You’ve seen her on a scallop shell. You’ve seen her in near pristine white marble – without a head or arms. You’ve seen her astrological symbol on protest signs, found her name on razors, and heard her name in pop songs.

But who is Aphrodite (or her Roman alter ego Venus), really?

Historian and professor Bettany Hughes tells you in her revealing, engaging, fascinating Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire.

Myth would have you believe Aphrodite sprang fully formed from the sea foam stirred up when her mother, Gaia, castrated her father, Ouranos, because he just wouldn’t leave her alone. The truth, according to Bettany, is the goddess of love’s final form was the work of many societies over centuries, coming together at cultural crossroads and then boarding ships for even more distant lands where she would meet her divine sisters to combine and recombine into something new yet again.

She would also encounter seismic shifts in gender politics and populations that had once been most concerned with survival beginning to look outward with a lust for conquest. Conquest required armies, and armies required mobility. Mobility meant men, who were not required for bearing children and maintaining the population beyond the initial stages – men who found themselves supreme for the first time and discovered they liked it and shifted their pantheons accordingly. Goddesses, who once reigned over both war and desire, soon found themselves as subservient as mortal women.

Sound interesting?

Trust me, that summary doesn’t even touch on the full story Hughes has uncovered and woven into a narrative for her readers.

I know what you’re thinking. But history? For… fun?

Let’s puncture one of our own cultural myths right now: history is not boring. The history you learned in school? Brutally mind numbing. Names, dates, battles, treaties, blah blah blah… awful.

Why is that the history they teach to kids? I have no idea. I’ve never understood it, even when I was in the middle of it because even then, I was doing some additional investigation on my own, and let me tell you there is some good stuff. There’s intrigue and sex and art and mistresses plotting with wives. Smart women holding on to their own territory in a world that fears nothing more than women with a modicum of power.

(For example? Ferdinand and Isbabella didn’t actually unite Spain because Isbabella had it written into their marriage contract that Castille would remain hers. When she died, it passed to her daughter Johanna whom Ferdinand and her husband, John, promptly had committed to a convent, citing “insanity.” Shady shit? Shady shit.)

History is awesome when the right story is being told by the right person, and Bettany Hughes is 100 percent the right person to tell Desire’s life story. (I’m also reading her Helen of Troy: The Story of the Most Beautiful Woman in the World, and let me tell you she is also the right person to tell that story.) Her style is engaging, one that balances detail and scholarly evidence with an accessibility that means you don’t need a PhD in classics to follow the work.

Rather than the standard, academic voice, Hughes has allowed us the gift of sharing her personal passion regarding her subject and thus her joy at each discovery and detail, building to a conclusion we’re as excited to uncover as she is. I felt very much personally invested in Aphrodite reclaiming her former glory as a dual-natured goddess who commanded the devotion of everyone from peasant women to Roman generals, because damn it, look at this saga Hughes has uncovered for me! I refuse to let it end this way!

As it turns out, I might be doing so in a manner of speaking. Venus and Aphrodite happened to find me at the perfect time since I’m working on a sapphic retelling of The Iliad and The Odyssey, and Aphrodite’s role as a figure worshiped for both bloodlust and lust for flesh has given me… ideas. I’m excited to see how it all plays out. (Trade secret: most of the time, fiction writers don’t know what’ll happen until we drop the grenade and watch the explosion.) It’s also perfect for anyone who enjoys history, mythology, or just a really interesting story.

Venus and Aphrodite: A Biography of Desire by Bettany Hughes (Basic Books) is available now.