title: Crohn's disease

text: Other conditions with similar symptoms as Crohn's disease includes intestinal tuberculosis, Behçet's disease, ulcerative colitis, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug enteropathy, irritable bowel syndrome and celiac disease. Irritable bowel syndrome is excluded when there are inflammatory changes. Celiac disease cannot be excluded if specific antibodies (anti-transglutaminase antibodies) are negative, nor in absence of intestinal villi atrophy.


title: Crohn's disease

text: There is no cure for Crohn's disease and remission may not be possible or prolonged if achieved. In cases where remission is possible, relapse can be prevented and symptoms controlled with medication, lifestyle and dietary changes, changes to eating habits (eating smaller amounts more often), reduction of stress, moderate activity, and exercise. Surgery is generally contraindicated and has not been shown to prevent relapse. Adequately controlled, Crohn's disease may not significantly restrict daily living. Treatment for Crohn's disease involves first treating the acute problem and its symptoms, then maintaining remission of the disease.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Certain lifestyle changes can reduce symptoms, including dietary adjustments, elemental diet, proper hydration, and smoking cessation.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Patients with Crohn's disease are very interested in diet. Recent reviews underlined the importance to adopt diets that are best supported by evidence, even if little is known about the impact of diets on these patients.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Diets that include higher levels of fiber and fruit are associated with reduced risk, while diets rich in total fats, polyunsaturated fatty acids, meat, and omega-6 fatty acids may increase the risk of Crohn's. Maintaining a balanced diet with proper portion control can help manage symptoms of the disease. Eating small meals frequently instead of big meals may also help with a low appetite. A food diary may help with identifying foods that trigger symptoms. Despite the recognized importance of dietary fiber for intestinal health, some people should follow a low residue diet to control acute symptoms especially if foods high in insoluble fiber cause symptoms, e.g., due to obstruction or irritation of the bowel. Some find relief in eliminating casein (a protein found in cow's milk) and gluten (a protein found in wheat, rye and barley) from their diets. They may have specific dietary intolerances (not allergies), for example, lactose. Fatigue can be helped with regular exercise, a healthy diet, and enough sleep, and for those with malabsorption of vitamin B12 due to disease or surgical resection of the terminal ileum, cobalamin injections. Smoking may worsen symptoms and the course of the disease, and stopping is recommended. Alcohol consumption can also worsen symptoms, and moderation or cessation is advised.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Acute treatment uses medications to treat any infection (normally antibiotics) and to reduce inflammation (normally aminosalicylate anti-inflammatory drugs and corticosteroids). When symptoms are in remission, treatment enters maintenance, with a goal of avoiding the recurrence of symptoms. Prolonged use of corticosteroids has significant side-effects; as a result, they are, in general, not used for long-term treatment. Alternatives include aminosalicylates alone, though only a minority are able to maintain the treatment, and many require immunosuppressive drugs. It has been also suggested that antibiotics change the enteric flora, and their continuous use may pose the risk of overgrowth with pathogens such as "Clostridium difficile".


title: Crohn's disease

text: Medications used to treat the symptoms of Crohn's disease include 5-aminosalicylic acid (5-ASA) formulations, prednisone, immunomodulators such as azathioprine (given as the prodrug for 6-mercaptopurine), methotrexate, and anti-TNF therapies and monoclonal antibodies, such as infliximab, adalimumab, certolizumab, vedolizumab, ustekinumab, and natalizumab. Hydrocortisone should be used in severe attacks of Crohn's disease. Biological therapies are medications used to avoid long-term steroid use, decrease inflammation, and treat people who have fistulas with abscesses. The monoclonal antibody ustekinumab appears to be a safe treatment option, and may help people with moderate to severe active Crohn's disease. The long term safety and effectiveness of monoclonal antibody treatment is not known. The monoclonal antibody briakinumab is not effective for people with active Crohn's disease and it is no longer being manufactured.


title: Crohn's disease

text: The gradual loss of blood from the gastrointestinal tract, as well as chronic inflammation, often leads to anemia, and professional guidelines suggest routinely monitoring for this. Adequate disease control usually improves anemia of chronic disease, but iron deficiency may require treatment with iron supplements. Guidelines vary as to how iron should be administered. Besides, other problems include a limitation in possible daily resorption and an increased growth of intestinal bacteria. Some advise parenteral iron as first line as it works faster, has fewer gastrointestinal side effects, and is unaffected by inflammation reducing enteral absorption.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Other guidelines advise oral iron as first-line with parenteral iron reserved for those that fail to adequately respond as oral iron is considerably cheaper. All agree that severe anemia (hemoglobin under 10g/dL) should be treated with parenteral iron. Blood transfusion should be reserved for those who are cardiovascularly unstable, due to its relatively poor safety profile, lack of long-term efficacy, and cost.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Crohn's cannot be cured by surgery, as the disease eventually recurs, though it is used in the case of partial or full blockage of the intestine. Surgery may also be required for complications such as obstructions, fistulas, or abscesses, or if the disease does not respond to drugs. After the first surgery, Crohn's usually comes back at the site where the diseased intestine was removed and the healthy ends were rejoined; it can also come back in other locations. After a resection, scar tissue builds up, which can cause strictures, which form when the intestines become too small to allow excrement to pass through easily, which can lead to a blockage. After the first resection, another resection may be necessary within five years. For patients with an obstruction due to a stricture, two options for treatment are strictureplasty and resection of that portion of bowel. There is no statistical significance between strictureplasty alone versus strictureplasty and resection in cases of duodenal involvement. In these cases, re-operation rates were 31% and 27%, respectively, indicating that strictureplasty is a safe and effective treatment for selected people with duodenal involvement.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Postsurgical recurrence of Crohn's disease is relatively common. Crohn's lesions are nearly always found at the site of the resected bowel. The join (or anastomosis) after surgery may be inspected, usually during a colonoscopy, and disease activity graded. The "Rutgeert's score" is an endoscopic scoring system for postoperative disease recurrence in Crohn's disease. Mild postsurgical recurrences of Crohn's disease are graded i1 and i2, moderate to severe recurrences are graded i3 and i4. Fewer lesions result in a lower grade. Based on the score, treatment plans can be designed to give the patient the best chance of managing the recurrence of the disease.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Short bowel syndrome (SBS, also short gut syndrome or simply short gut) is caused by the surgical removal of part of the small intestine. It usually develops in those patients who have had half or more of their small intestines removed. Diarrhea is the main symptom, but others may include weight loss, cramping, bloating, and heartburn. Short bowel syndrome is treated with changes in diet, intravenous feeding, vitamin and mineral supplements, and treatment with medications. In some cases of SBS, intestinal transplant surgery may be considered; though the number of transplant centres offering this procedure is quite small and it comes with a high risk due to the chance of infection and rejection of the transplanted intestine.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Bile acid diarrhea is another complication following surgery for Crohn's disease in which the terminal ileum has been removed. This leads to the development of excessive watery diarrhea. It is usually thought to be due to an inability of the ileum to reabsorb bile acids after resection of the terminal ileum and was the first type of bile acid malabsorption recognized.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Crohn's may result in anxiety or mood disorders, especially in young people who may have stunted growth or embarrassment from fecal incontinence. Counselling as well as antidepressant or anxiolytic medication may help some people manage.


title: Crohn's disease

text: It is common for people with Crohn's disease to try complementary or alternative therapy. These include diets, probiotics, fish oil, and other herbal and nutritional supplements.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Crohn's disease is a chronic condition for which there is no known cure. It is characterised by periods of improvement followed by episodes when symptoms flare up. With treatment, most people achieve a healthy weight, and the mortality rate for the disease is relatively low. It can vary from being benign to very severe, and people with CD could experience just one episode or have continuous symptoms. It usually reoccurs, although some people can remain disease-free for years or decades. Up to 80% of people with Crohn's disease are hospitalized at some point during the course of their disease, with the highest rate occurring in the first year after diagnosis. Most people with Crohn's live a normal lifespan. However, Crohn's disease is associated with a small increase in risk of small bowel and colorectal carcinoma (bowel cancer).


title: Crohn's disease

text: The percentage of people with Crohn's disease has been determined in Norway and the United States and is similar at 6 to 7.1:100,000. The Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America cites this number as approx 149:100,000; NIH cites 28 to 199 per 100,000. Crohn's disease is more common in northern countries, and with higher rates still in the northern areas of these countries. The incidence of Crohn's disease is thought to be similar in Europe but lower in Asia and Africa. It also has a higher incidence in Ashkenazi Jews and smokers.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Crohn's disease begins most commonly in people in their teens and 20s, and people in their 50s through to their 70s. It is rarely diagnosed in early childhood. It usually affects female children more severely than males. However, only slightly more women than men have Crohn's disease. Parents, siblings or children of people with Crohn's disease are 3 to 20 times more likely to develop the disease. Twin studies find that if one has the disease there is a 55% chance the other will too.


title: Crohn's disease

text: The incidence of Crohn's disease is increasing in Europe and in newly industrialised countries. For example, in Brazil, there has been an annual increase of 11% in the incidence of Crohn's disease since 1990.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Inflammatory bowel diseases were described by Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682–1771) and by Scottish physician T Kennedy Dalziel in 1913.


title: Crohn's disease

text: "Ileitis terminalis" was first described by Polish surgeon Antoni Leśniowski in 1904, although it was not conclusively distinguished from intestinal tuberculosis. In Poland, it is still called Leśniowski-Crohn's disease (). Burrill Bernard Crohn, an American gastroenterologist at New York City's Mount Sinai Hospital, described fourteen cases in 1932, and submitted them to the American Medical Association under the rubric of "Terminal ileitis: A new clinical entity". Later that year, he, along with colleagues Leon Ginzburg and Gordon Oppenheimer, published the case series "Regional ileitis: a pathologic and clinical entity". However, due to the precedence of Crohn's name in the alphabet, it later became known in the worldwide literature as Crohn's disease.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Some evidence supports the hypothesis that the bacterium "Mycobacterium avium" subspecies "paratuberculosis" (MAP) is a cause of Crohn's disease (see also Johne's disease). As a result, researchers are looking at the eradication of MAP as a therapeutic option. The Crohns MAP Vaccine is an experimental vaccine based on this hypothesis. Treating MAP using specific antibiotics that MAP may be susceptible to has been examined and the results are unclear but tentatively beneficial.


