Comparing a woman's beauty to that of a goddess actually seems to have been a fairly common form of flirtatious flattery in the ancient Greek world.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, the British papyrologists Arthur Surridge Hunt and Bernard Pyne Grenfell excavated the garbage dump of the city of Oxyrhynchos in Egypt and uncovered a large number of fragments of ancient Greek papyrus manuscripts dating to the Hellenistic and Roman periods that had been thrown away in antiquity and preserved due to the hot, dry climate of the Egyptian desert. In 1972, the papyrologist Edgar Lobel edited and published three fragments of a papyrus roll that Surridge and Hunt had excavated over half a century earlier as Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 2891, fr. 1–3.
These fragments bear portions of the beginning of an ancient Greek sex manual attributed to a woman named Philainis of Samos. Although the fragments come from a manuscript copied in the early second century CE, the text may date to as early as the fourth century BCE. The third and final surviving fragment contains part of a section on ways that a man should flatter a woman in order to seduce her to have sex with him.
The text says that a man should flatter a woman who is ugly by calling her as beautiful as Aphrodite and a woman who is older by calling her as beautiful as Rhea (i.e., the wife of Kronos and mother of the Olympian deities). Here is the Greek text of the third fragment in Lobel's edition:
".. ]ν τῇ διανοία[ι
μεν, τὴν μὲν [
ω?́ς ἰσόθεον [
οὖσαν, τὴν δὲ αἰσχρὰ[ν
ὡς ἐπαφρόδιτον, τ[ὴν
δὲ πρεσβυτέραν ὡς [
αν φάo.[ ]ων εἶναι, (?)[
> ----
Here is Ian Michael Plant's translation of the fragment quoted above, which can be found in his book Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome: An Anthology (published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2004), on page 46:
"[On Flattery]
. . . with the intention . . .,
while he says that
she . . . is equal to a goddess,
that she who is ugly is as lovely as Aphrodite
and that she who is older is as Rhea."
There is scholarly debate whether the sex manual attributed to Philainis was intended as a serious instructional work or as a work of parody. Plant calls it a work of parody (on page 45 of the same book quoted above). Even if it is a work of parody, though, it must be parodying the actual sorts of things that ancient Greek men would say to women as pickup lines, or else the parody would not make much sense.
I highly doubt that any of the people involved in the making of the 1997 Disney animated film Hercules had any awareness of the Oxyrhynchos Papyri or Philainis's sex manual. Nonetheless, when Hercules tells Meg in the film that she is "more beautiful than Aphrodite," he is actually following almost the exact advice for seduction that is given in Philainis's sex manual.
For further reading
For more about Philainis and the work attributed to her: