VENUS, 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 Max imus, both of which had as their dedication day Aug. 19, the festival of the Vinalia rustica, a fact which also points in the di rection 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 char acteristics of a cult of human love, which in her original form she had never possessed. See APHRODITE.