title: Crohn's disease

text: Crohn's is common in parts of the world where helminthic colonisation is rare and uncommon in those areas where most people carry worms. Infections with helminths may alter the autoimmune response that causes the disease. Early trials of "Trichuris suis" ova (TSO) showed promising results when used in people with IBD but later trials failed at Phase 2, and most were eventually discontinued. However, the phase 2 trials had used a different formulation of TSO from the one that had been used in the earlier studies that had shown positive outcomes.


title: Crohn's disease

text: There is no good evidence that thalidomide or lenalidomide is useful to bring about or maintain remission.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite ( ; ; , , ) is an ancient Greek goddess associated with love, lust, beauty, pleasure, passion, and procreation. She was syncretized with the Roman goddess . Aphrodite's major symbols include myrtles, roses, doves, sparrows, and swans. The cult of Aphrodite was largely derived from that of the Phoenician goddess Astarte, a cognate of the East Semitic goddess Ishtar, whose cult was based on the Sumerian cult of Inanna. Aphrodite's main cult centers were Cythera, Cyprus, Corinth, and Athens. Her main festival was the Aphrodisia, which was celebrated annually in midsummer. In Laconia, Aphrodite was worshipped as a warrior goddess. She was also the patron goddess of prostitutes, an association which led early scholars to propose the concept of "sacred prostitution" in Greco-Roman culture, an idea which is now generally seen as erroneous.


title: Aphrodite

text: In Hesiod's "Theogony", Aphrodite is born off the coast of Cythera from the foam (, ) produced by Uranus's genitals, which his son Cronus had severed and thrown into the sea. In Homer's "Iliad", however, she is the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Plato, in his "Symposium", asserts that these two origins actually belong to separate entities: Aphrodite Ourania (a transcendent, "Heavenly" Aphrodite) and Aphrodite Pandemos (Aphrodite common to "all the people"). Aphrodite had many other epithets, each emphasizing a different aspect of the same goddess, or used by a different local cult. Thus she was also known as Cytherea ("Lady of Cythera") and Cypris ("Lady of Cyprus"), because both locations claimed to be the place of her birth.


title: Aphrodite

text: In Greek mythology, Aphrodite was married to Hephaestus, the god of fire, blacksmiths and metalworking. Aphrodite was frequently unfaithful to him and had many lovers; in the "Odyssey", she is caught in the act of adultery with Ares, the god of war. In the "First Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite", she seduces the mortal shepherd Anchises. Aphrodite was also the surrogate mother and lover of the mortal shepherd Adonis, who was killed by a wild boar. Along with Athena and Hera, Aphrodite was one of the three goddesses whose feud resulted in the beginning of the Trojan War and she plays a major role throughout the "Iliad". Aphrodite has been featured in Western art as a symbol of female beauty and has appeared in numerous works of Western literature. She is a major deity in modern Neopagan religions, including the Church of Aphrodite, Wicca, and Hellenismos.


title: Aphrodite

text: Hesiod derives "Aphrodite" from () "sea-foam", interpreting the name as "risen from the foam", but most modern scholars regard this as a spurious folk etymology. Early modern scholars of classical mythology attempted to argue that Aphrodite's name was of Greek or Indo-European origin, but these efforts have now been mostly abandoned. Aphrodite's name is generally accepted to be of non-Greek, probably Semitic, origin, but its exact derivation cannot be determined.


title: Aphrodite

text: Scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accepting Hesiod's "foam" etymology as genuine, analyzed the second part of Aphrodite's name as *"-odítē" "wanderer" or *"-dítē" "bright". More recently, Michael Janda, also accepting Hesiod's etymology, has argued in favor of the latter of these interpretations and claims the story of a birth from the foam as an Indo-European mytheme. Similarly, Krzysztof Tomasz Witczak proposes an Indo-European compound ' "very" and ' "to shine", also referring to Eos, and Daniel Kölligan has interpreted her name as "shining up from the mist/foam". Other scholars have argued that these hypotheses are unlikely since Aphrodite's attributes are entirely different from those of both Eos and the Vedic deity Ushas.


title: Aphrodite

text: A number of improbable non-Greek etymologies have also been suggested. One Semitic etymology compares Aphrodite to the Assyrian "barīrītu", the name of a female demon that appears in Middle Babylonian and Late Babylonian texts. Hammarström looks to Etruscan, comparing "(e)prθni" "lord", an Etruscan honorific loaned into Greek as πρύτανις. This would make the theonym in origin an honorific, "the lady". Most scholars reject this etymology as implausible, especially since Aphrodite actually appears in Etruscan in the borrowed form "Apru" (from Greek , clipped form of "Aphrodite"). The medieval "Etymologicum Magnum" () offers a highly contrived etymology, deriving "Aphrodite" from the compound "habrodíaitos" (), "she who lives delicately", from "habrós" and "díaita". The alteration from "b" to "ph" is explained as a "familiar" characteristic of Greek "obvious from the Macedonians".


title: Aphrodite

text: The cult of Aphrodite in Greece was imported from, or at least influenced by, the cult of Astarte in Phoenicia, which, in turn, was influenced by the cult of the Mesopotamian goddess known as "Ishtar" to the East Semitic peoples and as "Inanna" to the Sumerians. Pausanias states that the first to establish a cult of Aphrodite were the Assyrians, followed by the Paphians of Cyprus and then the Phoenicians at Ascalon. The Phoenicians, in turn, taught her worship to the people of Cythera.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite took on Inanna-Ishtar's associations with sexuality and procreation. Furthermore, she was known as Ourania (Οὐρανία), which means "heavenly", a title corresponding to Inanna's role as the Queen of Heaven. Early artistic and literary portrayals of Aphrodite are extremely similar on Inanna-Ishtar. Like Inanna-Ishtar, Aphrodite was also a warrior goddess; the second-century AD Greek geographer Pausanias records that, in Sparta, Aphrodite was worshipped as "Aphrodite Areia", which means "warlike". He also mentions that Aphrodite's most ancient cult statues in Sparta and on Cythera showed her bearing arms. Modern scholars note that Aphrodite's warrior-goddess aspects appear in the oldest strata of her worship and see it as an indication of her Near Eastern origins.


title: Aphrodite

text: Nineteenth century classical scholars had a general aversion to the idea that ancient Greek religion was at all influenced by the cultures of the Near East, but, even Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, who argued that Near Eastern influence on Greek culture was largely confined to material culture, admitted that Aphrodite was clearly of Phoenician origin. The significant influence of Near Eastern culture on early Greek religion in general, and on the cult of Aphrodite in particular, is now widely recognized as dating to a period of orientalization during the eighth century BC, when archaic Greece was on the fringes of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.


title: Aphrodite

text: Some early comparative mythologists opposed to the idea of a Near Eastern origin argued that Aphrodite originated as an aspect of the Greek dawn goddess Eos and that she was therefore ultimately derived from the Proto-Indo-European dawn goddess *"Héusōs" (properly Greek Eos, Latin Aurora, Sanskrit Ushas). Most modern scholars have now rejected the notion of a purely Indo-European Aphrodite, but it is possible that Aphrodite, originally a Semitic deity, may have been influenced by the Indo-European dawn goddess. Both Aphrodite and Eos were known for their erotic beauty and aggressive sexuality and both had relationships with mortal lovers. Both goddesses were associated with the colors red, white, and gold. Michael Janda etymologizes Aphrodite's name as an epithet of Eos meaning "she who rises from the foam [of the ocean]" and points to Hesiod's "Theogony" account of Aphrodite's birth as an archaic reflex of Indo-European myth. Aphrodite rising out of the waters after Cronus defeats Uranus as a mytheme would then be directly cognate to the Rigvedic myth of Indra defeating Vrtra, liberating Ushas. Another key similarity between Aphrodite and the Indo-European dawn goddess is her close kinship to the Greek sky deity, since both of the main claimants to her paternity (Zeus and Uranus) are sky deities.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite's most common cultic epithet was "Ourania", meaning "heavenly", but this epithet almost never occurs in literary texts, indicating a purely cultic significance. Another common name for Aphrodite was "Pandemos" ("For All the Folk"). In her role as Aphrodite Pandemos, Aphrodite was associated with "Peithō" (), meaning "persuasion", and could be prayed to for aid in seduction. The character of Pausanias in Plato's "Symposium", takes differing cult-practices associated with different epithets of the goddess to claim that Ourania and Pandemos are, in fact, separate goddesses. He asserts that "Aphrodite Ourania" is the celestial Aphrodite, born from the sea foam after Cronus castrated Uranus, and the older of the two goddesses. According to the "Symposium", "Aphrodite Ourania" is the inspiration of male homosexual desire, specifically the ephebic eros, and pederasty. "Aphrodite Pandemos", by contrast, is the younger of the two goddesses: the common Aphrodite, born from the union of Zeus and Dione, and the inspiration of heterosexual desire and sexual promiscuity, the "lesser" of the two loves. "Paphian" (Παφία), was one of her epithets, after the Paphos in Cyprus where she had emerged from the sea at her birth.


title: Aphrodite

text: Among the Neoplatonists and, later, their Christian interpreters, Ourania is associated with spiritual love, and Pandemos with physical love (desire). A representation of Ourania with her foot resting on a tortoise came to be seen as emblematic of discretion in conjugal love; it was the subject of a chryselephantine sculpture by Phidias for Elis, known only from a parenthetical comment by the geographer Pausanias.


title: Aphrodite

text: One of Aphrodite's most common literary epithets is "Philommeidḗs" (), which means "smile-loving", but is sometimes mistranslated as "laughter-loving". This epithet occurs throughout both of the Homeric epics and the "First Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite". Hesiod references it once in his "Theogony" in the context of Aphrodite's birth, but interprets it as "genital-loving" rather than "smile-loving". Monica Cyrino notes that the epithet may relate to the fact that, in many artistic depictions of Aphrodite, she is shown smiling. Other common literary epithets are "Cypris" and "Cythereia", which derive from her associations with the islands of Cyprus and Cythera respectively.


title: Aphrodite

text: On Cyprus, Aphrodite was sometimes called "Eleemon" ("the merciful"). In Athens, she was known as "Aphrodite en kopois" ("Aphrodite of the Gardens"). At Cape Colias, a town along the Attic coast, she was venerated as "Genetyllis" "Mother". The Spartans worshipped her as "Potnia" "Mistress", "Enoplios" "Armed", "Morpho" "Shapely", "Ambologera" "She who Postpones Old Age". Across the Greek world, she was known under epithets such as "Melainis" "Black One", "Skotia" "Dark One", "Androphonos" "Killer of Men", "Anosia" "Unholy", and "Tymborychos" "Gravedigger", all of which indicate her darker, more violent nature.


