APHRODITE

Real Name: Aphrodite (Venus is her Roman name)

Occupation: Goddess of love, beauty and desire, Former Magazine Writer and College Professor

Legal Status: Citizen of Olympus

Identity: The general populace is unaware of Aphrodite’s existence except as a mythological character.

Other Aliases: Anadyomene, Cytherea, Inanna, Innina (Sumerian names), Astarte, Ashtart, (Babylonian names), "Dite," Ishtar (Phoenician name), Kypris ("Lady of Cyprus"), Turan (Etruscan name), Prendei (Illyrian name), Victoria Nutley Starr, Aprodite Reason (mortal civilian identities), et al.

Place of Birth: Cythera

Marital Status: Separated

Known Relatives: Zeus (father), Dione (mother), Anu (step-father), Hephaestus (estranged husband); Cupid (son); Aeneas (son, deceased); Harmonia, Leila (daughters), Psyche (daughter-in-law); Gaea (great-grandmother), Ouranos/Uranus (great-grandfather, deceased); Cronus, Rhea (paternal grandparents); Chiron, Hades, Poseidon (uncles); Demeter, Hera, Hestia (aunts); Prometheus, Typhon (half-uncles); Apollo, Ares, Dionysus, Hercules, Hermes, Enlil, Hadad, Ninurta, Martu, (half-brothers); Artemis, Athena, Eileithyia, Eris, Hebe, Helen of Troy, Persephone (half-sisters); Neptunia, Consus, Pomona, Vertumnus  (cousins); Iulus (grandson, deceased), Julius Caesar, King Arthur (descendants, deceased)

Group Affiliation: The Olympian Gods, The 1950s Avengers, former member of the Mesopotamian Gods

Base of Operations: Olympus

First Appearance: (historical) Venus #1, (modern) Submariner #57

History: Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus, Supreme ruler of the Olympian Gods, and Dione, his eighth wife who was a Titaness and goddess of fertility.  After Hera became queen of Olympus, many of Zeus's loves left Olympus with Leto taking refuge on the island of Delos where Apollo and Artemis were born and Io eventually fleeing to Egypt after being turned to a cow where her son Epaphus was born. Dione fled to the island of Cythera where she finally conceived Aphrodite.  Swimming in the sea later there led to the later myths that she was born from the foam from the tides. Dione instructed the wind-god Zephyros to carry the young goddess Aphrodite to Cyprus to hide her from Hera’s wrath. Dione was eventually courted by the Mesopotamian god, Anu, who saw in her the potential for sons of considerable power.  As his wife Asherah, Dione found asylum in the land of the Mesopotamian gods where Anu took Dione as his wife and later sired Anu four sons named Enlil, Ninurta, Hadad and Martu, Sumerian gods of wind and storm with obvious Olympian attributes.  Aphrodite became the adopted daughter of Anu and later acquired the name Inanna among other names.

Inanna, meanwhile, fell in love with Dumuzi, the grain god, but Eriskegal, Queen of the underworld, for unknown reasons, kidnapped him. Inanna went down to the underworld to retrieve him, but Eriskegal disgraced her by having her leave an article of clothing at each of then ten gates of the underworld. By time Inanna entered Eriskegal’s court, she was completely naked and could be taken prisoner. Anu sent Enlil to free her and Enlil found her by ripping the gates asunder from the underworld. Inanna was returned to earth, but Dumuzi had to stay behind. Anu, however, arbitrated that Inanna and Dumuzi could share six months out of the year on earth to be together. 

The Babylonian Empire that replaced the Sumerian Empire was soon replaced by the Assyrian Empire who revered the war-god Nergal as their patron deity in his role as Assur. They never accomplished the power of the previous Sumerian or Babylonian Empires and were constantly trying to hold their power against invading tribes and by the Phoenicians from the west that worshipped many of the same gods under different names. The conflict in interest over their worshippers divided the interest of many of the Mesopotamian gods. Anu also realized that there was unrest from the growing Judaism Religion, which wrongly accused many of the former Sumerian gods as unholy gods or demons. With this amount of concern and interior unrest amongst the gods, Anu was unprepared for the power of the Olympian gods from Greece entering Phoenicia.  The god Zeus in particular fell in love with the Phoenician princess Europa and spirited her off to Crete where she gave birth to the god-king Minos who founded the Minoan Civilization. Anu was finally able to route the interest of the Mesopotamian gods in the direction of the invading Olympian Gods as they both fought to withhold their perspective worship rites and establish boundaries on earth that they could claim. Asherah drawn out of loyalty to both the perspective pantheons arbitrated the peace between Zeus and Anu and eventually came to a truce. Part of the truce was that Zeus could retrieve Inanna, formerly Aphrodite, and bestow upon his daughter her true birthright as an Olympian Goddess. The Olympians promised to stay out of lands that the Greeks invaded and the Annunaki pledged to not interfere in the affairs of the Greeks. As Dione stayed among the Annunaki as Asherah, Aphrodite traveled to Olympus where she became the goddess of love. Although she was a Greek goddess, she still preferred the east end of the Mediterranean .

