbolise sex, passion and excess.
42:20But this began to sit uncomfortably with Roman society.
42:29Emperor Augustus publicly venerated Venus because of her links to Caesar.
42:33But privately, she symbolised all he claimed to despise.
42:39He introduced a new moral code, encouraging Romans to be modest and to live within their means.
42:46Venus Aphrodite was being pushed into the shadows.
43:04This is just a small thing, but it's a brilliant bit of evidence for what was going on.
43:10It's a fragment of a wall painting that would originally have been in a fancy Roman villa.
43:17It's obviously Aphrodite.
43:19She's there, gorgeously naked, with her goddess halo and her arm in that typically flirtatious gesture, plucking at her drapery.
43:29But what's really interesting is where this would have been in the villa.
43:35This would have been painted on the wall of a private back room, a bit like a kind of dirty
43:42secret.
43:43An escapist, charged symbol of sensual pleasure and of the now frowned upon luxury of Roman high life.
43:54Things only got worse for the once powerful goddess when Christianity was adopted as the official religion of Rome.
44:02The last bastions of organised worship of Venus and Aphrodite were eradicated in the 4th century AD,
44:10when the Emperor Theodosius the Great passed a series of decrees prohibiting any kind of sacrifice, oracle or chanting in
44:18honour of the pagan gods.
44:22All around the Mediterranean, in Africa, Asia and Europe, Aphrodite's statues, still thought to contain the potent spirit of the
44:32pagan goddess,
44:33were watched warily, or when times were hard, were brought crashing down as scapegoats.
44:40Churches were built on her temple sites, even here, at her once great sanctuary of Paphos.
44:52Venus, Aphrodite, in all her forms, had been worshipped across the Mediterranean for thousands of years.
44:59Now her altars were neglected and bare.
45:06It was the end of Venus's worship as a goddess, but it's by no means the end of her story.
45:22For a millennium and a half, Europe has been living with Christianity, a religion which has often taken a dim
45:29view of sex and sexuality.
45:34But now, you can walk around the galleries of the world, surrounded by Venus's.
45:42The Renaissance kindled an ongoing fascination with antiquity.
45:48Venus is back, but as a rather different kind of creature.
45:54And there's one place that I think exemplifies that rebirth.
46:12In one of the great houses of the English aristocracy, built 1,200 years after Venus worship was banned,
46:20almost every corner is devoted to the goddess of love and her familiars.
46:30This place is really quite extraordinary because at every turn, there's a Venus or an Aphrodite.
46:38Over there on the wall, if you can see, there's Aphrodite nicking one of Cupid's arrows.
46:45And then up here, she's teasing Cupid again, stealing his bow, holding it away from him.
46:53And then if you look up at the ceiling, it is a celebration of all the stories in Aphrodite's life.
47:06This is West Wickham Park in Buckinghamshire, home to the Dashwood family for the past 400 years.
47:15This collection of Venus's is the life's work of Sir Francis Dashwood, the house's most notorious occupant.
47:24In the 1740s, Sir Francis, like many gentlemen of his age, had gone on the Grand Tour, a journey through
47:32Europe and across the Ottoman Empire,
47:33and he fell in love with the culture of the classical world.
47:42But there was something else.
47:44Like many other young men of the time, he also got his first taste of life away from his parents
47:50and school teachers.
47:51Young and single, with money to burn in romantic, exotic locations,
47:57Dashwood clearly came to associate the civilisations that he encountered with sexual freedom and behaviour well beyond the bounds of
48:06polite society.
48:10Sir Francis and others like him found sex and the classics at one and the same time.
48:16They conceived a vision of the ancient world as a sexual playground they could imitate, shockingly, back home.
48:24And my goodness, he went for it.
48:27He used to like to depict himself as a monk, although rather than kneeling before God or the Virgin Mary,
48:34he'd be paying his respects to the goddess Venus Aphrodite.
48:41It's not just a fantasy.
48:43He formed, we're told, a monastic fraternity of like-minded dilettantes who dressed as monks and held pagan-inspired orgies.
48:54They'd meet twice a week on Wednesdays and Saturdays during parliamentary recess.
49:00Most of them were MPs to engage in orgiastic and hedonistic ritual.
49:05Their motto was,
49:10Do whatever you would like, and outsiders could only begin to imagine what went on.
49:18Every sacred rite of religion was profaned, said one.
49:22There were rumours of women freely available to members.
49:27Contemporaries knew them as the Hellfire Club.
49:33For these public school boys, wide-eyed with the sensuous pleasures of the Mediterranean, Aphrodite was being reclaimed,
49:43a patron of the pleasures of the flesh, a gorgeous antidote to the dour repression of Christianity.
49:57In the grounds of the park, Dashwood actually erected his own Temple of Venus.
50:03The room underneath it was said by one of the members to be oval in imitation of the female sex
50:09organs,
50:10which gives you an idea what was really on his mind.
