Venus Uncovered: Ancient Goddess of Love

At ten o'clock on March the 10th 1914,

a suffragette called Mary Richardson walked through the front door

of the National Gallery in London.

A meat cleaver was hidden in her clothing.

For 90 minutes she wandered the museum,

waiting for a lapse in security before making her way

to the gallery's latest acquisition.

The celebrated Rokeby Venus by Velazquez.

The galley had recently raised the princely sum of £45,000

to save the painting for the nation.

And people had come from all across the country to see it.

But Mary Richardson took the weapon that she'd been hiding in her sleeve

and started to slash furiously at the canvas.

If you look carefully you can just about make out the marks

where it's been repaired.

"I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in

"mythological history," she said.

"I couldn't stand the way men stood and gawped at it all day long."

And you can understand why.

This painting's previous owner, a Yorkshire MP,

described it as his "fine picture of Venus' backside".

This is the deity who led Greek heroes to their deaths,

whom Roman generals honoured with sacrifice before battle,

who was the incarnation of the ecstasy and agony of lust and love,

reduced to a showgirl, bearing herself for a viewing public.

Venus, Aphrodite.

While other gods of the past fade into obscurity,

she's a goddess we think we all know.

We remember her now for her beauty, for Cupid's bow,

words like aphrodisiac and venereal.

But in this film I want to shatter that illusion,

travelling to her haunts both ancient and modern...

Every turn there's a Venus or an Aphrodite.

..to her deep origins as a shape-shifting spirit of creation

and destruction...

They needed her because in most times life was hard.

..the force ancient people saw behind all lusts and urges.

If you violently desire somebody physically, sexually,

that's likely to cause the bad kind of strife.

Her story has far more to offer us today than just the beautiful curve

of her bottom.

Now, I've got no intention whatsoever of being carted off

to prison for vandalising a priceless artwork,

but I do want to take a knife to the idea

of Venus as a bit of divine totty.

It's time to get back to the goddess as the ancients understood her,

an elemental creature whose domain was the complex power

of human desire.

Venus has been called many names through history.

The ancient Greeks knew her as Aphrodite.

It was they who first told the iconic story of her birth,

arising fully formed from the sea.

It happened, they thought, not in some mythical land,

but in a real place, the sea off the island of Cyprus.

These balmy surroundings are at odds

with what's actually a pretty lurid story.

Into the sea, the myth says,

the severed genitals of the sky god,

Uranus, were flung by his son, Chronos.

The god's genitalia landed with a surging splash,

and out of the foam rose an awful and lovely maiden,

the goddess Aphrodite.

What's striking is how violent this imagery is.

The ancient myths are often pretty vivid, but this one

really is extraordinary.

Aphrodite's gruesome origins give her one of her epithets.

She was Philomedes' lover of male genitals.

And, indeed, her name, the Greek word aphros, means foam.

So, Aphrodite was foam born.

When she stepped ashore they believed this elemental creature

brought fertility to the barren earth.

For centuries, those who worshipped her would commemorate

this vivid seaside scene.

Her intimate connection to the sea meant that she was often honoured

with sea shells, scallop shells in particular.

We find them in her temples,

and in graves right across the eastern Mediterranean.

And they're often pierced,

so we think that worshippers would have worn them around their necks,

a representation of female sexuality.

The ancients really believed this Cypriot birth story.

They often called Aphrodite Kypris, the lady of Cyprus.

But what evidence is there that this is where her cult began?

In the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia are stored thousands

of finds unearthed from the island's prehistory.

There are strong hints that sexual potency was in fact venerated here,

long before even the Greeks reached the island,

as far back as 4000 BC.

Right across the south of the island archaeologists and local farmers

kept on turning up these strange figurines,

so far, over 200 of them.

What you can't fail to notice is how sexual they are.

There's focus on the vulva and the neck, and the head is distinctly

phallic. We don't know exactly what these were used for.

Some have suggested they were educational tools.

But I think they were probably a kind of incarnation of the spirit of

fertility that those prehistoric populations

were desperate to keep on side.

Spiritual beliefs must in some sense be the explanation

for these figures,

clearly something to do with the mysteries of sex and procreation.

But one figure above all has attracted particular attention.