With her arrival in Olympus, Aphrodite was immediately barraged by the male gods of Olympus wanting to claim her as a wife. Zeus feared that the gods would fight over Aphrodite's hand in marriage because of her unparalleled beauty but was advised by his own wife, Hera, on how to handle the matter. She petitioned her own son, Hephaestus, the smith-god, in order to marry Aphrodite in order to quell some of the bad feelings in their relationship. This union however was much to Aphrodite's disapproval. As a rather hedonistic goddess, Aphrodite was most displeased to be married to the lame blacksmith-god although she appreciated the many baubles he created for her. Subsequently, Aphrodite had several affairs while wedded to Hephaestus.

One of her most popular affairs was with Ares, the god of war. The god Apollo, however, informed Hephaestus of the affair to protect his honor. Hephaestus set up a trap in his marital bed to catch them in the affair and expose it. When Aphrodite and Ares once more engaged in another sexual liaison, the bed slammed shut around them as a trap as Hephaestus pushed them out in front of all the gods to embarrass them. The humiliation forced Aphrodite to end her affair with the war-god, but Hephaestus never forgave her despite the fact he was still in love with her. One of Aphrodite’s attendants, Aglaea of the Charities (Charis to the Romans), took pity on the smith-god and became his second wife.

Sometime during the affair, Aphrodite gave birth to Harmonia, a daughter of Ares, who became ancestor of the Amazons, and his sons Deimos and Phobos. In later years, Deimos and Phobos were slain by the heroes Hercules and Thor and restored to life by the primeval goddess Nyx who began calling herself their mother. Because she restored them to life after being slain, she was in a sense the mother of their new forms.

One of Aphrodite’s more famous lovers was the Phoenician prince Adonis. Fond of the prince since his birth, she accepted him as a lover when he became a young man and began hiding him in a chest to spirit him to Olympus for their romantic interludes. She once entrusted the hiding of the chest to her sister Persephone, but she peeked inside it and similarly fell in love with him. Jealous for his attentions, Aphrodite went to Zeus for absolution, but he instead arbitrated the case to Calliope, one of the nine daughters of song, who was also one of his daughters, to arbitrate the case rather than show preferential treatment. Calliope decreed that Adonis had the right to share his time with both goddesses. Dissatisfied with the solution, Aphrodite allegedly directly or indirectly caused the death of Calliope’s son, Orpheus (Not to be confused with the Eternal Khoryphos). A boar, however, killed Adonis, on his free time, during a hunt. Aphrodite mourned him awhile and even visited the Underworld a few times to keep tabs between him and Persephone.

Aphrodite also took offense over the accusation that the Phoenician princess Psyche was more beautiful than herself. She instructed her son Eros to smite the mortal princess with a mad love for a beast or social reject, but Eros instead scratched himself with one of his own arrows and fell in love and married Psyche himself.

Aphrodite was also the mother of the Dardanian prince Aeneas by Anchises, a ruler of Dardania. Indirectly responsible for the war after promising the hand of Helen to the Trojan Prince Paris, she protected Aeneas through the war even after getting wounded by the Argive general Diomedes. Aphrodite even lent her cestus (a sacred belt) to Hera even though they were supporting opposite’s sides of the war so that Hera could distract him from their involvement in the war. Aphrodite later spirited Paris from a battle with Menelaus and protected Aeneas as he fled Troy after its fall to the Greeks. (Aeneas later founded what would be the Roman Empire and was an ancestor of the Caesars. As Venus, her Roman name, Aphrodite became one of the most sacred gods in Roman religion due to her relationship to Aeneas.)

Zeus meanwhile became aware of several atrocities the Romans were creating in the names of the gods and severed all ties to mortals. Although he had interacted directly and indirectly with the Roman senate for years, he masterminded the deaths of the gods by tying the prophecy through the unborn child of the self-styled warrior-goddess Xena for the sake of an illusion that made it seemed the gods were dead. Secretly, Zeus had had the gods of Olympus restored to life through spells and enchantments he had already created. Because Aphrodite was not involved or among the Olympian gods seemingly destroyed, she withdrew into a state of depression and languished in the bacchanalic parties of the Roman Emperor Claudius. Slowly sapping her of her godhood, Xena slew Claudius before he could become a god himself and later restored Aphrodite to godhood with a golden apple stolen from the realm of the Asgardian gods.  Aphrodite was subsequently reunited with the Olympians although Ares had to be imprisoned to keep him away from mortals.

