Aphrodite

"I thought you guys were extinct!"

- Aphrodite on virgins, in "Many Happy Returns"

Aphrodite is the Olympian goddess of love. Although often spiteful and selfish, as well as very immature at times (as shown with her feuds with Discord and her son, Cupid), the influence of her half-brother Hercules and her friendships with mortals such as Iolaus, Xena and Gabrielle leads her character in some surprising directions.

Relationships
She treats Hercules as her protective older brother, affectionately referring to him as "Big Bro" (a physical description, given that she was millennia older than he) and was probably the closest to him of all the Olympians. She frequently took his advice and assisted him on his adventures. Although she was manipulating him during their initial encounter, Aphrodite eventually became friends with Iolaus, Hercules's most frequent ally. Xena and Gabrielle often found themselves entangled in one of Aphrodite's hair-brained schemes, though their relationship with her improved to the point where the goddess was willing to stand up to Athena on their behalf.

She was also quite close to her brother Ares, largely due to the connection they shared. Aphrodite literally goes insane when Ares loses his godhood, as War and Love must exist in cosmic balance. In spite of her affection for Ares, Aphrodite has no time for his flunkies, in particular Discord, with whom she shares an almost adolescent rivalry.

Aphrodite's relationship with her son Cupid is generally strained for a variety of reasons, her over-protectiveness and the fact that she was his boss as well as his mother being chief among them.

Like many Olympians, Aphrodite occasionally has trysts with mortals. Two children produced from such couplings are Deon and Aeneas. She also has children with Ares (Deimos) and Hermes (Fortune).

Story
Before her tryst with Hephaestus takes place she is portrayed as being a bit promiscuous: she steals a boyfriend away from Hera and because of that Hera places a curse on her son Cupid. Cupid falls in love with a girl named Psyche, who is said to be more beautiful than Aphrodite, which makes her extremely jealous. Out of jealousy, Aphrodite tries to shoot a love arrow at Psyche, when Cupid tries to stop her Hercules is accidentally hit and falls in love with Psyche. Thanks to Hera's curse, Cupid literally turns into a green-eyed monster with jealousy at the thought of losing Psyche. The curse is eventually lifted when the truth comes, after he confesses his love for Psyche and she marries him. Aphrodite gives Psyche Ambrosia to make her a goddess to make amends, since she is the one who started the mess. Although she soon realizes she is now a mother-in-law, which does not make her very happy. She becomes a grandmother later on when Psyche and Cupid have a son, Bliss.

On Hercules, Aphrodite is usually the comic relief or the viewers' window into the politics of Mount Olympus. Though she is originally introduced as a scheming goddess, devious and almost as uncaring as Ares, she quickly evolves into a more benevolent fun-loving character, though still prone to mood-swings. She is also the only member of his Olympian family apart from Zeus Hercules seems to have any sort of close relationship with (in one episode he refers to her as his favorite little sister, as well as is somewhat close to her son Cupid who refers to him as "Uncle Herc"), despite the trouble she seems to cause him.

Aphrodite determines to break up a royal family marriage that will end a war, only because the newly allied kingdoms plan to destroy her temples. As her son Cupid explains to Gabrielle, "When the Goddess of Love decides to do something petty and spiteful, she can be a tad difficult to reason with." She later develops a friendship with Gabrielle and tries to save her during the massacre of the Olympian Deities.

Aphrodite becomes one of the survivors of the Twilight of the Olympian Gods, organized by Xena when the deities, under Athena's flag, join together to kill Eve. Aphrodite remains unconvinced that Eve will willingly destroy the deities, to the point where she sneaks Xena and Gabrielle into Olympus itself. After the Twilight of the Gods, Aphrodite becomes mentally unbalanced due to Ares losing his powers: Love must be balanced by War. Her powers are stolen by Caligula, whom Xena tricks into killing himself. Xena helps restore Aphrodite's and Ares's powers with the golden apples she stole from the Asgardian Deities, thereby restoring balance to the universe. Ironically, Twilight is supposed to allow humanity to mature to the point where they no longer need the deities, but it seems that mankind needs Ares and Aphrodite in a much more literal sense than the other deities.

This means that Aphrodite is one of the Olympians to survive the events of the show. Since episodes of both Hercules and Xena set in the modern day show that Ares and Hercules continue their rivalry, Aphrodite must also survive to the present day of the series universe, since Ares would have gone insane without her to balance him.

Powers
As an Olympian goddess, Aphrodite possesses the normal range of abilities: immortality, enhanced stamina, reflexes, senses, agility, teleportation (in her case, vanishing in an explosion of small heart shapes), telekinesis, conjuration, regeneration, invisibility, intangibility, invincibility,  fireballs, flying, magical shielding, time travel (restricted by order of Zeus), healing (restricted by order of Athena), as well as shape-shifting. She also displayed an ability to generate an aura to prevent the soul of a worshiper from being taken to the Underworld for the span of one day- she is the only Olympian seen to display this ability, but it is possible that this is a perk any Olympian can use occasionally.

As the Goddess of love, Aphrodite's particular power is to cause people to fall in love or be consumed by passion. This lovely goddess could also control the minds of her lovers when she had ever needed or wanted to.

Background

 * Aphrodite was played by Alexandra Tydings.
 * Tydings has short brunette hair. She was surprised and gratified to be cast as Aphrodite in spite of her brown locks... but then they showed her the wig she would be wearing.
 * Aphrodite has appeared in 11 episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess and 9 episodes of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, for a total of 20 appearances.
 * Aphrodite is portrayed as a sibling of Hercules and a daughter of Hera, but in the myths, Aphrodite's origins were varied. Most versions relate that she was actually older than Zeus and not one of his godly children, more his aunt than anything else, born from the sea foam generated by the severed genetalia of Uranus, Zeus's grandfather. However, in Homer's Iliad Book V, she is a daughter of Zeus and Dione, the mother goddess whose oracle was at Dodona (and whose name is nothing more than a feminization of Zeus's).
 * Plato once attempted to resolve this by suggesting that Aphrodite Ourania ("daughter of Uranus"), the goddess of spiritual love (or homosexual love), was the one born from the sea foam, while Aphrodite Pandemos ("of all the people") was the daughter of Zeus and Dione and the goddess of physical love (or heterosexual love).
 * Boticelli's famous painting The Birth of Venus, Aphrodite appears rising out of the sea in a giant seashell. In "The Apple", she appears the same way- and in typical Xenverse fashion, uses the seashell to go windsurfing.
 * Though the shell is not seen again in the canon Xenaverse, she uses it again in Hercules & Xena - The Animated Movie: The Battle for Mount Olympus to surf, both on the ocean and down the slopes of Olympus. She later planned to hide in her shell if her "calming aura to neutralize the bad titan vibes" didn't work.