title: Aphrodite

text: She had the epithet "Automata" because, according to Servius, she was the source of spontaneous love.


title: Aphrodite

text: A male version of Aphrodite known as Aphroditus was worshipped in the city of Amathus on Cyprus. Aphroditus was depicted with the figure and dress of a woman, but had a beard, and was shown lifting his dress to reveal an erect phallus. This gesture was believed to be an apotropaic symbol, and was thought to convey good fortune upon the viewer. Eventually, the popularity of Aphroditus waned as the mainstream, fully feminine version of Aphrodite became more popular, but traces of his cult are preserved in the later legends of Hermaphroditus.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite's main festival, the Aphrodisia, was celebrated across Greece, but particularly in Athens and Corinth. In Athens, the Aphrodisia was celebrated on the fourth day of the month of Hekatombaion in honor of Aphrodite's role in the unification of Attica. During this festival, the priests of Aphrodite would purify the temple of Aphrodite Pandemos on the southwestern slope of the Acropolis with the blood of a sacrificed dove. Next, the altars would be anointed and the cult statues of Aphrodite Pandemos and Peitho would be escorted in a majestic procession to a place where they would be ritually bathed. Aphrodite was also honored in Athens as part of the Arrhephoria festival. The fourth day of every month was sacred to Aphrodite.


title: Aphrodite

text: Pausanias records that, in Sparta, Aphrodite was worshipped as "Aphrodite Areia", which means "warlike". This epithet stresses Aphrodite's connections to Ares, with whom she had extramarital relations. Pausanias also records that, in Sparta and on Cythera, a number of extremely ancient cult statues of Aphrodite portrayed her bearing arms. Other cult statues showed her bound in chains.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite was the patron goddess of prostitutes of all varieties, ranging from "pornai" (cheap street prostitutes typically owned as slaves by wealthy pimps) to "hetairai" (expensive, well-educated hired companions, who were usually self-employed and sometimes provided sex to their customers). The city of Corinth was renowned throughout the ancient world for its many "hetairai", who had a widespread reputation for being among the most skilled, but also the most expensive, prostitutes in the Greek world. Corinth also had a major temple to Aphrodite located on the Acrocorinth and was one of the main centers of her cult. Records of numerous dedications to Aphrodite made by successful courtesans have survived in poems and in pottery inscriptions. References to Aphrodite in association with prostitution are found in Corinth as well as on the islands of Cyprus, Cythera, and Sicily. Aphrodite's Mesopotamian precursor Inanna-Ishtar was also closely associated with prostitution.


title: Aphrodite

text: Scholars in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries believed that the cult of Aphrodite may have involved ritual prostitution, an assumption based on ambiguous passages in certain ancient texts, particularly a fragment of a "skolion" by the Boeotian poet Pindar, which mentions prostitutes in Corinth in association with Aphrodite. Modern scholars now dismiss the notion of ritual prostitution in Greece as a "historiographic myth" with no factual basis.


title: Aphrodite

text: During the Hellenistic period, the Greeks identified Aphrodite with the ancient Egyptian goddesses Hathor and Isis. Aphrodite was the patron goddess of the Lagid queens and Queen Arsinoe II was identified as her mortal incarnation. Aphrodite was worshipped in Alexandria and had numerous temples in and around the city. Arsinoe II introduced the cult of Adonis to Alexandria and many of the women there partook in it. The Tessarakonteres, a gigantic catamaran galley designed by Archimedes for Ptolemy IV Philopator, had a circular temple to Aphrodite on it with a marble statue of the goddess herself. In the second century BC, Ptolemy VIII Physcon and his wives Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III dedicated a temple to Aphrodite Hathor at Philae. Statuettes of Aphrodite for personal devotion became common in Egypt starting in the early Ptolemaic times and extending until long after Egypt became a Roman province.


title: Aphrodite

text: The ancient Romans identified Aphrodite with their goddess Venus, who was originally a goddess of agricultural fertility, vegetation, and springtime. According to the Roman historian Livy, Aphrodite and Venus were officially identified in the third century BC when the cult of "Venus Erycina" was introduced to Rome from the Greek sanctuary of Aphrodite on Mount Eryx in Sicily. After this point, Romans adopted Aphrodite's iconography and myths and applied them to Venus. Because Aphrodite was the mother of the Trojan hero Aeneas in Greek mythology and Roman tradition claimed Aeneas as the founder of Rome, Venus became venerated as "Venus Genetrix", the mother of the entire Roman nation. Julius Caesar claimed to be directly descended from Aeneas's son Iulus and became a strong proponent of the cult of Venus. This precedent was later followed by his nephew Augustus and the later emperors claiming succession from him.


title: Aphrodite

text: This syncretism greatly impacted Greek worship of Aphrodite. During the Roman era, the cults of Aphrodite in many Greek cities began to emphasize her relationship with Troy and Aeneas. They also began to adopt distinctively Roman elements, portraying Aphrodite as more maternal, more militaristic, and more concerned with administrative bureaucracy. She was claimed as a divine guardian by many political magistrates. Appearances of Aphrodite in Greek literature also vastly proliferated, usually showing Aphrodite in a characteristically Roman manner.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite is usually said to have been born near her chief center of worship, Paphos, on the island of Cyprus, which is why she is sometimes called "Cyprian", especially in the poetic works of Sappho. The Sanctuary of Aphrodite Paphia, marking her birthplace, was a place of pilgrimage in the ancient world for centuries. Other versions of her myth have her born near the island of Cythera, hence another of her names, "Cytherea". Cythera was a stopping place for trade and culture between Crete and the Peloponesus, so these stories may preserve traces of the migration of Aphrodite's cult from the Middle East to mainland Greece.


title: Aphrodite

text: According to the version of her birth recounted by Hesiod in his "Theogony", Cronus severed Uranus' genitals and threw them behind him into the sea. The foam from his genitals gave rise to Aphrodite (hence her name, which Hesiod interprets as "foam-arisen"), while the Giants, the Erinyes (furies), and the Meliae emerged from the drops of his blood. Hesiod states that the genitals "were carried over the sea a long time, and white foam arose from the immortal flesh; with it a girl grew." Hesiod's account of Aphrodite's birth following Uranus's castration is probably derived from "The Song of Kumarbi", an ancient Hittite epic poem in which the god Kumarbi overthrows his father Anu, the god of the sky, and bites off his genitals, causing him to become pregnant and give birth to Anu's children, which include Ishtar and her brother Teshub, the Hittite storm god.


title: Aphrodite

text: In the "Iliad", Aphrodite is described as the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Dione's name appears to be a feminine cognate to "Dios" and "Dion", which are oblique forms of the name "Zeus". Zeus and Dione shared a cult at Dodona in northwestern Greece. In "Theogony", Hesiod describes Dione as an Oceanid, but Apollodorus makes her the thirteenth Titan, child of Gaia and Uranus.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite is consistently portrayed as a nubile, infinitely desirable adult, having had no childhood. She is often depicted nude. In the "Iliad", Aphrodite is the apparently unmarried consort of Ares, the god of war, and the wife of Hephaestus is a different goddess named Charis. Likewise, in Hesiod's "Theogony", Aphrodite is unmarried and the wife of Hephaestus is Aglaea, the youngest of the three Charites.


title: Aphrodite

text: In Book Eight of the "Odyssey", however, the blind singer Demodocus describes Aphrodite as the wife of Hephaestus and tells how she committed adultery with Ares during the Trojan War. The sun-god Helios saw Aphrodite and Ares having sex in Hephaestus's bed and warned Hephaestus, who fashioned a net of gold. The next time Ares and Aphrodite had sex together, the net trapped them both. Hephaestus brought all the gods into the bedchamber to laugh at the captured adulterers, but Apollo, Hermes, and Poseidon had sympathy for Ares and Poseidon agreed to pay Hephaestus for Ares's release. Humiliated, Aphrodite returned to Cyprus, where she was attended by the Charites. This narrative probably originated as a Greek folk tale, originally independent of the "Odyssey". In a much later interpolated detail, Ares put the young soldier Alectryon, by their door to warn them of Helios's arrival as Helios would tell Hephaestus of Aphrodite's infidelity if the two were discovered, but Alectryon fell asleep on guard duty. Helios discovered the two and alerted Hephaestus, as Ares in rage turned Alectryon into a rooster, which always crows at dawn when the sun is about to rise announcing its arrival.


title: Aphrodite

text: After exposing them, Hephaestus asks Zeus for his wedding gifts and dowry to be returned to him; by the time of the Trojan War, he is married to Charis/Aglaea, one of the Graces, apparently divorced from Aphrodite. Afterwards, it was generally Ares who was regarded as the husband or official consort of the goddess; on the François Vase, the two arrive at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis on the same chariot, as do Zeus with Hera and Poseidon with Amphitrite; moreover poets such as Pindar and Aeschylus explicitly refer to Ares as Aphrodite's husband.


title: Aphrodite

text: Later stories were invented to explain Aphrodite's marriage to Hephaestus. In the most famous story, Zeus hastily married Aphrodite to Hephaestus in order to prevent the other gods from fighting over her. In another version of the myth, Hephaestus gave his mother Hera a golden throne, but when she sat on it, she became trapped and he refused to let her go until she agreed to give him Aphrodite's hand in marriage. Hephaestus was overjoyed to be married to the goddess of beauty, and forged her beautiful jewelry, including a "strophion" () known as the (), a saltire-shaped undergarment (usually translated as "girdle"), which accentuated her breasts and made her even more irresistible to men. Such "strophia" were commonly used in depictions of the Near Eastern goddesses Ishtar and Atargatis.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite is almost always accompanied by Eros, the god of lust and sexual desire. In his "Theogony", Hesiod describes Eros as one of the four original primeval forces born at the beginning of time, but, after the birth of Aphrodite from the sea foam, he is joined by Himeros and, together, they become Aphrodite's constant companions. In early Greek art, Eros and Himeros are both shown as idealized handsome youths with wings. The Greek lyric poets regarded the power of Eros and Himeros as dangerous, compulsive, and impossible for anyone to resist. In modern times, Eros is often seen as Aphrodite's son, but this is actually a comparatively late innovation. A "scholion" on Theocritus's "Idylls" remarks that the sixth-century BC poet Sappho had described Eros as the son of Aphrodite and Uranus, but the first surviving reference to Eros as Aphrodite's son comes from Apollonius of Rhodes's "Argonautica", written in the third century BC, which makes him the son of Aphrodite and Ares. Later, the Romans, who saw Venus as a mother goddess, seized on this idea of Eros as Aphrodite's son and popularized it, making it the predominant portrayal in works on mythology until the present day.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite's main attendants were the three Charites, whom Hesiod identifies as the daughters of Zeus and Eurynome and names as Aglaea ("Splendor"), Euphrosyne ("Good Cheer"), and Thalia ("Abundance"). The Charites had been worshipped as goddesses in Greece since the beginning of Greek history, long before Aphrodite was introduced to the pantheon. Aphrodite's other set of attendants was the three Horae (the "Hours"), whom Hesiod identifies as the daughters of Zeus and Themis and names as Eunomia ("Good Order"), Dike ("Justice"), and Eirene ("Peace"). Aphrodite was also sometimes accompanied by Harmonia, her daughter by Ares, and Hebe, the daughter of Zeus and Hera.