Found lying on its back surrounded by other smaller sculptures,

some scholars speculate that this could be the deity him, or herself.

She's 5,000 years old, made of limestone

and is affectionately known as the Lady of Lemba.

And she might just be an early glimpse of the spirit

that eventually becomes the great goddess Aphrodite.

It's a tempting thought that this sexually charged Stone Age figure

was where the whole story of Venus Aphrodite began.

But the goddess was a more mixed-up creature than that.

Her origins lie not only in Cyprus,

but in other places far further afield.

Cyprus sits less than 100 miles from, arguably,

the most creative cultural nexus of prehistory,

the Fertile Crescent...

..the area that stretches from modern-day Iraq

to the eastern shores of the Mediterranean,

a source of much of what would later constitute Greek and Roman culture.

It's for that reason I keep coming back to countries like Jordan.

This region has a special allure for an historian,

the birthplace of so many of the ideas that have shaped civilisation,

agriculture, the city and of course all kinds of religion.

It's a story that goes back further than you'd think.

We're used to the idea that the Middle East gave birth

to the Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

But they're relative newcomers.

Right back at the very birth of civilisation,

around 5,000 years ago, these lands also generated this feisty creature.

She is known as Ishtar, Astarte or Inanna.

Ishtar was the goddess of sexual love,

worshipped in various names and guises

across the ancient Near and Middle East.

Unlike the Stone Age figurines of Cyprus,

her story was written down by the scribes of Sumeria,

Babylon and Akkadia.

It's a story that seems to prefigure Aphrodite's.

We hear from the eastern epics that this regal divinity had a mortal

lover, a shepherd boy called Dumuzid.

Now, Dumuzid died tragically and the goddess was so distraught she was

given permission to bring him back to life

for three months of the year.

It's a fairly clear allegory for the cycle of life,

but it's also fascinating as this is exactly the tale

told later by Greeks about Aphrodite.

Her shepherd boy lover, though, was called Adonis, not Dumuzid.

It's strong evidence for the fact that Ishtar,

Inanna was early source material for Aphrodite.

If that's true, the original Aphrodite wasn't to be messed with.

Just listen to what one of her priestesses wrote about her.

"Lady of blazing dominion, clad in dread. Riding on fire-red power.

"Flood, storm, hurricane adorned.

"Battle planner, foe smasher."

Ishtar and Inanna were warrior goddesses,

often pictured in military attire,

formidable queens of heaven and earth.

Archaeologists now know that the story of Ishtar reached the island

of Cyprus in the boats of travellers and traders.

And there, she merged with the sexually charged ancient deity

they already worshipped.

When Eastern and Cypriot influences are combined,

this is how the ancestor of Aphrodite ends up

being represented on the island.

She is a strange mixture of bird, beast and woman,

a creature of both day and night.

And just amazing to think of the world that those clay eyes

would have looked out on.

It's hard to pin down exactly who the sublime creature was

so early in her history, but it's easy to read into these features

a figure who combined exaggerated feminine sexuality

with potential to inflict fear and terror on human beings.

How was it that this ferocious figure became the heavenly beauty

we picture as the classical Aphrodite?

From the 12th century BC,

Greeks from the mainland began arriving in Cyprus.

The island became the linchpin in an intercontinental exchange

of goods and ideas.

The Greeks, wowed by the great Cypriot goddess, adopted her

into their own divine system...

..eventually giving her the name Aphrodite.

"Aphrodite, who loves laughter and smiles,

"went to Paphos on Cyprus and her precinct there.

"The Graces bathed her and rubbed her with ambrosial oil

"that glistens on the skin of the immortal gods,

"and then they dressed her in beautiful clothes.

"A wonder to see."

Epic poems by Homer, the very first works of European literature,

describe her vividly.

And where there were inscrutable figurines,

there is now a character with a story.

Aphrodite is part of a family of gods, with Zeus at the head.

She is married to Hephaestus, the lame blacksmith god,

but in an adulterous affair with the God of War, Aries.

She has mortal lovers, too,

most notably the doomed shepherd boy Adonis.

Her son is called Eros, which literally means desire.

His Latin name is Cupid.

While other goddesses are virgins or mother figures,

Aphrodite is seductive, unpredictable, disruptive.

The bird heads and the phalluses are gone.

