The varying strands of the cestus symbol as it developed in late Antiquity and through the Middle Ages are drawn together in Giovanni Boccaccio's artful description of the motif in the third book of the Genealogia deorum gentilium. An early and fruitful misreading of Homer's Greek (Iliad XIV, 214), based on a confusion of the morphological status of the word kestos (gr.) in its most famous occurrence, gave birth to a parallel, and opposite, moral and allegorical explanation of the significance of Venus' "belt'. Boccaccio's inventive genius allows him to construct a reading the entire tradition which considers at once the radically divergent interpretations.