title: Aphrodite

text: The fertility god Priapus was usually considered to be Aphrodite's son by Dionysus, but he was sometimes also described as her son by Hermes, Adonis, or even Zeus. A "scholion" on Apollonius of Rhodes's "Argonautica" states that, while Aphrodite was pregnant with Priapus, Hera envied her and applied an evil potion to her belly while she was sleeping to ensure that the child would be hideous. In another version, Hera cursed Aphrodite's unborn son because he had been fathered by Zeus. When Aphrodite gave birth, she was horrified to see that the child had a massive, permanently erect penis, a potbelly, and a huge tongue. Aphrodite abandoned the infant to die in the wilderness, but a herdsman found him and raised him, later discovering that Priapus could use his massive penis to aid in the growth of plants.


title: Aphrodite

text: The "First Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite" (Hymn 5), which was probably composed sometime in the mid-seventh century BC, describes how Zeus once became annoyed with Aphrodite for causing deities to fall in love with mortals, so he caused her to fall in love with Anchises, a handsome mortal shepherd who lived in the foothills beneath Mount Ida near the city of Troy. Aphrodite appears to Anchises in the form of a tall, beautiful, mortal virgin while he is alone in his home. Anchises sees her dressed in bright clothing and gleaming jewelry, with her breasts shining with divine radiance. He asks her if she is Aphrodite and promises to build her an altar on top of the mountain if she will bless him and his family.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite lies and tells him that she is not a goddess, but the daughter of one of the noble families of Phrygia. She claims to be able to understand the Trojan language because she had a Trojan nurse as a child and says that she found herself on the mountainside after she was snatched up by Hermes while dancing in a celebration in honor of Artemis, the goddess of virginity. Aphrodite tells Anchises that she is still a virgin and begs him to take her to his parents. Anchises immediately becomes overcome with mad lust for Aphrodite and swears that he will have sex with her. Anchises takes Aphrodite, with her eyes cast downwards, to his bed, which is covered in the furs of lions and bears. He then strips her naked and makes love to her.


title: Aphrodite

text: After the lovemaking is complete, Aphrodite reveals her true divine form. Anchises is terrified, but Aphrodite consoles him and promises that she will bear him a son. She prophesies that their son will be the demigod Aeneas, who will be raised by the nymphs of the wilderness for five years before going to Troy to become a nobleman like his father. The story of Aeneas's conception is also mentioned in Hesiod's "Theogony" and in Book II of Homer's "Iliad".


title: Aphrodite

text: The myth of Aphrodite and Adonis is probably derived from the ancient Sumerian legend of Inanna and Dumuzid. The Greek name ("Adōnis", ) is derived from the Canaanite word "ʼadōn", meaning "lord". The earliest known Greek reference to Adonis comes from a fragment of a poem by the Lesbian poet Sappho ( – ), in which a chorus of young girls asks Aphrodite what they can do to mourn Adonis's death. Aphrodite replies that they must beat their breasts and tear their tunics. Later references flesh out the story with more details. According to the retelling of the story found in the poem "Metamorphoses" by the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC – 17/18 AD), Adonis was the son of Myrrha, who was cursed by Aphrodite with insatiable lust for her own father, King Cinyras of Cyprus, after Myrrha's mother bragged that her daughter was more beautiful than the goddess. Driven out after becoming pregnant, Myrrha was changed into a myrrh tree, but still gave birth to Adonis.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite found the baby and took him to the underworld to be fostered by Persephone. She returned for him once he was grown and discovered him to be strikingly handsome. Persephone wanted to keep Adonis, resulting in a custody battle between the two goddesses over whom should rightly possess Adonis. Zeus settled the dispute by decreeing that Adonis would spend one third of the year with Aphrodite, one third with Persephone, and one third with whomever he chose. Adonis chose to spend that time with Aphrodite. Then, one day, while Adonis was hunting, he was wounded by a wild boar and bled to death in Aphrodite's arms. In a semi-mocking work, the "Dialogues of the Gods", the satirical author Lucian comedically relates how a frustrated Aphrodite complains to the moon goddess Selene about her son Eros making Persephone fall in love with Adonis and now she has to share him with her.


title: Aphrodite

text: In different versions of the story, the boar was either sent by Ares, who was jealous that Aphrodite was spending so much time with Adonis, or by Artemis, who wanted revenge against Aphrodite for having killed her devoted follower Hippolytus. In another version, Apollo in fury changed himself into a boar and killed Adonis because Aphrodite had blinded his son Erymanthus when he stumbled upon Aphrodite naked as she was bathing after intercourse with Adonis. The story also provides an etiology for Aphrodite's associations with certain flowers. Reportedly, as she mourned Adonis's death, she caused anemones to grow wherever his blood fell and declared a festival on the anniversary of his death. In one version of the story, Aphrodite injured herself on a thorn from a rose bush and the rose, which had previously been white, was stained red by her blood. According to Lucian's "On the Syrian Goddess", each year during the festival of Adonis, the Adonis River in Lebanon (now known as the Abraham River) ran red with blood.


title: Aphrodite

text: The myth of Adonis is associated with the festival of the Adonia, which was celebrated by Greek women every year in midsummer. The festival, which was evidently already celebrated in Lesbos by Sappho's time, seems to have first become popular in Athens in the mid-fifth century BC. At the start of the festival, the women would plant a "garden of Adonis", a small garden planted inside a small basket or a shallow piece of broken pottery containing a variety of quick-growing plants, such as lettuce and fennel, or even quick-sprouting grains such as wheat and barley. The women would then climb ladders to the roofs of their houses, where they would place the gardens out under the heat of the summer sun. The plants would sprout in the sunlight but wither quickly in the heat. Then the women would mourn and lament loudly over the death of Adonis, tearing their clothes and beating their breasts in a public display of grief.


title: Aphrodite

text: In Hesiod's "Works and Days", Zeus orders Aphrodite to make Pandora, the first woman, physically beautiful and sexually attractive, so that she may become "an evil men will love to embrace". Aphrodite "spills grace" over Pandora's head and equips her with "painful desire and knee-weakening anguish", thus making her the perfect vessel for evil to enter the world. Aphrodite's attendants, Peitho, the Charites, and the Horae, adorn Pandora with gold and jewelry.


title: Aphrodite

text: According to one myth, Aphrodite aided Hippomenes, a noble youth who wished to marry Atalanta, a maiden who was renowned throughout the land for her beauty, but who refused to marry any man unless he could outrun her in a footrace. Atalanta was an exceedingly swift runner and she beheaded all of the men who lost to her. Aphrodite gave Hippomenes three golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides and instructed him to toss them in front of Atalanta as he raced her. Hippomenes obeyed Aphrodite's order and Atalanta, seeing the beautiful, golden fruits, bent down to pick up each one, allowing Hippomenes to outrun her. In the version of the story from Ovid's "Metamorphoses", Hippomenes forgets to repay Aphrodite for her aid, so she causes the couple to become inflamed with lust while they are staying at the temple of Cybele. The couple desecrate the temple by having sex in it, leading Cybele to turn them into lions as punishment.


title: Aphrodite

text: The myth of Pygmalion is first mentioned by the third-century BC Greek writer Philostephanus of Cyrene, but is first recounted in detail in Ovid's "Metamorphoses". According to Ovid, Pygmalion was an exceedingly handsome sculptor from the island of Cyprus, who was so sickened by the immorality of women that he refused to marry. He fell madly and passionately in love with the ivory cult statue he was carving of Aphrodite and longed to marry it. Because Pygmalion was extremely pious and devoted to Aphrodite, the goddess brought the statue to life. Pygmalion married the girl the statue became and they had a son named Paphos, after whom the capital of Cyprus received its name. Pseudo-Apollodorus later mentions "Metharme, daughter of Pygmalion, king of Cyprus".


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite generously rewarded those who honored her, but also punished those who disrespected her, often quite brutally. A myth described in Apollonius of Rhodes's "Argonautica" and later summarized in the "Bibliotheca" of Pseudo-Apollodorus tells how, when the women of the island of Lemnos refused to sacrifice to Aphrodite, the goddess cursed them to stink horribly so that their husbands would never have sex with them. Instead, their husbands started having sex with their Thracian slave-girls. In anger, the women of Lemnos murdered the entire male population of the island, as well as all the Thracian slaves. When Jason and his crew of Argonauts arrived on Lemnos, they mated with the sex-starved women under Aphrodite's approval and repopulated the island. From then on, the women of Lemnos never disrespected Aphrodite again.


title: Aphrodite

text: In Euripides's tragedy "Hippolytus", which was first performed at the City Dionysia in 428 BC, Theseus's son Hippolytus worships only Artemis, the goddess of virginity, and refuses to engage in any form of sexual contact. Aphrodite is infuriated by his prideful behavior and, in the prologue to the play, she declares that, by honoring only Artemis and refusing to venerate her, Hippolytus has directly challenged her authority. Aphrodite therefore causes Hippolytus's stepmother, Phaedra, to fall in love with him, knowing Hippolytus will reject her. After being rejected, Phaedra commits suicide and leaves a suicide note to Theseus telling him that she killed herself because Hippolytus attempted to rape her. Theseus prays to Poseidon to kill Hippolytus for his transgression. Poseidon sends a wild bull to scare Hippolytus's horses as he is riding by the sea in his chariot, causing the horses to bolt and smash the chariot against the cliffs, dragging Hippolytus to a bloody death across the rocky shoreline. The play concludes with Artemis vowing to kill Aphrodite's own mortal beloved (presumably Adonis) in revenge.