Aphrodite, the beautiful goddess, has arrived.

One site, more than any other, is associated with that moment

of rebirth, The Sanctuary of Paphos.

Hello. Is that Jacqueline?

-Hello.

-Hello!

So pleased to meet you.

So pleased to see you.

Thank you so much.

French archaeologist Jacqueline Karageorghis

has spent a lifetime working here.

It is wonderful to have you decode it for me.

Why is this sanctuary so important in understanding the story

of Aphrodite?

Because it is here that the Goddess became Aphrodite.

When the Greeks came in the 12th century BC from mainland Greece

and settled in Paphos, they may have already found a previous goddess

who was the goddess of fertility.

They transformed her by giving her different qualities.

The Greeks added to the primitive goddess of sex and fertility,

who had violence in her,

they added more refined qualities of tenderness, of love,

of desire and especially the added beauty.

This sanctuary became little by little very important

and it was considered as important as Delphi.

It is amazing when you come here just to think

of what this place meant to the men and women

who worshipped Aphrodite.

Yes, she was called Theia, the goddess.

Or Aphaea, the goddess from Paphos.

There was no other in the place and she was helpful

in every field of life, in the fertility, for men, for nature.

Some people came here to worship her, bringing incense.

But bloody sacrifices were forbidden here because she was essentially

a goddess protecting life.

For the men and women of those days,

this was also important because she was absolutely real,

they had to worship her and adore her to get her protection.

Yes. Without her, I think they felt helpless.

And they needed her, because in those times, life was hard,

full of dangers, full of diseases,

with agriculture giving not so abundant crops,

so they really needed help from somewhere.

And this goddess was providing hope.

And she added to the primitive act of generation,

feeling and beauty and care.

And this is the basis of our European civilisation

and I think this is why Aphrodite is very important.

She teaches us the possibility of love.

All this was made in Cyprus.

In this site, we start to get a sense of the scale and significance

of Aphrodite's cult here on Cyprus.

The sanctuary at Paphos allows us to jigsaw-puzzle together the evidence.

Ancient sources tell us that it was protected by wonderful golden gates

and shaded by fruit trees,

that you could hear the sound of ritual purification

and that the air was heavy with the smell of perfume and incense.

Being here, you really do feel close to those thousands of worshippers

who came to the sanctuary to seek the power,

the protection and the pity of the goddess.

And nearby, we can lay eyes on further evidence of how Aphrodite

was worshipped by the man, and critically the woman, on the street.

Beautiful. What's the date of this vase?

It's eighth century BC.

So it's a very animated scene here.

Yes. It's one of the rarest pictorial representations,

compositions, of a ritual dance.

There are some women dancing, and they are holding flowers.

In the middle, there is a lyre player, he is playing music.

And there is a tree, a kind of tree of life.

So you can see the symbolism as well as the ritual dance.

It is just fabulous to see this,

because then you think of this site at Paphos and just imagine it filled

with this kind of activity.

And you can imagine that this was happening in every sanctuary.

And if you come round to this side, there's more to see.

Oh, yes.

-What is this curious creature at the end?

-It's a sphinx.

It's a mythical animal.

Which, in this case, she is smelling a flower.

And so this, together with the bull mask,

shows that we are perhaps in a cultic environment.

And you can see this lady holding several jugs

and attending to another lady who is sitting high up on this,

maybe throne or high chair, her feet on a stool,

and she is getting ready to drink some kind of liquid from a straw,

from this jar here.

Maybe wine, maybe an alcoholic drink, we don't know.

Because they made beer, as well.

They made wine, yes, they made alcoholic drinks.

And who do we think this lady is?

Well, she might be representing a priestess or even the deity herself,

we don't know exactly.

But the fact that we have some symbolic elements in this scene

allows us to hypothesise, to infer, that perhaps

it wasn't an ordinary person.

It must have been either a priestess or the deity.

Fascinatingly, she is being worshipped,

not just by bearded priests but by priestesses

and crowds of devoted women.

It is a tantalising glimpse of who it was back then

who helped Aphrodite's cult flourish.

The early Aphrodite was worshipped by everyone in the community

but she seems to have had a particular following amongst women.

We know this not just from pictures on pots,

but from the first named woman writer in European history, Sappho.

