Venus and Aphrodite
By Bettany Hughes
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 241pp, £12.99/$17
Whether we know her as the Roman Venus or the Greek Aphrodite, the goddess of love and lust is as powerful today as she has always been. Bettany Hughes traces Venus/Aphrodite back to her beginnings and follows her career over millennia, right up to the present day. Aphrodite’s “ancestors” – Inanna, Ishtar and Astarte – were powerful goddesses of the ancient world. “Desire – for control, blood, fear, dominance, rapture, justice – can lead both to making war and to making love,” Hughes writes.
