On Famous Women

...they said she was the very star of heaven which we call Venus. Others said she was a celestial woman who fell to earth from the lap of Jupiter. Briefly, everyone, obscured by a blind darkness, although they knew she was born from a mortal woman, asserted she was an immortal goddess. And they affirmed with all their might that she was the mother of that ill-fated love which they called Cupid. Nor did she lack the arts of capturing the minds of foolish onlookers with various gestures. By these actions, it happened through their deserts that, since they were unable to resist many obscenities (not all of which I am about to write down immediately), she was held to be the daughter of Jupiter and one of the most venerable goddesses.

Nor was she appeased by incense alone at Paphos, the most ancient town of the Cypriots; for they thought that this dead and incestuous woman delighted in that fragrance, she who while living delighted in the filth and pleasures of brothels. But also among other nations and the Romans, who once built a temple to her under the title of Venus Genitrix original: "veneris genitricis"; Venus the Mother, the ancestral goddess of the Roman people via Aeneas. and Verticordia original: "verticordiē"; "The Changer of Hearts," a title used when invoking Venus to turn women's hearts toward chastity and virtue. and other honors.

But because many things are said, it was believed she married two men. It is not entirely certain to whom she first married; therefore, as it pleases some, she first married Vulcan, king of the Lemnians and son of the Cretan Jupiter. After he was removed, she married Adonis, son of Cinyras and Myrrha, the king of the Cypriots. This seems more likely to me than if we were to say Adonis was her first husband. Whether it was done by the fault of her own temperament, or the infection of the region in which lust seems most powerful, or the malice of a corrupt mind, after Adonis was already dead, she fell into such a great itch of luxury original: "luxurie pruritum"; a historical idiom for intense sexual desire or "lust." that she seemed to have stained all the clarity of her beauty with frequent fornications, not merely obscured but entirely spotted.

Since it was known to the adjacent regions that she was caught with a soldier while married to Vulcan, her first husband; from which the story of her adultery with Mars Mars is the god of war, here referred to as an "armiger" or soldier. was believed to have taken its place. Finally, however, so that she might seem to have wiped away a little of the redness from her shameless face A metaphor for losing the ability to feel shame or blush. and gained a wider license for her lust, she thought up an unspeakable baseness: she first, as they say, invented public prostitution and established brothels original: "fornices"; literally "arches," referring to the vaulted underground chambers in Rome where prostitutes often worked. and compelled matrons to enter them. This was testified by the execrable custom of the Cypriots which has been witnessed through many past centuries. They long observed the practice of sending their virgins to the shores so that they might engage in intercourse with strangers, and thus in the future...

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