This enigmatic figure lived on the island of Lesbos

in the seventh century BC.

It's from her that we get our terms lesbian and Sapphic,

because her sensual love poetry was addressed

not to men but to other women.

And she attributed that passion to her patron goddess, Aphrodite.

I just love Sappho because she deals with Aphrodite

in such an intimate, personal way.

She describes one of the goddess's temples with real joy,

talking about it being surrounded by fruit trees and roses

and spring flowers.

And she turns the deity into someone you can pray to directly

for help. This is one of Sappho's hymns to Aphrodite.

"O golden one.

"You come down from the heavens,

"my blessed goddess with a smile on your deathless face.

"And you ask me what the matter was this time,

"why I had called for you."

Sappho's poetry brings vividly to life a world

where women and young girls are joined in the worship

of Aphrodite, and enjoying the pleasures of desire,

but also confronting the pain and suffering that desire can generate.

If I had my way, I think I'd have Sappho's hymns to Aphrodite

taught in all schools, because she gets the experience of first love

so perfectly.

She describes fire creeping under your skin and the fact that you feel

as if you are possessed, and she is actually the first person ever

to describe love as being bittersweet.

Although she's a bit more honest and she says that it's sweet,

and then bitter.

Through Sappho, we can hear the intimate agonies

and the yearning of a woman who lived 2,500 years ago.

A rare and poignant portrait of Aphrodite in action.

She reveals a deity with whom women felt a special connection

and a driver of their intense homoerotic relationships.

Because the ancients knew that desire wasn't confined

to one gender.

This figurine was found here at Amathus.

The original dates from the sixth century BC

and it seems to show a bearded Aphrodite.

The goddess has got a woman's body and a man's face and facial hair.

Now this is really interesting because there is a historian

from Amathus called Paeon of Amathus who tells us

that the Cypriot goddess sometimes took on the form of a man.

Evidence like this has led some archaeologists and historians

to suggest that the worshippers of Aphrodite were androgynous

or sexually ambivalent.

Well, maybe.

But what this says to me is that by being both male and female,

Aphrodite was nourishing sexuality in whatever form

as a surging life force.

And the bearded lady was by no means the oddest Aphrodite on Cyprus.

There is another from the same time that reminds us

that the ancients still saw Aphrodite as something dark

and ineffable.

This volcanic rock is the form that the goddess was worshipped in

here at Paphos. Access to the stone was highly restricted,

it was originally painted in white,

and it would be oiled and decorated with flowers.

It does feel very primordial and otherworldly, almost sci-fi

and, frankly, a bit weird.

But it's not just us who feel that way.

The Roman author Tacitus, when he visited the site,

said that the origins of the worship of Aphrodite

in this form are obscure.

The Greek poets might have made Aphrodite sensual and beautiful,

but they had not extinguished the sometimes sinister ways

that people imagined her.

She is adored in a myriad of different forms...

..as Aphrodite Homonoia, Aphrodite of union,

Aphrodite Harmonia, Aphrodite of harmony,

but also as Aphrodite Epistrophia, Aphrodite the deceiver,

and Aphrodite Melainis, Aphrodite of the dark night.

She was a creature of summer and winter, of life and of death.

In the minds of the ancients,

her power pulsed through the natural and supernatural world,

creating and destroying at will.

They saw her in the miracle of human and animal reproduction,

the glue of mutual love and respect that holds societies together,

but also the malignant desires that can destroy lives

and pull communities apart.

One example was the disturbing story of the Cypriot hero Cinyras.

Cinyras was a priest and a king, and somehow his daughter

offended Aphrodite, and in retribution, she punished her

in the most awful way, by making her fall in love with her own father.

Cinyras was tricked into sleeping with his daughter

and, learning the horrific truth,

he then advanced on her in a murderous rage.

Just as he was about to kill her,

Aphrodite took pity on the young girl and intervened

and turned her into a tree.

Now, this does something very typical of the classical myths,

it makes men and women face up to the more troubling aspects

of human society, to deal head-on with the darker

and disturbing issues of being human.

The myth of Cinyras is no exception.

Aphrodite was more often than not a menacing figure

who destroyed lives by inflicting perverse infatuations.

