The embodiment of Greek sexual love (erōs) and desire (himeros; epithymīa) was naturally the love goddess herself, Aphrodite. Her proxy was her son Eros, love personified, and their domain was the entire universe: gods, humans, and animals together. Around 350, the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles had revolutionized the images of both goddess (Figure 104) and offspring, with enormous consequences for Hellenistic and later Western art.

THE KNIDIA

Housed on a windy crag high above the Mediterranean in a colonnaded rotunda that perhaps symbolized her universal power, and set on a chest-high base, Praxiteles’ statue was almost 7 feet (2.04 meters) tall, and stood at Knidos for almost 800 years. Taken to Constantinople in the fifth century AD, it soon perished in a fire, but hundreds of ancient reproductions (Figure 104), together with many ancient texts, allow us to visualize it in detail.

We encounter the goddess after her bath. About to don her cloak, she stands stark naked for the first time in mainstream Western art. Her equivalent, the Near Eastern Ishtar/Ashtart, had appeared in this guise for thousands of years, so it can be no coincidence that this Aphrodite was commissioned by a Greek seaport then under Persian rule; located on the cusp between Greece and the East; linked in cult with Aphrodite’s birthplace at Paphos in Cyprus; and frequented by both Greek and Phoenician sailors. (The latter presumably dedicated the dozens of little terracottas of Ashtart holding her breasts found in the sanctuary.)