Venus, in Roman mythology, the goddess of love, especially of sensual love. She was originally considered a divinity of very little importance, and no mention was made of her in the documents relating to the early history of Rome. In later times the Romans identified her with the Greek Aphrodite, and adopted all the myths relating to that goddess. Aphrodite was among the Greeks one of the great Olympian divinities and the goddess of love and beauty. The Iliad makes her the daughter of Jupiter and Dione; later traditions assign to her a different parentage. The one most generally adopted, because best suited to the poetical imagination of the Greeks, represented her as having sprung from the foam of the sea, whence her name, from the Greek a$p6q, foam. She first landed at Cythera, and thence went to Cyprus. Wherever she trod, flowers sprang up. These two islands were the principal seats of her worship, and from them she was called the Cytherean, Paphian, and Cyprian Aphrodite. She was married to the deformed god Hephsestus (Vulcan), but had many amours both with other gods, especially Mars, and with mortals. Of the latter, Adonis inspired her with the fondest passion.

To the Trojan Anchises she bore Aeneas, from whom the Roman poets and historians traced the descent of Romulus. Paris awarded her the golden apple, the prize of beauty, in preference to Juno and Minerva; and she consequently sided with the Trojans in the war against their city. She had a cestus or girdle which inspired the beholder with a passionate love for the one who wore it. Among plants and birds, the poppy, apple, myrtle, and rose, and the sparrow, swallow, swan, dove, and lynx or wryneck, were her favorites. The planet Venus and the month of April were sacred to her. Young animals were sometimes sacrificed to her, but usually the offerings consisted of incense and garlands of flowers. Festivals were celebrated in her honor, the principal of which were called Aphrodisia. Modern scholars regard Aphrodite as originally identical with the Phoenician Astarte (in the Bible Ashtoreth), or with Baaltis (by some identified with the Asherah of the Bible), and think that her worship was introduced at a very early period by the Phoenicians into Cyprus and Oythera, whence it spread over Greece, and in the course of its development became wholly Grecian. - Venus was a favorite subject of ancient sculpture.

The statues known as the Venus de' Medici and the Venus of Milo are among the most celebrated works that have been preserved from antiquity. The former, exhumed in the 17th century in 11 pieces, is in Florence; the latter, found in the island of Milo in 1820, is in the Louvre, in Paris.