I've come to meet Professor Paul Cartledge to try to thrash out

what the Greeks meant by these disquieting stories.

Well, she embodies a kind of love which isn't necessarily bad,

but it has a risk of becoming divisive.

And the Greeks were very conscious that Aphrodite and aphrodisia,

sexual activity, was potentially dangerous, as well as profitable.

Because they talk about Aphrodite's love as being maddening,

creating this limb-loosening desire. And as you say,

that is not a good thing because you are losing control.

That's right. I mean, the basic Greek word for lust or desire

we sometimes mistranslate as love,

it is eros, and it is where we get erotic from.

But for them, eros was potentially quite damaging. If you lose control,

if you direct your lust at the wrong object,

if you violently desire somebody physically, sexually,

that's likely to cause the bad kind of strife.

So Greeks tended to have a slightly, you could say,

realistic or you could say a rather pessimistic notion

of the relationship between love and hate.

Really fascinating,

because neuroscientists tell us now the boundary between love and hate

is very, very slim, but the Greeks got there 2,500 years ago.

Yeah. Aphrodite is a wonderful teacher,

that is to say in her myths, all the various versions of her,

you can learn that love is not any one simple thing.

She herself, in Homer, is actually married.

And not many gods and goddesses,

apart from Hera and Zeus, are actually married to anybody.

So it is quite interesting. There is almost a contradiction,

that on the one hand, she is a free spirit, she commits adultery,

she's a very bad girl.

But on the other hand, she also is, if a couple are happy,

sexually as well as others,

then she also can be there, part of the household.

And that seems to me why Aphrodite's story is so helpful,

because it can help us all decode our lives and our world

-in the 21st century.

-I agree with that.

I would like to think that we would privilege the gentle,

the harmonious, the unanimity aspects of Aphrodite,

rather than the eristic, that's to say the strife-torn version.

But, yes, it certainly should be a shaping force.

I sometimes wonder whether Aphrodite is the wound and bandage.

Well, actually, that's a very ancient Greek thought,

that the same god who causes damage is also the one that cures it.

In our own society we're used to thinking in terms of good and evil,

but the Greeks saw the world in a different way

as the push and pull of multiple different forces,

which could be good and bad, each represented by a god.

In Aphrodite's case, that was the double-edged sword of humans' desire

for one another.

The ancients understood something about desire and lust

that we can pussyfoot around a bit today.

We celebrate desire when it gives us our first kiss,

or a passionate relationship, or hot sex.

But if you think about it,

these are the same forces that can result in unrequited love,

or abusive obsessive relationships, or sex crimes like rape and incest.

Desire lures us into doing crazy things that can really wreck lives,

and the Greeks didn't pretend that this bad stuff didn't happen.

Instead, they gave these urges, both malign and benign,

a name and a face, Aphrodite.

Human relationships are hard.

The Greeks got that.

They didn't romanticise desire.

Arguably, they challenge us to think more honestly about the problems

that come with trying to live together.

But the Greeks also set in train a kind of prejudice

that proved worryingly tenacious.

Increasingly in Greek myth Aphrodite was turned into a

kind of home-breaker, inciting women in particular, and men,

to do dark deeds.

As the divine ally of Helen of Troy,

she was blamed for the dread suffering of the Trojan War.

It was said that Aphrodite was desperate to be declared the fairest

of all the goddesses

and so she offered the most beautiful woman in the world,

Helen, to the Prince of Troy, Paris.

Suffusing Helen with himeros, desire, she persuaded her

to leave her home, her husband and her daughter and to run off

with Paris with his glistening love locks.

A hero race of godlike men were destroyed by rich-tressed Helen,

Aphrodite's plaything.

There is an implication that sexual union with women

is an inescapable curse that weakens men.

Aphrodite and her son, Eros, drive men mad with their entrapping nets

and poisoned arrows...

..and mortal women are credited with dangerous sexual appetites.

Sex, or Ta Aphrodisia,

the things of Aphrodite, as it was called in the ancient world,

was increasingly thought to be an inconvenient distraction

from the manly business of fighting and empire building,

and a woman's fault.

The root of much of the denigration of Aphrodite, and then Venus,

lies in the ancient world itself.

It was in ancient Greece that the goddess first became an object

to ogle at, as well as idolise.

