The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite is one of the longer poems in the collection of hexameter hymns transmitted under Homer's name, though composed by various anonymous poets, probably in the seventh century BCE. It tells how Zeus, to humble the goddess who had made the other gods fall for mortals, turns her own power upon her, filling her with desire for the mortal herdsman Anchises, whom she comes to on Mount Ida in disguise and by whom she conceives the hero Aeneas. The poem is notable for the irony with which it treats its own subject, the goddess of desire herself overmastered by desire and left ashamed at having lain with a mortal, and for the tenderness and unease of the encounter. Like the other major Homeric Hymns it was probably performed as a prelude at festivals in honour of the deity, and it stands among the finest early Greek poems, a principal literary source for the Greek conception of Aphrodite.
The poem was influential well beyond its own period: Virgil drew on its scene of divine seduction for the meeting of Venus and Anchises in the Aeneid, and the hymn is a principal source, alongside later retellings, for the genealogy that makes Aeneas the son of a goddess and a mortal, a lineage later Roman tradition used to trace its own founders back to Aphrodite herself. Anchises' fear on realizing he has lain with a goddess, and his plea not to be left weakened by the encounter, reflects a widespread ancient belief that intimate contact with a deity carried real danger for a mortal.