If you ask a modern person what Aphrodite stands for, you will probably hear love. Roses, candlelight, a soft focus. It is a lovely idea, but you will struggle to find it in the Greek poems. The Aphrodite of Homer and Hesiod is not about courtship or tenderness. She is about desire, the sudden pull that makes people do things they did not plan to do, and she is usually described as something that happens to you rather than something you choose. I think that is the most useful way to understand her, and it also explains why the Greeks were so wary of her.
Two births
She has two origin stories, and the difference between them is telling. In Homer, Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and a minor goddess named Dione. A respectable family, a normal birth. In Hesiod's Theogony, the story is very different. When Cronus cut off the genitals of his father Uranus and threw them into the sea, white foam gathered around them, and from the foam a girl rose up and came ashore, first at Cythera and then at Cyprus. Her name is explained as meaning foam, aphros.
Hesiod does not pretend this is gentle. He gives her the epithet philommeides and then, in the same breath, puns on a different word that sounds nearly identical, one that refers to the genitals from which she came. The Greeks heard the joke. The goddess of desire is born from violence and from a body part, and she comes up out of the water already attended by Eros and Himeros, love and longing.
Plato later tried to reconcile these two births in the Symposium by saying there were really two Aphrodites. One, Urania, the heavenly, came from the sky god alone and stood for a higher, more intellectual love. The other, Pandemos, the common one, was the daughter of Zeus and Dione and stood for ordinary physical desire. It is a philosopher's solution, but I think it shows that even the Greeks could feel the goddess pulling in two directions.
What happens when she tries to fight
One of my favourite moments in the Iliad shows the limits of her power. In book five, the Greek hero Diomedes is on a rampage, and he actually wounds Aphrodite in the hand when she tries to rescue her son Aeneas. She flees, bleeding, to Olympus. Her mother Dione comforts her, and then Zeus, with that familiar mix of kindness and condescension, tells her that war is not her business. She should concern herself with the works of marriage, and leave fighting to Ares and Athena.
That line is often quoted as evidence that Aphrodite is a gentle goddess of love. I read it the opposite way. Zeus has to remind her to stay in her lane because she is clearly capable of showing up where she is not welcome. And in real Greek cities, she did. At Sparta she was worshipped in armour, and there was a statue of an armed Aphrodite on the Acrocorinth at Corinth. The goddess of desire carried weapons in two of the toughest places in Greece, which tells you the Greeks saw no contradiction.
Desire as a force from outside
Here is where I stop paraphrasing and give my own reading. The Greeks did not think of desire as something you owned. They thought of it as something that came over you, rather like weather, and the name for that weather was Aphrodite. This is why you find so many stories in which a mortal is driven to act against their own interest and the explanation is simply that a god did it.
The clearest example is Helen. In book three of the Iliad, Helen is on the walls of Troy, and Aphrodite appears in disguise and orders her to go to bed with Paris, who has just been rescued from a duel he was losing. Helen recognizes the goddess and tells her off to her face. She says to go sit with him herself, then, and be his wife. Aphrodite's answer is chilling. She tells Helen not to provoke her, or she will hate her as much as she now loves her, and make her miserable in front of both armies. Helen obeys. She is afraid.
Nobody in that scene gets to say no. The goddess of desire is also the goddess of consequences, and what she wants goes. When poets later blamed Helen for the Trojan War, others pointed out that the real culprit was Aphrodite, who promised her to Paris in the first place in return for being named the most beautiful goddess. The Judgement of Paris is a story about a bribe, after all. Aphrodite wins by offering the one thing she controls.
Even the gods are not exempt
What I find most revealing is a story from the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. The hymn says that Aphrodite has long made the other gods fall in love with mortals, and has mocked Zeus himself for it, making him desire mortal women again and again. So Zeus decides to turn it around. He puts into her heart a longing for a mortal man, the Trojan prince Anchises.
She goes to Mount Ida disguised as a young girl and tells a long, bright, almost convincing story to Anchises about being a princess. They sleep together. In the morning she reveals herself, and she is mortified. She says that it is a terrible shame to her, that the other gods will laugh. She tells Anchises to keep their son Aeneas a secret, and that if he boasts of this he will be struck by lightning.
Think about how this works. The goddess who makes everyone else helpless gets caught by the same mechanism, and she hates it. She has a human reaction to it: embarrassment. It is a surprisingly warm portrait of someone who dispenses a power she has never been on the wrong side of until now.
Even the strap she wears, the kestos himas, an embroidered band that makes anyone desire the wearer, can be lent. In the Iliad, Hera borrows it from Aphrodite to distract Zeus, and Aphrodite gives it without hesitation. Desire, in other words, is a tool. It can be picked up and used by anyone clever enough to ask.
Sailors, cities, and the common people
Beyond the stories, the Greeks asked for her help in less obvious ways. Sailors prayed to her as Euploia, the goddess of fair voyages, which makes sense since she came out of the sea. In Athens she was worshipped as Pandemos, Aphrodite of all the people, and her cult was said to have been founded to mark the political unification of the city. A goddess of attraction as the glue of a community, the force that gets strangers to live together, is a very unromantic idea, and a very sensible one.
The poet Sappho, writing around 600 BCE, wrote a famous poem asking Aphrodite for help in a love affair. Her request is that the goddess come as an ally, a symmachos, the word you would use for a military partner. Even a poet who is in love wants her on side the way you would want a general.
What I take from her
If I had to compress all this, I would say that Aphrodite is the Greek recognition that attraction is not under your control. She is not the soft side of life. She is the reason the Trojan War happened, the reason a mother-goddess was ashamed in the woods, and the reason Helen did what she was told.
The Greeks gave desire a face, and the face was beautiful, because that is how desire feels from the inside. But the stories remember that from the outside it looks like an invasion, and they were careful never to forget it.