Aphrodite meanwhile became a matron goddess of the Amazons and a tutelary protector of Diana, the daughter of Queen Hippolyta who later became the costumed champion Wonder Woman. Since Zeus had removed Olympus from Earth away from mortals, Aphrodite wandered the earth in mortal guise for several years and had several mortal children of whom only a few are known. In the Twentieth Century, she began calling herself Vanessa Nutley-Starr and became an editor for Beauty Magazine although she was still not above using her godly powers to further her status. She also found a need to use her powers to protect mortals in the same way that costumed crime-fighters used superhuman powers to benefit humanity. She publicly revealed herself as the goddess Aphrodite although she used her guise as Nutley as a secret mortal identity, but no one believed she was the true goddess of love but rather another superhuman champion exploiting the ancient Greek myths.

As Nutley , Aphrodite fell in love with her Editor Whitney Hammond and even once flirted with the Eternal Gilgamesh (now known as Samson). Her opponent for Hammond ’s affections, Della Mason, hired detectives Sam Stout and Willie Weed to investigate her past, but neither Della nor Whitney gave the so-called report any credence after they discovered her godly origins.  A psychiatrist, Dr. Walter Dingle who interviewed her also had a mental breakdown after psychoanalyzing her. Another doctor that Della arranged to meet Nutley also had a mental collapse after meeting her.

Aphrodite’s sister, Jova, attempted to use Aphrodite’s affection for Hammond to have her stripped of her godhood for cavorting with mortals, and Loki of the Asgardian gods tried to use the distraction as an opportunity to invade Olympus , but Aphrodite tricked Loki to being exiled to the underworld with her although she secretly replaced herself with Jova at the last minute. Loki, however, later escaped this predicament.

In the course of her adventures on Earth, Aphrodite became a member of a short-lived group of heroes known as the Avengers to rescue President Dwight D Eisenhower from the villainous Yellow Claw. A villain calling himself the Rumor attempted to use her to ensorcel the people of Earth, but the thunder-god Thor and the group First Line rescued her.  As Nutley , Aphrodite left Hammond at his magazine to work as Professor of Humanities at UCLA rather than have to watch him grow old while she stayed young. Among her students was Namorita Prentiss, cousin of Namor the Submariner who fought Ares now recently escaped from his imprisonment.  Ares was working with the mind-controlled Hippolyta for Hades, the god of the dead, in an attempt to overthrow Zeus as ruler of the gods, but Aphrodite was saved along with Hercules and the Champions.

Hercules, meanwhile, had become a superhero on earth following Aphrodite and later joined a new group of heroes called the Avengers. When he was brutally beaten near death by enemies of the Avengers, Aphrodite stood alongside Apollo, Athena and Hephaestus to convince Zeus that the Avengers were not at fault for the injuries that Hercules had received. Realizing his error, Zeus issued an edict forbidding the Olympian Gods from further interfering with earthly matters, but Aphrodite refused to take it to heart as she still had mortal responsibilities in her mortal identity.

For revenge on the Avengers for getting him barred from Earth, Ares tried manipulating Aphrodite into sending Eros to break up the West Coast Avengers.  Believing that Mockingbird was the reincarnation of his deceased wife, he tried to force her to love him. Hercules broke Aphrodite from Ares’ mental control and they together stopped Ares and Eros from destroying the Avengers.

Aphrodite began by now recalled her love to Whitney Hammond and went to look for him as Jova informed her of a threat to him. Since his magazine had folded, Hammond had created the Hanover Computer Dating Service with Chili Hanover and Hedy DeVine. When the service was invaded by the extra-terrestrial Goom to abduct the women of earth as mates, Aphrodite presented him with a perfect mate: Another extra-terrestrial female named Shivoor. Reunited with Whiney as a result, Aphrodite left with him to rekindle their relationship.

Height: 5'6"
Weight: 380 lbs.
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Blonde

Unusual Physical Characteristics: Venus is extraordinarily beautiful, perfectly proportioned, and possesses no physical flaws whatsoever.  By the standards of the Western civilization on Earth, she is the epitome of female beauty and one of the most aesthetically perfect female beings in existence. 

It has also been suggested that Aphrodite automatically appears as any mortal man’s “ideal woman” when she appears to them so at times her appearance tends to vary by the individual viewing her.