The development of naturalistic sculpture offered human forms

that you could lust after.

In the fourth century BC,

Praxiteles of Athens carved the legendary Aphrodite of Knidos.

The original is lost, but it was the first full-sized

naked female stone sculpture in Greek history.

It was so intensely sensuous that it became emblematic

and was copied in its own time and for centuries after.

The original statue is said to have attracted countless pilgrims,

but also those with less high-minded intentions.

The story goes that a young man broke into the sanctuary

where the statue was standing and copulated with it,

permanently staining the marble thigh with his passion.

I actually think this is a horrible story,

because it disrespects and downgrades the goddess

at a time when pretty much the same thing was happening

to the flesh-and-blood women of the ancient world,

because there is no doubt that by now real Greek women

were second-class citizens.

They were fed half-rations,

they were restricted indoors during daylight hours

and they were encouraged to be silent and restrained.

The Aphrodite of Knidos started a craze for seductive nudity

that became the basis for all depictions of the goddess.

It was as if Aphrodite's multifaceted personality

had been stripped to focus on physical beauty alone.

But Aphrodite's warrior past was set to rise again.

The Romans, the new masters of the ancient world,

would take the goddess and transform her

into one of the most powerful deities in their pantheon.

In ancient Rome, they had once worshipped a goddess of their own,

Venus, who also governed desire and fertility.

But the Greeks had such a cultural influence on Rome

that by the end of the third century BC,

Venus and Aphrodite were officially declared to be one and the same.

To the Romans, Venus was a key figure.

She was the mother of Aeneas,

Trojan hero and the founding father of Rome.

So, highborn Romans traced their lineage right back to the goddess.

One highborn Roman in particular.

Julius Caesar made a point of publicising and amplifying the fact

that Venus had birthed Aeneas,

and that his own family were descended from Aeneas

and therefore from the goddess.

He actually had this coin minted with Venus on one side

and his name Caesar there,

and the picture is of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises,

who was Venus's lover, as they escaped from Troy.

Here in Rome, he pushed the point even further.

The year that Caesar was made dictator,

he built this massive temple for Venus Genetrix,

Venus the mother or ancestor.

Venus Aphrodite was becoming a political tool.

Caesar was also the first Roman

to give the goddess martial iconography.

Because Aphrodite was the mother of Rome, she couldn't be a meek,

gentle goddess, and so she was armed.

She appears dressed in armour on coins and on an engraved ring

that Caesar always wore.

It feels as though Caesar's Aphrodite is a bit more

like those ferocious Middle Eastern goddesses Inanna and Ishtar,

who are there right at the beginning of Aphrodite's story.

And there was another connection with the East.

In the first century BC, Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt,

lived in Rome as Caesar's lover.

Already associated with the Egyptian goddess of fertility, Isis,

she was immediately identified with Aphrodite Venus,

and a statue of her erected in the Temple of Venus Genetrix.

After the assassination of Julius Caesar,

Mark Antony gave Cyprus as a love token to Cleopatra.

The living embodiment of Aphrodite was given Aphrodite's isle.

Cleopatra blatantly exploited her connection to the goddess of sex

and fertility.

She dressed as Venus Aphrodite right down to the golden sandals

and perfumed oils,

and she even had coils of golden hair tendrilling down her neck.

Actually that became so popular that Roman ladies would replicate it,

although, rather gruesomely,

they used the hair of captive Germanic slaves.

Now, I'm sure that Cleopatra,

who genuinely believed that she was the embodiment of Isis and of the

fertility of Egypt, wasn't doing any of this cynically.

But there's a problem,

because once looking like Aphrodite becomes a high-end fashion choice,

inevitably the goddess acquires the characteristics of a pin-up.

By the time of Caesar's successor, Augustus,

Aphrodite Venus had once again come to symbolise sex,

passion and excess, but this began to sit uncomfortably

with Roman society.

Emperor Augustus publicly venerated Venus

because of her links to Caesar,

but privately she symbolised all he claimed to despise.

He introduced a new moral code,

encouraging Romans to be modest and to live within their means.

Venus Aphrodite was being pushed into the shadows.

This is just a small thing,

but it's a brilliant bit of evidence for what was going on.

It's a fragment of a wall painting that would originally have been

in a fancy Roman villa.

