Goddess of Love and Mistress of the Sea. Notes on a Hellenistic Hymn to Arsinoe-Aphrodite (P. Lit.Goodsp. 2, I-IV)

The article analyses one of the hexametric poems copied on a second century AD papyrus, possibly from Hermupolis, P.Lit.Goodspeed 2: a Hellenistic hymn to Aphrodite celebrated as a patroness of the sea and of wedded love. This portrayal of the goddess perfectly fits with Ptolemaic royal propaganda in III BC. The address to a "Ptolemai[c] Arsinoe" (II 5) reveals that here the goddess is worshipped as a divine image of a queen Arsinoe, most probably Arsinoe II Philadelphos, who had strong links with key-figures of the Ptolemaic navy. The hymn is compared with contemporary Alexandrian poetry, like the epigrams of the Milan papyrus P.Mil.Vogl. VIII 309. Some hypotheses are also presented about the context for the composition and the performance of the hymn (a Cypriot cult of Arsinoe Philadelphos?).