1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Venus (goddess)

VENUS, an old Roman and Latin goddess, apparently representing beauty and growth in nature, and especially in gardens, where the Roman practical sense would most naturally see these. She had two temples in Rome, one in the grove of Libitina, with whom she was wrongly identified, and the other near the Circus Maximus, both of which had as their dedication day the 19th of August, the festival of the Visalia rustica, a fact which also points in the direction of skilled cultivation as the human work of which she was protectress. But this old Latin deity was in historical times entirely absorbed by the Greek Aphrodite, and assumed the characteristics of a cult of human love, which in her original form she had never possessed. (See Aphrodite.)