50:16Now, you could argue that the goddess is being rehabilitated.
50:20She's being revered once again, and she's helping to spearhead a kind of sexual revolution.
50:26But there's a big part of me that thinks that the cult of Venus here
50:31was really just a cover-up for something more mundane and probably even sordid.
50:36The men involved were politicians and academics and aristocrats.
50:41And the women? Well, they were cool girls and courtesans and prostitutes.
50:47This was hardly a paradise of free and equal love.
50:52Although, for some, Aphrodite Venus was definitely once again the subject of adoration,
50:59I'm pretty sure also what she's doing here is becoming an agent of exploitation.
51:06With Venus as their figurehead, men like Dashwood across Europe were indulging in their own kind of sexual liberation.
51:19Venus was back on a pedestal, but once more she'd become something to leer at.
51:36In many ways, that is now Venus's diminished legacy.
51:41Our own world's obsession with the naked female form.
51:50It began with Botticelli.
51:53Painted in the 1480s, when classical subjects were coming back into vogue,
51:59this imagining of Venus's Cypriot birth is in many ways the birth of the modern nude.
52:07Other gods and goddesses could be naked, but Venus was the one who by her nature was supposed to inspire
52:13desire and love.
52:15That challenged artists to produce ever raunchier images.
52:31Take this striking 17th century painting.
52:34There's Aphrodite Venus, a satire, and her son Cupid.
52:40Here Aphrodite's become available.
52:43She's little more than a sex object, with Cupid resting after picking off his mortal victims with those poisoned arrows.
52:53What has survived from the ancient world is her nakedness, and that's a very tenacious part of her appeal.
53:01Aphrodite might no longer be regarded as a goddess, but she was still big box office.
53:10The models for most of these paintings were courtesans, and so the boundary between an image of Venus and one
53:18of a prostitute was becoming increasingly blurred.
53:22In Velazquez's painting, it's only the Cupid in the corner that makes the distinction clear.
53:30It was this salacious version of the goddess that angered and frustrated the suffragette, who slashed her painting in the
53:37National Gallery in 1914.
53:41It's a sad fate for a goddess who was originally a protector and figurehead for women.
53:48Women, long associated with the goddess, it seems would turn against Aphrodite.
53:54She'd become an object of political frustration, rather than a subject of adoration.
54:06But the story doesn't end there.
54:09The Venus of sculptors and painters might have become a cipher for men's fascination with the female body.
54:17But if you know where to look, you can find places where Venus, the sacred figure, has found a way
54:24to live on.
54:34In Cyprus, every Easter, a festival takes place.
54:41On Good Friday, the women of the community get together and pick flowers to decorate an empty bier for the
54:48crucified Christ.
54:51In the hope that he'll be resurrected on the third day.
54:56But it's a festival that doesn't have its origins in Christianity.
55:01Because the women of Cyprus were doing the same thing for another hero centuries before Christ's birth and death.
55:14Aphrodite, as you may recall, had fallen madly in love with Adonis.
55:18But her passion was unrequited.
55:22And then, to boot, he was gored to death by a wild boar.
55:28Desperate, running to him, thorns tall at her skin as she passed, colouring roses red.
55:35And then she, in turn, transformed his blood into anemone flowers.
55:42Wailing and tearing at her chest in distraction, the intensity of her passion brought Adonis back to life.
55:49And this was a story that was remembered across the classical world in a yearly festival called the Adonia.
55:56Women would make a wooden image of Adonis, put it on a wooden plank, and then decorate it in flowers
56:02in the hope that they would bring it back to life.
56:04They would wail and beat at their chests in sympathy with Aphrodite.
56:10When Christianity came to Cyprus, these themes of resurrection and new life were translated into the Easter rituals.
56:19So, in many ways, the spirit of Aphrodite still lives on.
56:26If Adonis has become Jesus, then Aphrodite, the divine woman who mourned him, is now the Virgin Mary.
56:37A church to Mary All-Holy even stands on the site of the ancient temple to Aphrodite, all-powerful Queen
56:44of Heaven.
56:47The goddess has influenced so many archetypes we have of womanhood today.
56:53From the seductive temptress, even in some places, to the Madonna herself.
57:10Whatever we call her, Venus, Aphrodite, Ishtar or Inanna, somehow this goddess remains alive in our minds.
57:20A figure that embodies for us those feelings inside that draw us to one another and that pull us apart.
57:31It seems to be a human need to dwell on and to hold in awe that immortal, beguiling force that
57:40drives us as humans.
57:48The men and women of the ancient world understood that desire was complex, dangerous, hugely powerful and worthy of respect.
57:59We insult desire's divine incarnation if we reduce Venus Aphrodite merely to a patron of physical love.
58:09Instead, we should remember, as the ancients did, that desire is transformative and not always in a good way.
58:17And that it's down to us to make desire our ally, not our undoing.
58:33To be continued...
58:34To be continued...
58:35To be continued...
58:35To be continued...