Venus
deity figure · 8 works · 9 mentions · 20 anchored passages
Divine one · Goddess · Lady · Murcia · Venus' boy · the Venusberg · the beauteous queen of love · the bright dame
in the texts
De Rerum Natura
The goddess Venus, invoked at the opening as mother of Rome, creatrix of all living things, guide of the cosmos, and muse of the poem. She is also addressed as the force that tames Mars and brings peace.
Restore the generations kind by kind?
Foretoken thy approach, O thou Divine,
Mother of Rome, delight of Gods and men,
Poems
The goddess Venus, invoked in scholarly and poetic tradition with her mythological attributes, and also used as a comparison for the beloved Fanny.
Her features all express The beauteous queen of love:
Drawn by sparrows, or swans, or dolphins, or doves, Attended in form by the graces and loves:
Without all this bustle I saw the bright dame, To supper last night to P—y's she came In a good warm sedan;
On Benefits
Goddess to whom the Graces are given as companions
9 For, besides what Hecaton copies down, Chrysippus says that the three Graces are the daughters of Jupiter and Eurynome, younger in age than the Hours, but somewhat fairer of face, and for that reason given to Venus as her companions.
Ad Nationes
Goddess of love, shown wounded by a mortal in Homer.
he wounds Venus with a human arrow, holds Mars thirteen months in chains, perhaps to perish;
Apologeticum
Goddess of love, subject of myth and theatrical mockery cited by Tertullian.
you endure to have the records of Jupiter sung, and Juno, Venus, and Minerva judged by a shepherd.
that Venus was wounded by a human arrow, because she wished to rescue her son Aeneas, all but slain by that same Diomedes;
that Jupiter, lest he should suffer the same violence from the other heaven-dwellers, was set free by the work of a certain monster;
De Spectaculis
Goddess of love, honored under the name Murcia in the circus and directly as patroness of the theatre.
for they will have Murcia to be the goddess of love, to whom in that part they vowed a temple.
And so Pompey the Great—less only than his own theatre—when he had built that citadel of all turpitudes, fearing some day the censorian animadversion upon his memory, set a temple of Venus on top, and, calling the people by an edict to the dedication, named it not a theatre but a temple of Venus, "under which," he said, "we have placed tiers of seats for the spectacles.
History of the Peloponnesian War
Goddess whose temple at Eryx holds treasures displayed by the Segestans to deceive Athenian envoys about their wealth.
They took them to the temple of Venus at Eryx, and showed them the treasures deposited there, consisting of bowls, wine-ladles, censers, and other articles of furniture in no small quantity;
Law in a Free State
Roman goddess of love, whose Venusberg symbolises the crude, early stage of passion that (per Shaw) precedes perfect love.
Now Tannhäuser's passion for Venus is a development of the humdrum fondness of the bourgeois Jack for his Jill, a development at once higher and more dangerous.
Shaw seems to hope that although for the present the way to perfect love lies through the Venusberg, the time will come when our children will be born on the other side of it “and so be spared that fiery purgation.