Venus de Milo

Picking the Aphrodite of Melos as the topic I wanted to write on was easy because I’ve seen the figure before over time and in many places, it is a renowned classic in art. The culture the figure is from is ancient Greece. To Socrates and Plato, Aphrodite was a real god because she represented the giver of love and life and joy, among other things. Further back and in even more ancient times, this Venus or Aphrodite was the mother of all mankind, and although the roman’s didn’t restrict her to just being an aesthete, she also being a goddess who in battle assured victory, but this even was by no means a Roman invention, and this dates back to the most ancient days of Babylonian tradition. Looking at history and then looking at the Bible knows that the Bible got and derived many of its stories from ancient Egypt, Persia, Mesopotamian, Babylon, Sumerian, Greek and Roman legends and fables. And Venus herself is known to ‘resurrect the dead back to life’ and that sounds familiar does it not, particularly with Jesus and in Christian teachings? And even in our humanities book one reads about Augustine, as many of those in the early church people and leaders did, they became who they were and made simply because of their Greco-Roman learning, influence, etc, only to see these very people turn on it. And much of the deformity to the Venus of Milo came from crazed religious zealots who vented their rage against this goddess of love, but their act was also something of a barbaric war against man’s greatest achievements, including art. The Venus of Milo is of one but many, many pieces historians, scientists and archeologists are trying to restore what early Christianity ruthlessly destroyed and/or mutilated. I am not squeamish by any means but I am still sickened, and I think mankind’s greatest atrocity had to be by Christian zealots burning down the library of Alexandria and their bacchanal-like murder of its librarian, Hypatia. Nowhere in ancient paganism do we find the

Cited: Carus, Paul. The Venus of Milo: An Archeological Study of the Goddess of Womanhood. Chicago: Open Court, 1916.