title: Aphrodite

text: Glaucus of Corinth angered Aphrodite by refusing to let his horses for chariot racing mate, since doing so would hinder their speed. During the chariot race at the funeral games of King Pelias, Aphrodite drove his horses mad and they tore him apart. Polyphonte was a young woman who chose a virginal life with Artemis instead of marriage and children, as favoured by Aphrodite. Aphrodite cursed her, causing her to have children by a bear. The resulting offspring, Agrius and Oreius, were wild cannibals who incurred the hatred of Zeus. Ultimately, he transformed all the members of the family into birds of ill omen.


title: Aphrodite

text: According to Apollodorus, a jealous Aphrodite cursed Eos, the goddess of dawn, to be perpetually in love and have insatiable sexual desire because Eos once had lain with Aphrodite's sweetheart Ares, the god of war.


title: Aphrodite

text: According to Ovid in his "Metamorphoses" (book 10.238 ff.), Propoetides who are the daughters of Propoetus from the city of Amathus on the island of Cyprus denied Aphrodite's divinity and failed to worship her properly. Therefore, Aphrodite turned them into the world's first prostitutes. According to Diodorus Siculus, when the Rhodian sea nymphe Halia's six sons by Poseidon arrogantly refused to let Aphrodite land upon their shore, the goddess cursed them with insanity. In their madness, they raped Halia. As punishment, Poseidon buried them in the island's sea-caverns.


title: Aphrodite

text: Xanthius, a descendent of Bellerophon, had two children: Leucippus and an unnamed daughter. Through the wrath of Aphrodite (reasons unknown), Leucippus fell in love with his own sister. They started a secret relationship but the girl was already betrothed to another man and he went on to inform her father Xanthius, without telling him the name of the seducer. Xanthius went straight to his daughter's chamber, where she was together with Leucippus right at the moment. On hearing him enter, she tried to escape, but Xanthius hit her with a dagger, thinking that he was slaying the seducer, and killed her. Leucippus, failing to recognize his father at first, slew him. When the truth was revealed, he had to leave the country and took part in colonization of Crete and the lands in Asia Minor.


title: Aphrodite

text: Queen Cenchreis of Cyprus, wife of King Cinyras, bragged that her daughter Myrrha was more beautiful than Aphrodite. Therefore, Myrrha was cursed by Aphrodite with insatiable lust for her own father, King Cinyras of Cyprus and he slept with her unknowingly in the dark. she eventually transformed into the myrrh tree and gave birth to Adonis in this form. Cinyras also had three other daughters: Braesia, Laogora, and Orsedice. These girls by the wrath of Aphrodite (reasons unknown) cohabited with foreigners and ended their life in Egypt.


title: Aphrodite

text: The Muse Clio derided the goddess' own love for Adonis. Therefore, Clio fell in love with Pierus, son of Magnes and bore Hyacinth.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aegiale was a daughter of Adrastus and Amphithea and was married to Diomedes. Because of anger of Aphrodite, whom Diomedes had wounded in the war against Troy, she had multiple lovers, including a certain Hippolytus. when Aegiale went so far as to threaten his life, he fled to Italy. According to Stesichorus and Hesiod while Tyndareus sacrificing to the gods he forgot Aphrodite, therefore goddess made his daughters twice and thrice wed and deserters of their husbands. Timandra deserted Echemus and went and came to Phyleus and Clytaemnestra deserted Agamemnon and lay with Aegisthus who was a worse mate for her and eventually killed her husband with her lover and finally, Helen of Troy deserted Menelaus under the influence of Aphrodite for Paris and her unfaitfulness eventually causes the War of Troy.


title: Aphrodite

text: In one of the versions of the legend, Pasiphae did not make offerings to the goddess Venus [Aphrodite]. Because of this Venus [Aphrodite] inspired in her an unnatural love for a bull or she cursed her because she was Helios's daughter who revealed her adultery to Hephaestus. For Helios' own tale-telling, she cursed him with uncontrollable lust over the mortal princess Leucothoe, which led to him abandoning his then-lover Clytie, leaving her heartbroken.


title: Aphrodite

text: Lysippe was the mother of Tanais by Berossos. Her son only venerated Ares and was fully devoted to war, neglecting love and marriage. Aphrodite cursed him with falling in love with his own mother. Preferring to die rather than give up his chastity, he threw himself into the river Amazonius, which was subsequently renamed Tanais.


title: Aphrodite

text: According to Hyginus, At the behest of Zeus, Orpheus's mother, the Muse Calliope, judged the dispute between the goddesses Aphrodite and Persephone over Adonis and decided that both shall possess him half of the year. This enraged Venus [Aphrodite], because she had not been granted what she thought was her right. Therefore, Venus [Aphrodite] inspired love for Orpheus in the women of Thrace, causing them to tear him apart as each of them sought Orpheus for herself.


title: Aphrodite

text: The myth of the Judgement of Paris is mentioned briefly in the "Iliad", but is described in depth in an epitome of the "Cypria", a lost poem of the Epic Cycle, which records that all the gods and goddesses as well as various mortals were invited to the marriage of Peleus and Thetis (the eventual parents of Achilles). Only Eris, goddess of discord, was not invited. She was annoyed at this, so she arrived with a golden apple inscribed with the word καλλίστῃ (kallistēi, "for the fairest"), which she threw among the goddesses. Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena all claimed to be the fairest, and thus the rightful owner of the apple.


title: Aphrodite

text: The goddesses chose to place the matter before Zeus, who, not wanting to favor one of the goddesses, put the choice into the hands of Paris, a Trojan prince. After bathing in the spring of Mount Ida where Troy was situated, the goddesses appeared before Paris for his decision. In the extant ancient depictions of the Judgement of Paris, Aphrodite is only occasionally represented nude, and Athena and Hera are always fully clothed. Since the Renaissance, however, Western paintings have typically portrayed all three goddesses as completely naked.


title: Aphrodite

text: All three goddesses were ideally beautiful and Paris could not decide between them, so they resorted to bribes. Hera tried to bribe Paris with power over all Asia and Europe, and Athena offered wisdom, fame and glory in battle, but Aphrodite promised Paris that, if he were to choose her as the fairest, she would let him marry the most beautiful woman on earth. This woman was Helen, who was already married to King Menelaus of Sparta. Paris selected Aphrodite and awarded her the apple. The other two goddesses were enraged and, as a direct result, sided with the Greeks in the Trojan War.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite plays an important and active role throughout the entirety of Homer's "Iliad". In Book III, she rescues Paris from Menelaus after he foolishly challenges him to a one-on-one duel. She then appears to Helen in the form of an old woman and attempts to persuade her to have sex with Paris, reminding her of his physical beauty and athletic prowess. Helen immediately recognizes Aphrodite by her beautiful neck, perfect breasts, and flashing eyes and chides the goddess, addressing her as her equal. Aphrodite sharply rebukes Helen, reminding her that, if she vexes her, she will punish her just as much as she has favored her already. Helen demurely obeys Aphrodite's command.


title: Aphrodite

text: In Book V, Aphrodite charges into battle to rescue her son Aeneas from the Greek hero Diomedes. Diomedes recognizes Aphrodite as a "weakling" goddess and, thrusting his spear, nicks her wrist through her "ambrosial robe". Aphrodite borrows Ares's chariot to ride back to Mount Olympus. Zeus chides her for putting herself in danger, reminding her that "her specialty is love, not war." According to Walter Burkert, this scene directly parallels a scene from Tablet VI of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" in which Ishtar, Aphrodite's Akkadian precursor, cries to her mother Antu after the hero Gilgamesh rejects her sexual advances, but is mildly rebuked by her father Anu. In Book XIV of the "Iliad", during the "Dios Apate" episode, Aphrodite lends her "kestos himas" to Hera for the purpose of seducing Zeus and distracting him from the combat while Poseidon aids the Greek forces on the beach. In the "Theomachia" in Book XXI, Aphrodite again enters the battlefield to carry Ares away after he is wounded.


title: Aphrodite

text: Sometimes poets and dramatists recounted ancient traditions, which varied, and sometimes they invented new details; later scholiasts might draw on either or simply guess. Thus while Aeneas and Phobos were regularly described as offspring of Aphrodite, others listed here such as Priapus and Eros were sometimes said to be children of Aphrodite but with varying fathers and sometimes given other mothers or none at all.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite's most prominent avian symbol was the dove, which was originally an important symbol of her Near Eastern precursor Inanna-Ishtar. (In fact, the ancient Greek word for "dove", "peristerá", may be derived from a Semitic phrase "peraḥ Ištar", meaning "bird of Ishtar".) Aphrodite frequently appears with doves in ancient Greek pottery and the temple of Aphrodite Pandemos on the southwest slope of the Athenian Acropolis was decorated with relief sculptures of doves with knotted fillets in their beaks. Votive offerings of small, white, marble doves were also discovered in the temple of Aphrodite at Daphni. In addition to her associations with doves, Aphrodite was also closely linked with sparrows and she is described riding in a chariot pulled by sparrows in Sappho's "Ode to Aphrodite".


title: Aphrodite

text: Because of her connections to the sea, Aphrodite was associated with a number of different types of water fowl, including swans, geese, and ducks. Aphrodite's other symbols included the sea, conch shells, and roses. The rose and myrtle flowers were both sacred to Aphrodite. Her most important fruit emblem was the apple, but she was also associated with pomegranates, possibly because the red seeds suggested sexuality or because Greek women sometimes used pomegranates as a method of birth control. In Greek art, Aphrodite is often also accompanied by dolphins and Nereids.


title: Aphrodite

text: A scene of Aphrodite rising from the sea appears on the back of the Ludovisi Throne ( 460 BC), which was probably originally part of a massive altar that was constructed as part of the Ionic temple to Aphrodite in the Greek polis of Locri Epizephyrii in Magna Graecia in southern Italy. The throne shows Aphrodite rising from the sea, clad in a diaphanous garment, which is drenched with seawater and clinging to her body, revealing her upturned breasts and the outline of her navel. Her hair hangs dripping as she reaches to two attendants standing barefoot on the rocky shore on either side of her, lifting her out of the water. Scenes with Aphrodite appear in works of classical Greek pottery, including a famous white-ground "kylix" by the Pistoxenos Painter dating the between 470 and 460 BC, showing her riding on a swan or goose.


title: Aphrodite

text: In BC, the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles carved the marble statue "Aphrodite of Knidos", which Pliny the Elder later praised as the greatest sculpture ever made. The statue showed a nude Aphrodite modestly covering her pubic region while resting against a water pot with her robe draped over it for support. The "Aphrodite of Knidos" was the first full-sized statue to depict Aphrodite completely naked and one of the first sculptures that was intended to be viewed from all sides. The statue was purchased by the people of Knidos in around 350 BC and proved to be tremendously influential on later depictions of Aphrodite. The original sculpture has been lost, but written descriptions of it as well several depictions of it on coins are still extant and over sixty copies, small-scale models, and fragments of it have been identified.