It's obviously Aphrodite.

She's there gorgeously naked,

with her goddess halo and her arm in that typically flirtatious gesture,

plucking at her drapery.

But what's really interesting is where this would have been

in the villa.

This would have been painted on the wall of a private backroom,

a bit like a kind of dirty secret,

an escapist, charged symbol of sensual pleasure,

and of the now frowned upon luxury of Roman highlife.

Things only got worse for the once powerful goddess

when Christianity was adopted as the official religion of Rome.

The last bastions of organised worship of Venus and Aphrodite

were eradicated in the fourth century AD,

when the Emperor Theodosius the Great passed a series of decrees

prohibiting any kind of sacrifice,

oracle or chanting in honour of the pagan gods.

All around the Mediterranean, in Africa, Asia and Europe,

Aphrodite's statues, still thought to contain the potent spirit

of the pagan goddess, were watched warily,

or when times were hard, were brought crashing down as scapegoats.

Churches were built on her temple sites,

even here at her once great sanctuary Paphos.

Venus Aphrodite, in all reforms,

had been worshipped across the Mediterranean

for thousands of years. Now her altars were neglected and bare.

It was the end of Venus's worship as a goddess,

but it's by no means the end of her story.

For a millennium and a half, Europe has been living with Christianity,

a religion which has often taken a dim view of sex and sexuality.

But now you can walk around the galleries of the world

surrounded by Venuses.

The Renaissance kindled an ongoing fascination with antiquity.

Venus is back, but as a rather different kind of creature.

And there's one place that I think exemplifies that rebirth.

In one of the great houses of the English aristocracy,

built 1,200 years after Venus worship was banned,

almost every corner is devoted to the goddess of love

and her familiars.

This place is really quite extraordinary,

because at every turn there's a Venus or Aphrodite.

Over there on the wall, I don't know if you can see, there is Aphrodite

nicking one of Cupid's arrows.

And then up here she's teasing Cupid again, stealing his bow,

holding it away from him.

And then if you look up at the ceiling,

it is a celebration of all the stories in Aphrodite's life.

This is West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire,

home to the Dashwood family for the past 400 years.

This collection of Venuses is the life's work of Sir Francis Dashwood,

the house's most notorious occupant.

In the 1740s, Sir Francis, like many gentlemen of his age,

had gone on the Grand Tour,

a journey through Europe and across the Ottoman Empire,

and he fell in love with the culture of the classical world.

But there was something else.

Like many other young men of the time,

he also got his first taste of life away from his parents

and schoolteachers. Young and single, with money to burn

in romantic, exotic locations,

Dashwood clearly came to associate the civilisations

that he encountered with sexual freedom and behaviour

well beyond the bounds of polite society.

Sir Francis and others like him found sex and the classics

at one and the same time.

They conceived a vision of the ancient world as a sexual playground

they could imitate shockingly back home.

And, my goodness, he went for it.

He used to like to depict himself as a monk,

although rather than kneeling before God or the Virgin Mary

he'd be paying his respects to the goddess Venus Aphrodite.

It's not just a fantasy.

He formed, we're told, a monastic fraternity

of like-minded dilettantes,

who dressed as monks and held pagan-inspired orgies.

They'd meet twice a week,

on Wednesdays and Saturdays during parliamentary recess,

most of them were MPs,

to engage in orgiastic and hedonistic rituals.

Their motto was "fais ce que tu voudras".

"Do whatever you would like."

And outsiders can only begin to imagine what went on.

Every sacred rite of religion was profaned, said one.

There were rumours of women freely available to members.

Contemporaries knew them as the Hellfire Club.

For these public schoolboys,

wide-eyed with the sensuous pleasures of the Mediterranean,

Aphrodite was being reclaimed,

a patron of the pleasures of the flesh,

a gorgeous antidote to the dour repression of Christianity.

In the grounds of the park,

Dashwood actually erected his own Temple of Venus.

The room underneath it was said by one of the members to be oval,

in imitation of the female sex organs,

which gives you an idea what was really on his mind.

Now, you could argue that the goddess was being rehabilitated.

She's being revered once again,

and she is helping to spearhead a kind of sexual revolution.

There is a big part of me that thinks that the cult of Venus here

was really just a cover-up for something more mundane

and probably even sordid.

