Aphrodite
Aphrodite was a female Olympian, known as a goddess in the home of the Greek gods. (COMIC: The Life Bringer!) She "inspired love in the hearts of mankind". (AUDIO: The Queen of Time)
Her equivalent in the Roman pantheon was Venus. (PROSE: Byzantium!)
Biography
Aphrodite rose from the sea amidst a cluster of oysters. These oysters were later acquired by Hecuba. She tried to serve them to the Second Doctor when she invited him for dinner, seemingly not realising that they had, over the intervening millennia, decayed into putrescent slime. (AUDIO: The Queen of Time)
Displeased to find that Prometheus had returned to Olympus, she took him and the Fourth Doctor to see Zeus, whom she informed that Prometheus stubbornly intended to repopulate the universe with men again. Aphrodite later went to see Prometheus in his cell, hoping to persuade him to be more reasonable, but found that he had escaped and alerted Zeus. (COMIC: The Life Bringer!)
At one point, Aphrodite's brother Ares, the god of war, became inflamed with lust for her; as a result, his star Mars began to pursue her star Venus through Greek Space, smashing holes in Olympos and raining fire across the land. Their relative Iris devised a solution in which the two stars would spin about missing each other, only rarely aligning in pleasurable occultations. (PROSE: Wandering Stars)
References
Odysseus hoped that the First Doctor, whom the Greeks had mistaken for Zeus, would tell a tale or two of Aphrodite at dinner. (TV: The Myth Makers)
In a parallel universe, one where the effects of the reality bomb caused its stars to wink out, the ancient Greeks believed that the observable disappearances were Hermes stealing them as gifts for Aphrodite. (AUDIO: The Endless Night)