title: Aphrodite

text: The Greek painter Apelles of Kos, a contemporary of Praxiteles, produced the panel painting "Aphrodite Anadyomene" ("Aphrodite Rising from the Sea"). According to Athenaeus, Apelles was inspired to paint the painting after watching the courtesan Phryne take off her clothes, untie her hair, and bathe naked in the sea at Eleusis. The painting was displayed in the Asclepeion on the island of Kos. The "Aphrodite Anadyomene" went unnoticed for centuries, but Pliny the Elder records that, in his own time, it was regarded as Apelles's most famous work.


title: Aphrodite

text: During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, statues depicting Aphrodite proliferated; many of these statues were modeled at least to some extent on Praxiteles's "Aphrodite of Knidos". Some statues show Aphrodite crouching naked; others show her wringing water out of her hair as she rises from the sea. Another common type of statue is known as "Aphrodite Kallipygos", the name of which is Greek for "Aphrodite of the Beautiful Buttocks"; this type of sculpture shows Aphrodite lifting her "peplos" to display her buttocks to the viewer while looking back at them from over her shoulder. The ancient Romans produced massive numbers of copies of Greek sculptures of Aphrodite and more sculptures of Aphrodite have survived from antiquity than of any other deity.


title: Aphrodite

text: Early Christians frequently adapted pagan iconography to suit Christian purposes. In the Early Middle Ages, Christians adapted elements of Aphrodite/Venus's iconography and applied them to Eve and prostitutes, but also female saints and even the Virgin Mary. Christians in the east reinterpreted the story of Aphrodite's birth as a metaphor for baptism; in a Coptic stele from the sixth century AD, a female orant is shown wearing Aphrodite's conch shell as a sign that she is newly baptized. Throughout the Middle Ages, villages and communities across Europe still maintained folk tales and traditions about Aphrodite/Venus and travelers reported a wide variety of stories. Numerous Roman mosaics of Venus survived in Britain, preserving memory of the pagan past. In North Africa in the late fifth century AD, Fulgentius of Ruspe encountered mosaics of Aphrodite and reinterpreted her as a symbol of the sin of Lust, arguing that she was shown naked because "the sin of lust is never cloaked" and that she was often shown "swimming" because "all lust suffers shipwreck of its affairs." He also argued that she was associated with doves and conchs because these are symbols of copulation, and that she was associated with roses because "as the rose gives pleasure, but is swept away by the swift movement of the seasons, so lust is pleasant for a moment, but is swept away forever."


title: Aphrodite

text: While Fulgentius had appropriated Aphrodite as a symbol of Lust, Isidore of Seville ( 560–636) interpreted her as a symbol of marital procreative sex and declared that the moral of the story of Aphrodite's birth is that sex can only be holy in the presence of semen, blood, and heat, which he regarded as all being necessary for procreation. Meanwhile, Isidore denigrated Aphrodite/Venus's son Eros/Cupid as a "demon of fornication" ("daemon fornicationis"). Aphrodite/Venus was best known to Western European scholars through her appearances in Virgil's "Aeneid" and Ovid's "Metamorphoses". Venus is mentioned in the Latin poem "Pervigilium Veneris" ("The Eve of Saint Venus"), written in the third or fourth century AD, and in Giovanni Boccaccio's "Genealogia Deorum Gentilium".


title: Aphrodite

text: Since the Late Middle Ages. the myth of the "Venusberg" (German; French "Mont de Vénus", "Mountain of Venus") – a subterranean realm ruled by Venus, hidden underneath Christian Europe – became a motif of European folklore rendered in various legends and epics. In German folklore of the 16th century, the narrative becomes associated with the minnesinger Tannhäuser, and in that form the myth was taken up in later literature and opera.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite is the central figure in Sandro Botticelli's painting "Primavera", which has been described as "one of the most written about, and most controversial paintings in the world", and "one of the most popular paintings in Western art". The story of Aphrodite's birth from the foam was a popular subject matter for painters during the Italian Renaissance, who were attempting to consciously reconstruct Apelles of Kos's lost masterpiece "Aphrodite Anadyomene" based on the literary "ekphrasis" of it preserved by Cicero and Pliny the Elder. Artists also drew inspiration from Ovid's description of the birth of Venus in his "Metamorphoses". Sandro Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" ( 1485) was also partially inspired by a description by Poliziano of a relief on the subject. Later Italian renditions of the same scene include Titian's "Venus Anadyomene" ( 1525) and Raphael's painting in the "Stufetta del cardinal Bibbiena" (1516). Titian's biographer Giorgio Vasari identified all of Titian's paintings of naked women as paintings of "Venus", including an erotic painting from 1534, which he called the "Venus of Urbino", even though the painting does not contain any of Aphrodite/Venus's traditional iconography and the woman in it is clearly shown in a contemporary setting, not a classical one.


title: Aphrodite

text: Jacques-Louis David's final work was his 1824 "magnum opus", "Mars Being Disarmed by Venus", which combines elements of classical, Renaissance, traditional French art, and contemporary artistic styles. While he was working on the painting, David described it, saying, "This is the last picture I want to paint, but I want to surpass myself in it. I will put the date of my seventy-five years on it and afterwards I will never again pick up my brush." The painting was exhibited first in Brussels and then in Paris, where over 10,000 people came to see it. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres's painting "Venus Anadyomene" was one of his major works. Louis Geofroy described it as a "dream of youth realized with the power of maturity, a happiness that few obtain, artists or others." Théophile Gautier declared: "Nothing remains of the marvelous painting of the Greeks, but surely if anything could give the idea of antique painting as it was conceived following the statues of Phidias and the poems of Homer, it is M. Ingres's painting: the "Venus Anadyomene" of Apelles has been found." Other critics dismissed it as a piece of unimaginative, sentimental kitsch, but Ingres himself considered it to be among his greatest works and used the same figure as the model for his later 1856 painting "La Source".


title: Aphrodite

text: Paintings of Venus were favorites of the late nineteenth-century Academic artists in France. In 1863, Alexandre Cabanel won widespread critical acclaim at the Paris Salon for his painting "The Birth of Venus", which the French emperor Napoleon III immediately purchased for his own personal art collection. Édouard Manet's 1865 painting "Olympia" parodied the nude Venuses of the Academic painters, particularly Cabanel's "Birth of Venus". In 1867, the English Academic painter Frederic Leighton displayed his "Venus Disrobing for the Bath" at the academy. The art critic J. B. Atkinson praised it, declaring that "Mr Leighton, instead of adopting corrupt Roman notions regarding Venus such as Rubens embodied, has wisely reverted to the Greek idea of Aphrodite, a goddess worshipped, and by artists painted, as the perfection of female grace and beauty." A year later, the English painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, painted "Venus Verticordia" (Latin for "Aphrodite, the Changer of Hearts"), showing Aphrodite as a nude red-headed woman in a garden of roses. Though he was reproached for his "outré" subject matter, Rossetti refused to alter the painting and it was soon purchased by J. Mitchell of Bradford. In 1879, William Adolphe Bouguereau exhibited at the Paris Salon his own "Birth of Venus", which imitated the classical tradition of "contrapposto" and was met with widespread critical acclaim, rivalling the popularity of Cabanel's version from nearly two decades prior.


title: Aphrodite

text: William Shakespeare's erotic narrative poem "Venus and Adonis" (1593), a retelling of the courtship of Aphrodite and Adonis from Ovid's "Metamorphoses", was the most popular of all his works published within his own lifetime. Six editions of it were published before Shakespeare's death (more than any of his other works) and it enjoyed particularly strong popularity among young adults. In 1605, Richard Barnfield lauded it, declaring that the poem had placed Shakespeare's name "in fames immortall Booke". Despite this, the poem has received mixed reception from modern critics; Samuel Taylor Coleridge defended it, but Samuel Butler complained that it bored him and C. S. Lewis described an attempted reading of it as "suffocating".


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite appears in Richard Garnett's short story collection "The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales" (1888), in which the gods' temples have been destroyed by Christians. Stories revolving around sculptures of Aphrodite were common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Examples of such works of literature include the novel "The Tinted Venus: A Farcical Romance" (1885) by Thomas Anstey Guthrie and the short story "The Venus of Ille" (1887) by Prosper Mérimée, both of which are about statues of Aphrodite that come to life. Another noteworthy example is "Aphrodite in Aulis" by the Anglo-Irish writer George Moore, which revolves around an ancient Greek family who moves to Aulis. The French writer Pierre Louÿs titled his erotic historical novel "" (1896) after the Greek goddess. The novel enjoyed widespread commercial success, but scandalized French audiences due to its sensuality and its decadent portrayal of Greek society.


title: Aphrodite

text: In the early twentieth century, stories of Aphrodite were used by feminist poets, such as Amy Lowell and Alicia Ostriker. Many of these poems dealt with Aphrodite's legendary birth from the foam of the sea. Other feminist writers, including Claude Cahun, Thit Jensen, and Anaïs Nin also made use of the myth of Aphrodite in their writings. Ever since the publication of Isabel Allende's book "Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses" in 1998, the name "Aphrodite" has been used as a title for dozens of books dealing with all topics even superficially connected to her domain. Frequently these books do not even mention Aphrodite, or mention her only briefly, but make use of her name as a selling point.


title: Aphrodite

text: In 1938, Gleb Botkin, a Russian immigrant to the United States, founded the Church of Aphrodite, a neopagan religion centered around the worship of a mother goddess, whom its practitioners identified as Aphrodite. The Church of Aphrodite's theology was laid out in the book "In Search of Reality", published in 1969, two years before Botkin's death. The book portrayed Aphrodite in a drastically different light than the one in which the Greeks envisioned her, instead casting her as "the sole Goddess of a somewhat Neoplatonic Pagan monotheism". It claimed that the worship of Aphrodite had been brought to Greece by the mystic teacher Orpheus, but that the Greeks had misunderstood Orpheus's teachings and had not realized the importance of worshipping Aphrodite alone.