The men involved were politicians and academics and aristocrats.

And the women?

Well, they were call girls and courtesans and prostitutes.

I mean, this was hardly a paradise of free and equal love.

Although for some Aphrodite Venus was definitely once again

the subject of adoration,

I'm pretty sure also what she's doing here

is becoming an agent of exploitation.

With Venus as their figurehead, men like Dashwood across Europe

were indulging in their own kind of sexual liberation.

Venus was back on a pedestal.

But once more she'd become something to leer at.

In many ways, that is now Venus's diminished legacy...

..our own world's obsession with the naked female form.

It began with Botticelli.

Painted in the 1480s,

when classical subjects were coming back into vogue,

this imagining of Venus's Cypriot birth is, in many ways,

the birth of the modern nude.

Other gods and goddesses could be naked,

but Venus was the one who by her nature

was supposed to inspire desire and love.

That challenged artists to produce ever raunchier images.

Take this striking 17th-century painting.

There is Aphrodite Venus, a satyr and her son, Cupid.

But here Aphrodite has become available.

She's little more than a sex object,

with Cupid resting after picking off his mortal victims

with those poisoned arrows.

What has survived from the ancient world is her nakedness,

and that's a very tenacious part of her appeal.

Aphrodite might no longer be regarded as a goddess,

but she was still big box office.

The models from most of these paintings were courtesans,

and so the boundary between an image of Venus and one of a prostitute

was becoming increasingly blurred.

In Velazquez's painting, it's only the Cupid in the corner

that makes the distinction clear.

It was this salacious version of the goddess that angered and frustrated

the suffragette who slashed her painting

in the National Gallery in 1914.

It's a sad fate for a goddess who was originally a protector

and figurehead for women.

Women, long associated with the goddess,

it seems were turning against Aphrodite.

She'd become an object of political frustration,

rather than a subject of adoration.

But the story doesn't end there.

The Venus of sculptures and painters might have become a cipher

for men's fascination with the female body,

but if you know where to look you can find places where Venus,

the sacred figure, has found a way to live on.

In Cyprus, every Easter a festival takes place.

On Good Friday, the women of the community get together and pick

flowers to decorate an empty bier for the crucified Christ,

in the hope that he'll be resurrected on the third day.

But it's a festival that doesn't have its origins in Christianity,

because the women of Cyprus were doing the same thing

for another hero centuries before Christ's birth and death.

Aphrodite, as you may recall, had fallen madly in love with Adonis,

but her passion was unrequited.

And then, to boot, he was gored to death by a wild boar.

Desperate, running to him, thorns tore at her skin as she passed,

colouring roses red.

And then she in turn transformed his blood into anemone flowers.

Wailing and tearing at her chest in distraction,

the intensity of her passion brought Adonis back to life.

And this was a story that was remembered

across the classical world in a yearly festival called the Adonia.

Women would make a wooden image of Adonis, put it on a wooden plank,

and then decorate it in flowers in the hope that they would bring it

back to life. They would wail and beat at their chests

in sympathy with Aphrodite.

When Christianity came to Cyprus,

these themes of resurrection and new life were translated

into the Easter rituals.

So, in many ways the spirit of Aphrodite still lives on.

If Adonis has become Jesus, then Aphrodite,

the divine woman who mourned him, is now the Virgin Mary.

A church to Mary, All-Holy even stands on the site

of the ancient temple to Aphrodite, all-powerful Queen of Heaven.

The goddess has influenced so many archetypes we have of womanhood

today, from the seductive temptress,

even in some places to the Madonna herself.

Whatever we call her, Venus, Aphrodite, Ishtar or Inanna,

somehow this goddess remains alive in our minds,

a figure that embodies for us those feelings inside

that draw us to one another and that pull us apart.

It seems to be a human need, to dwell on and to hold in awe

that immortal, beguiling force that drives us as humans.

The men and women of the ancient world understood

that desire was complex, dangerous, hugely powerful

and worthy of respect.

We insult desire's divine incarnation

if we reduce Venus Aphrodite merely to a patron of physical love.

Instead we should remember, as the ancients did,

that desire is transformative, and not always in a good way,

and that it's down to us to make desire our ally,

not our undoing.