Few ancient statues carry a name as honestly human as the Venus Callipyge. The marble figure in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples shows the goddess lifting her robe and looking back over her shoulder at her own body. Its Greek name, Aphrodite Kallipygos, means “Aphrodite of the beautiful buttocks.”
The name comes from a story recorded in antiquity about two Greek sisters from the countryside near Syracuse, in Sicily, who argued over which of them had the more beautiful backside. The tale is genuinely ancient. But it is not a myth about the gods, and nothing in the ancient sources ties it to the statue in Naples.
The story of the two sisters
The fullest version survives in the Deipnosophistae (“The Learned Banqueters”) by Athenaeus of Naucratis, a Greek writer from Egypt whose sprawling work collects anecdotes and quotations from earlier authors. “But in former times men were so devoted to luxury, that they dedicated a temple to Venus Callipyge on this account,” the passage begins in Charles Duke Yonge’s 1854 English translation.
According to Athenaeus, a countryman had two beautiful daughters. Arguing over whose buttocks were finer, they went out to the public road to settle the matter. A young man, the son of a wealthy older father, who happened to pass by, judged the elder sister the winner and fell in love with her.
When he told his younger brother, the brother went out to the fields to see the sisters for himself and fell in love with the younger one. Their father could not persuade his sons to seek grander matches, so he brought the two young women to the family and married them to his sons.
From then on, the sisters were known as the kallipygoi, the women with beautiful buttocks. Having become wealthy through their marriages, they built a temple to Aphrodite and gave the goddess the same title, Kallipygos.
Athenaeus cites two earlier poets for the story. He quotes a line by Cercidas of Megalopolis about a pair of kallipygoi women at Syracuse, and says the founding of the temple was also related by a poet named Archelaus.
An anecdote, not a myth
The story is best read as an ancient anecdote explaining how a local cult got its unusual name, rather than as mythology. No gods take part, and the characters are ordinary people. Athenaeus tells it in a discussion of luxury and indulgence, not of religion.
There is separate ancient evidence that the cult itself was real. Clement of Alexandria, a Christian writer attacking pagan worship, lists the Syracusans’ devotion to Aphrodite Kallipygos among the practices he found shameful, alongside other local titles of the goddess honored in Argos and Athens.
That variety was typical. Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty identified by the Romans with Venus, was rooted in ancient fertility cults on Cyprus and worshiped under many local names across the Greek world.
In Syracuse, founded by settlers from Corinth, one of those names was evidently Kallipygos. Whether the two sisters ever existed cannot be known.
The statue in Naples
The statue that now carries the name has a separate history. The Naples marble is a Roman work, generally dated to around the first century BC, and is thought to copy or adapt a lost Greek original, probably in bronze, from around 300 BC. Its sculptor and original setting are unknown.
It was found in Rome without its head and was in the collection of the Farnese family by 1594. It is sometimes said to have come from Nero’s Golden House, the Domus Aurea, but scholars consider that unlikely.
The missing head was supplied in the 16th century, and the restorer chose to have the goddess look back over her shoulder. That choice has shaped how the statue has been understood ever since. In 1786, before the figure was sent from Rome to Naples, the sculptor Carlo Albacini replaced the head, the arms and one leg, keeping the backward glance. By 1802 it was in the museum that is now the National Archaeological Museum, in a city that the Greeks had founded as Neapolis.
Because the original head is lost, there is no way to confirm that the famous over-the-shoulder look is ancient. The link to the Syracusan sisters is also a later one. Athenaeus’s tale circulated widely from the 16th century, and in the 17th and 18th centuries viewers identified the statue as the cult image of the Syracusan temple, or even as one of the sisters.
A favorite of European collectors
That identification helped make the Venus Callipyge one of the most admired antiquities in Europe. Marble copies were made for Versailles in the 1680s, and later versions in marble, bronze, plaster and ceramic went to palaces, gardens and country houses in France, Germany and England.
Like the Venus de Milo, whose missing arms have prompted their own debates, the Venus Callipyge shows how much of an ancient statue’s fame can rest on what later centuries added. In this case, the addition was not only a head but a story, borrowed from two sisters on a road outside Syracuse.
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