title: Aphrodite

text: Aphrodite is a major deity in Wicca, a contemporary nature-based syncretic Neopagan religion. Wiccans regard Aphrodite as one aspect of the Goddess and she is frequently invoked by name during enchantments dealing with love and romance. Wiccans regard Aphrodite as the ruler of human emotions, erotic spirituality, creativity, and art. As one of the twelve Olympians, Aphrodite is a major deity within Hellenismos (Hellenic Polytheistic Reconstructionism), a Neopagan religion which seeks to authentically revive and recreate the religion of ancient Greece in the modern world. Unlike Wiccans, Hellenists are usually strictly polytheistic or pantheistic. Hellenists venerate Aphrodite primarily as the goddess of romantic love, but also as a goddess of sexuality, the sea, and war. Her many epithets include "Sea Born", "Killer of Men", "She upon the Graves", "Fair Sailing", and "Ally in War".


title: The Wachowskis

text: Lana Wachowski (born June 21, 1965, formerly known as Larry Wachowski) and Lilly Wachowski (born December 29, 1967, formerly known as Andy Wachowski) are American film and television directors, writers and producers. The sisters are both trans women.


title: The Wachowskis

text: Together known as the Wachowskis (), the sisters have worked as a writing and directing team through most of their careers. They made their directing debut in 1996 with "Bound" and achieved fame with their second film, "The Matrix" (1999), a major box office success for which they won the Saturn Award for Best Director. They wrote and directed its two sequels, "The Matrix Reloaded" and "The Matrix Revolutions" (both in 2003), and were involved in the writing and production of other works in the "Matrix" franchise.


title: The Wachowskis

text: Following the commercial success of the "Matrix" series, the Wachowskis wrote and produced the 2005 film "V for Vendetta", an adaptation of the graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, and in 2008 released the film "Speed Racer", a live-action adaptation of the Japanese anime series. Their next film, "Cloud Atlas", based on the novel by David Mitchell and co-written and co-directed by Tom Tykwer, was released in 2012. Their film "Jupiter Ascending" and the Netflix series "Sense8", which they co-created with J. Michael Straczynski, debuted in 2015; the second season of "Sense8" ended the series in 2018 and was Lana's first major creative undertaking without Lilly.


title: The Wachowskis

text: Since the series finale of "Sense8", the Wachowskis have been working separately on different projects: Lilly directed, wrote, and executive-produced several episodes of Showtime's "Work in Progress" (2019) with creators Abby McEnany and Tim Mason, while Lana filmed "The Matrix Resurrections", written with Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon, which was released in December 2021.


title: The Wachowskis

text: Lana was born in Chicago in 1965; Lilly was born two and a half years later, in 1967. Their mother, Lynne ( Luckinbill), was a nurse and painter. Their father, Ron Wachowski, was a businessman of Polish descent. Their uncle is an actor and Primetime Emmy Award–winning producer, Laurence Luckinbill. Ron and Lynne died five weeks apart in the late 2010s. Lana and Lilly have two other sisters, Julie and Laura. Julie was assistant coordinator for the film "Bound"; she is a novelist and screenwriter.


title: The Wachowskis

text: The Wachowskis attended the Kellogg Elementary School in Chicago's Beverly area, and graduated from Whitney Young High School, known for its performing arts and science curriculum, in 1983 and 1985. Former classmates recall them playing "Dungeons & Dragons" and working in the school's theater and TV program.


title: The Wachowskis

text: Lana went to Bard College, in New York state; Lilly attended Emerson College, in Boston. Each dropped out before graduating, and they ran a house-painting and construction business in Chicago.


title: The Wachowskis

text: Beginning in 1993, they wrote several issues of "Ectokid" for Marvel Comics' Razorline imprint (created by horror novelist Clive Barker), which were credited to Lana. They also wrote for the series "Clive Barker's Hellraiser" and "Clive Barker's Nightbreed" for Marvel's Epic Comics imprint.


title: The Wachowskis

text: In the mid-1990s they went into film writing, including the script for "Assassins" in 1994, which was directed by Richard Donner and released in 1995. Warner Bros. bought the script and included two more pictures in the contract. Donner had their script "totally rewritten" by Brian Helgeland and the Wachowskis tried unsuccessfully to remove their names from the film. They say the experience gave them the perspective that they should become directors or "[they will] never survive as writers in this town".


title: The Wachowskis

text: Their next project was the 1996 neo-noir thriller "Bound", for which they wrote the script and made their debut as directors. The film was well received for its style and craft, and was noted as one of the first mainstream films to feature a same-sex relationship without it being central to the plot. Taking advantage of the positive buzz, the Wachowskis asked to direct their next picture, "The Matrix".


title: The Wachowskis

text: They completed "The Matrix", a science fiction action film, in 1999. The movie stars Keanu Reeves as Neo, a hacker recruited by a rebellion to aid them in the fight against machines who have taken over the world and placed humanity inside a simulated reality called "the Matrix". Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss, Hugo Weaving and Joe Pantoliano also star. The movie was a critical and commercial hit for Warner Bros. It won four Academy Awards, including for "Best Visual Effects" for popularizing the bullet time visual effect. "The Matrix" came to be a major influence for action movies and has appeared in several "greatest science fiction films" lists. In 2012, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant".


title: The Wachowskis

text: After its success, the Wachowskis directed two sequels back-to-back, "The Matrix Reloaded" and "The Matrix Revolutions", both released in 2003. "The Matrix Reloaded" received positive critical reception, although not on the level of the original. It became a major box office hit, retaining the spot of the highest-grossing R-rated film for over a decade (until 2016's "Deadpool"). "The Matrix Revolutions" received a mixed critical reception and performed only moderately in the box office. Although profitable, it was slightly less so compared to the original film.


title: The Wachowskis

text: During production of the first film, the Wachowskis and Spencer Lamm, who ran the film's official website, developed comics based on the setting of the film, which were published free of charge on the website. These and a few short stories were released in three series from 1999 to 2003, with several of them (along with new material) collected in two print volumes in 2003 and 2004. The Wachowskis themselves contributed "Bits and Pieces", a prequel to the movie that explains the origins of the Matrix, featuring illustrations by Geof Darrow, the movie's conceptual designer. Other writers and artists that contributed to the series include Neil Gaiman, Dave Gibbons, Paul Chadwick, Ted McKeever, Poppy Z. Brite, and Steve Skroce.


title: The Wachowskis

text: After Lilly Wachowski came out as transgender, she encouraged looking back on her and Lana's works "through the lens of our transness", saying that the themes of identity, self-image and transformation are apparent in "The Matrix".


title: The Wachowskis

text: The Wachowskis' next feature film was "V for Vendetta", an adaptation of Alan Moore and David Lloyd's graphic novel of the same name, starring Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving. They wrote and produced the film with "Matrix" producer Joel Silver, who had previously purchased the film rights to the graphic novel. The Wachowskis offered the film to James McTeigue, the first assistant director of "The Matrix" trilogy, as his directorial debut. Moore did not participate in the production, as he was disappointed by previous Hollywood adaptations of his work, and disagreed with differences between his graphic novel and the screenplay. Following a statement to the press by Silver that Moore was supposedly excited to learn more about the movie, Moore demanded that Silver retract it, and had his own name removed from the credits when he didn't. The film's controversial storyline and themes have been both criticized and praised by sociopolitical groups. It was released in 2005 and was well received critically; it was a box office success but did not rank on the scale of "The Matrix" films. The film popularized the image of the Guy Fawkes mask, as the version designed by David Lloyd for the graphic novel and used in the movie was adopted as a symbol by the online hacktivist group Anonymous two years later.


title: The Wachowskis

text: In 2006, Silver had the Wachowskis and McTeigue hired to revamp "The Invasion" for Warner Bros. The studio was disappointed in the film as produced by director Oliver Hirschbiegel and hired the Wachowskis to rewrite a portion of the script and add new action scenes, which McTeigue directed. The film, the fourth adaptation of the novel "The Body Snatchers", was released in 2007 and was not a critical or box office success. The Wachowskis and McTeigue are not credited on the film.


title: The Wachowskis

text: The Wachowskis returned to directing with "Speed Racer" (2008) which starred Emile Hirsch. The film, which was again produced by Silver, was an adaptation of a 1960s Japanese manga series originally called "Mach GoGoGo", which had previously been adapted as an anime television series in 1967. The Wachowskis were attracted to the project because the series was the first anime they had watched, and they wanted to make a family-friendly film for their nieces and nephews to enjoy. In an effort to simulate the look of anime in live action, the Wachowskis had cinematographer David Tattersall shoot the movie digitally on a digital backlot with the intention of adding extensive visual effects in post-production. The movie was considered a critical and commercial failure. While its special effects were noted as outstanding, the storyline is considered lacking. It was nominated in the category of "Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-off or Sequel" for the 29th Golden Raspberry Awards. Its box office gross was $93 million compared to a production budget of $120 million. Since then, critics periodically have put the film on lists of underrated or cult films.


title: The Wachowskis

text: The Wachowskis' next film project was "Ninja Assassin", a martial arts film starring Rain, which was released in 2009. It was inspired by Rain's fighting scene in "Speed Racer". It was produced by the Wachowskis in their last involvement with Silver, and directed by McTeigue. The screenplay was written by Matthew Sand and J. Michael Straczynski, whom the Wachowskis called six weeks before filming to ask him for a total rewrite completed within a week, because they were dissatisfied with the earlier drafts and were running out of time. "Ninja Assassin" received negative reviews and performed lukewarmly in the theaters but respectably on home video.


title: The Wachowskis

text: Their next directorial outing was "Cloud Atlas", which was adapted from David Mitchell's 2004 novel of the same name and starred an ensemble cast which included Tom Hanks and Halle Berry. "Cloud Atlas" was written and directed in collaboration with German filmmaker Tom Tykwer, to whom the Wachowskis had introduced the novel several years earlier. The filmmakers failed to secure funding from a studio (save for $20 million by Warner Bros.) and the film was produced independently after much trouble. With a budget of over $100 million it was noted as the most expensive independent movie to that date and the first attempt at a German blockbuster. The movie opened at the 37th annual Toronto International Film Festival in September 2012 to acclaim and received a loud and lengthy standing ovation. In its general release a month later, it received polarizing reviews and eventually appeared in both "Best Film" and "Worst Film" lists. Overall reviews were mixed to positive. The film received many nominations and awards, particularly for its technical aspects, including 10 nominations for the German Film Award, out of which it won five. It also received five Saturn Award nominations, out of which it won two. David Mitchell liked the script of "Cloud Atlas", spent some time on the set (including filming a cameo), and had a positive impression about the result. According to the Wachowskis the movie was the hardest of their films to make, the one they are the most proud of, and the one they have been told has touched people's lives the most. They believe "Cloud Atlas" will be the film for which they will be remembered.


