sexual experience—and vice versa. ... (A)rtists always treat Hermaphroditus in terms of the viewer finding out his/her actual sexual identity. ... Hermaphroditus stands for both the physical and, more important, the psychological impossibility of ever understanding the feelings of the beloved. Hermaphroditus is a highly sophisticated representation, invading the boundaries between the sexes that seem so clear in classical thought and representation. Macrobius describes a masculine form of "Venus" (Aphrodite) who received cult on Cyprus; she had a beard and male genitals, but wore women's clothing. The deity's worshippers cross-dressed, men wearing women's clothes, and women men's. The Latin poet Laevius wrote of worshipping "nurturing Venus" whether female or male (sive femina sive mas). The figure was sometimes called Aphroditos. In several surviving examples of Greek and Roman sculpture, she is found in the attitude anasyrmene, from the Greek verb anasyromai, "to pull up one's clothes". The love goddess lifts her garments to reveal her masculine attribute, male genitalia, a gesture that traditionally held apotropaic or magical power. Sexual conquest and imperialism In 55 BC, Pompeius Magnus ("Pompey the Great") opened his theater complex dedicated to Venus Victrix, "Venus the Conqueror," which continued into late antiquity as a venue for performing arts, literature, landscape design, visual art, and architecture. The Theater of Pompey was in many ways the permanent monument of his military triumph six years earlier. Among the displays were portrait galleries of female writers and of courtesans; a series of images illustrated freakish births that had served as war omens. In general, intellectuality and culture are represented as feminine and Hellenized, while war and politics are Roman and masculine. Statues personified fourteen conquered nationes ("nations, peoples") as women in ethnic or "barbarian" dress. Other monuments throughout the Empire, including the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias and the altar of the Sanctuary of the Three Gauls at Lugdunum (modern Lyon, France), as well as various coins, embody conquered territories and peoples as women: Roman military power defeats a "feminized" nation. Although the figures from Pompey's theater have not survived, relief panels from Aphrodisias include scenes such as a heroically nude Claudius forcing the submission of Britannia, whose right breast is bare, and Nero dragging away a dead Armenia, a composition that recalls the defeat of the Amazon Penthesilea by Achilles. A particularly well-documented series of coins depicts Iudaea Capta, a female personification of the Jewish nation as captive, issued after the