title: The Wachowskis

text: The Wachowskis subsequently produced and directed "Jupiter Ascending", an original space opera screenplay they wrote. The film was released in 2015. It stars Channing Tatum and Mila Kunis, and features the Wachowskis' regular collaborators John Gaeta on visual effects and Kym Barrett on costumes. According to "Deadline", the financial and critical failure of "Jupiter Ascending" caused their business relationship with Warner Bros, that began with "The Matrix" franchise, to be terminated.


title: The Wachowskis

text: Their next project was the Netflix science fiction drama series "Sense8", created and written with J. Michael Straczynski. "Sense8" features an international ensemble cast and was shot in multiple cities around the world. The Wachowskis directed most of the episodes of the first season, with the rest being handled by McTeigue, Tykwer, and their go-to visual effects supervisor on their movies, Dan Glass, in his directorial debut. The first season premiered in 2015 to generally positive reviews, particularly for the scale of the production and the presentation of diverse and LGBT characters and themes, winning the GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Drama Series. It also received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Original Main Title Theme Music. After the first season, Lilly took a break from it, for what turned out to be the remainder of the series. A Christmas special was released on December 23, 2016, with the remainder of the show's second season released in May 2017. Subsequently, the third season was canceled, and "Sense8" concluded with a two-hour finale which aired in June 2018.


title: The Wachowskis

text: In June 2016, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences invited the Wachowskis to join its ranks.


title: The Wachowskis

text: In May 2019, it was reported that Lilly would co-write, and co-showrun the eight-episode first season of the drama-comedy series "Work in Progress", created by Abby McEnany and Tim Mason for Showtime. The series premiered in December 2019. In January 2020, the series was renewed for a 10-episode second season, with which Lilly would continue to be involved.


title: The Wachowskis

text: In August 2019, it was announced that Lana would be returning to write, direct and produce the fourth installment of the "Matrix" series, with Reeves and Moss also reprising their roles; it marks the first film made by only one of the Wachowskis. Lana wrote the script with David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon. The film was released in December 2021.


title: The Wachowskis

text: J. Michael Straczynski, who has worked with the Wachowskis on "Ninja Assassin" and "Sense8", has said that the sisters told him they were reading his column on scriptwriting for the "Writer's Digest" magazine, for inspiration and pointers. Straczynski contributed to the magazine from 1981 to 1991.


title: The Wachowskis

text: In 1998, in the context of explaining how they got their start in filmmaking, the Wachowskis mentioned Roger Corman's book "How I Made A Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime", and indicated, with laughter, that they liked his movies, and began by wanting to "make a low-budget horror movie". In the same interview they stated that they felt flattered, after their first film, by comparisons others had made between them and the Coen brothers, who had "made five, maybe six great movies…" at that time.


title: The Wachowskis

text: Speaking to Bernard Weintraub of "The New York Times" in April 1999, the Wachowskis mentioned explicitly that they prepared for their first "Matrix" production by studying the works of John Woo "and other Hong Kong filmmakers", as well as reading and rereading Homer's "Odyssey", and studying the works of John Huston, Stanley Kubrick, Fritz Lang, George Lucas, Ridley Scott, and Billy Wilder.


title: The Wachowskis

text: Mark Miller, writing in "Wired" in 2003, also listed Homer, Hermann Hesse, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and philosopher Cornel West. In an interview with "Gadfly" in 1998 (after their first movie), the Wachowskis reiterated their influence by or enjoyment of Huston (e.g. "Treasure of the Sierra Madre") and Wilder (e.g., "Sunset Boulevard" and "Lost Weekend"), and added to these the impacts of Alfred Hitchcock (e.g. "Strangers on a Train" and "Psycho"), Roman Polanski (e.g. "Repulsion"), and Francis Ford Coppola (the "Godfather" movies, and "The Conversation").


title: The Wachowskis

text: The Wachowskis admit to a love for telling multi-part stories. "Because we grew up on comic books and the Tolkien trilogy, one of the things we're interested in is bringing serial fiction to cinema," Lana has said. Lilly says: "We think movies are fairly boring and predictable. We want to screw with audiences' expectations." In terms of themes expressed in their body of work, Lana has cited "the inexplicable nature of the universe [being] in constant dialogue with our own consciousness and our consciousness actually affect[ing] the inexplicable nature of the universe", "interconnectivity and about truth beneath the surface", "the paradox of choice and choicelessness", "transcendence ... transcending archetypal boxes, stereotypes", "race ... an important component" and "gender ... it's one of our most significant cultural subjects".


title: The Wachowskis

text: The Wachowskis cited the art of comic book artist Geof Darrow as an influence on the look of "The Matrix". Also, they said that "Ghost in the Shell", "Ninja Scroll", and "Akira" were anime that inspired them, saying "in anime, one thing that they do that we tried to bring to our film was a juxtaposition of time and space in action beats".


title: The Wachowskis

text: The Wachowskis cited Stanley Kubrick's "" as a major influence for "Cloud Atlas". They first saw the film when they were ten and seven, respectively.


title: The Wachowskis

text: Lana has most been influenced by "2001: A Space Odyssey", "Blade Runner", "Ma vie en rose", and "My Neighbor Totoro". Both Wachowskis are fans of the "Ghost in the Shell", "Akira", "Wicked City", "Ninja Scroll" and "Fist of the North Star" anime films.


title: The Wachowskis

text: None of the home video releases of their films feature any deleted scenes. Lana says that despite often having to cut scenes from their movies, they do not want to include deleted scenes in such releases, as this would suggest that their films suffer from incompleteness. They love their finished products and believe them complete. For the same reason, they have not released their films for home video with director's or extended cuts. They also avoid recording audio commentary tracks, having participated only on the track recorded for the LaserDisc of "Bound". The sisters say they learned that offering an interpretation of their films means that viewers will be less likely to express their own interpretation.


title: The Wachowskis

text: The Wachowskis frequently hire the same basic film crew to make their movies. Lana says they do it in part to ensure a positive environment. "It's like family. Everyone is very respectful of each other," says Lana. They used the same practice while selecting the television crew for their Netflix show, "Sense8".


title: The Wachowskis

text: During "The Matrix Reloaded", "The Matrix Revolutions", "The Animatrix" and "Enter the Matrix" production, the Wachowskis created EON Entertainment (not to be confused with Eon Productions), their production company to coordinate and direct all involved partners. It is also where the films were edited together, after the various FX vendors sent their finished work. EON's internal VFX team, ESC, did a number of visual effect shots for the two "Matrix" sequels and coordinated the other vendors. ESC was shut down in summer 2004. Anarchos Productions (credited in "Cloud Atlas" as Anarchos Pictures) is their production company that has been billed for all their films starting with "V for Vendetta" up to the first season of "Sense8". In the second season and following Lilly's break from the show, Anarchos is replaced by Venus Castina Productions, a production company created by Lana Wachowski and her wife Karin Winslow. Venus Castina is an epithet of the Roman goddess Venus, who in this form, was supposedly associated with "the yearnings of feminine souls locked up in male bodies". In the "Sense8" series finale, the real book "Venus Castina: Famous Female Impersonators Celestial and Human" makes an appearance as the unlikely object that brought a lesbian couple together; according to Lana and the actresses that portray the couple, the duo have been based on Lana and Karin.


title: The Wachowskis

text: "Kinowerks" is their pre- and post-production and effects studio, based in the Ravenswood neighborhood of Chicago. It has been acclaimed for its green-friendly design, including solar panels, a planted roof, countertops and floors made of recycled materials, plug-in car stations, a water reuse and filtration system, skylights, and a pneumatic elevator. Roger Ebert was invited to watch a restored print of "The Godfather" in the "Kinowerks" facilities and met the Wachowskis, but he was oblivious to the fact the studio belonged to them. According to the "Chicago Tribune"s Christopher Pirelli, the facility is very low-key: "an industrial building that appears neither old nor especially new" and "It could be an upscale dentist's office" while the "inside is rather unexpected" and has numerous mementos of past film projects. On October 22, 2018, the Wachowskis announced their plans to close and list "Kinowerks" for $5 million.


title: The Wachowskis

text: In 2003, they created Burlyman Entertainment and released comic books based on "The Matrix" as well as two original bi-monthly series:


title: The Wachowskis

text: The Wachowskis' first script was a thriller called "Carnivore". It has been described as "a Corman-style, low-budget horror movie that dealt with cannibalism or, more specifically, rich people being eaten by cannibals". The writing was well received and the script achieved notice for the duo; however, interest in making the movie was low, for executives told them: "This is a bad idea. I can't make this. I'm rich." Years later, on April 6, 1999, a week after "The Matrix" opened in American theaters, "Variety" reported Trimark was looking to buy the script and were in talks with George Romero to direct it with production scheduled to begin in August. In April 2001, news of the Wachowskis producing it for Lionsgate and looking for a director surfaced again, and in August 2003 a second time, with their go-to cinematographer Bill Pope rumored to be making his directorial debut with it. The film ultimately went unproduced.


title: The Wachowskis

text: Another two of their earliest scripts which were never produced were "Plastic Man", based on the DC Comics superhero of the same name and "Vertical Run" based on the book of the same name by Joseph R. Garber.


title: The Wachowskis

text: After completing "The Matrix", the Wachowskis were looking to make an animated adaptation of Frank Miller's "Hard Boiled" graphic novel. The comic was drawn by Geof Darrow, the conceptional designer of "The Matrix" and later its sequels. The project didn't move forward because Miller didn't want it to be an animated film.


title: The Wachowskis

text: In November 2000, "Variety" reported the Wachowskis would produce, co-create and direct second unit on a new "Conan the Barbarian" movie for Warner Bros. which was to be written and directed by John Milius and which could see Arnold Schwarzenegger make an appearance. The Wachowskis were planning to juggle their pre-production involvement on the movie and work on "The Matrix" sequels at the same time. In January 2004 it was reported that development on "King Conan: Crown of Iron" had stalled for years because of the Wachowskis' involvement in "The Matrix" sequels and now that the movies were complete they decided to abandon the project of their own volition because of the frequent clashes they had experienced with Milius concerning the tone and direction of the movie. Lana once suggested "Conan the Barbarian" as her favorite movie based on comics, to which Lilly also responded enthusiastically.


title: The Wachowskis

text: In 2008, the Wachowskis were producing for Madhouse an animated film based on their comic book company's "Shaolin Cowboy", titled "Shaolin Cowboy in The Tomb of Doom". The feature is co-directed by the comic book's creator Geof Darrow and Seiji Mizushima, a Japanese director. When the American financiers backed out, the film was left half-finished and in need of $3 million. Darrow does not believe that the required amount of money to finish it will be found.