The Greeks regarded Adonis's worship as of Near Eastern origin. The cult of Aphrodite and Adonis is widely understood as a continuation of Sumerian Inanna and Dumuzid (Tammuz); Ezekiel 8:14 describes women mourning Tammuz at the Temple in Jerusalem. The earliest Greek literary reference is a fragment of Sappho in which young women ask Aphrodite how to mourn Adonis and are told to beat their breasts and tear their tunics.

Walter Burkert stresses that the legend gave Greek women a licensed outlet for intense public grief within the constraints of polis life. Orientalising contact in the eighth century BC shaped early Greek religion and Aphrodite's cult in particular. In Cyprus the cult of Adonis gradually superseded that of Cinyras; W. Atallah has suggested that the later Hellenistic myth conflates two independent traditions.

Ovid's Metamorphoses makes Adonis the son of Myrrha (also called Smyrna) and her father Cinyras, king of Cyprus: after Myrrha's incestuous conception — engineered in Ovid by a Fury, or elsewhere by Aphrodite's wrath — she is transformed into a myrrh tree from which the infant is delivered. Pseudo-Apollodorus instead names Cinyras and Metharme as parents, and cites Hesiod for a lineage from Phoenix and Alphesiboea; Antoninus Liberalis and others place a parallel tale with the Assyrian or Lebanese king Theias.

These birth traditions belong to the same mythic figure as the lover of Aphrodite. They should not be confused with unrelated later uses of "Adonis" as a common noun for a handsome youth.

Aphrodite found the infant and entrusted him to Persephone in the underworld. When he grew strikingly beautiful, both goddesses claimed him; Zeus (or, in another version, Calliope) divided his year — a third with each goddess and a third of his own choice in one account, or half the year with each in another. Adonis chose Aphrodite and stayed with her above ground for his allotted share.

While hunting he was gored by a wild boar and bled to death in Aphrodite's arms. Versions blame Ares (jealous of Aphrodite's attention), Artemis (avenging Hippolytus), or Apollo (punishing Aphrodite for blinding Erymanthus). Anemones — or, in one late account, roses — sprang from his blood; Aphrodite instituted a festival on the anniversary of his death. Lucian records that the Adonis River in Lebanon ran red each year at the festival.

The Adonia was celebrated by Greek women in midsummer. Participants planted "gardens of Adonis" — shallow baskets or sherds sown with lettuce, fennel, wheat, or barley — and set them on rooftops in the hot sun. The plants sprouted quickly and withered; women burned incense, then mourned loudly, tore their clothes, and beat their breasts. An effigy of Adonis was laid on a bier, carried to the sea with the withered plants, and cast into the water.

Ovid's Venus and Adonis shaped medieval and Renaissance literature: Jean de Meun, Ronsard, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's narrative poem Venus and Adonis (1593), and Marino's L'Adone (1623). Frazer treated Adonis as a prime "dying-and-rising god" in The Golden Bough; later scholars have questioned that archetype, noting that the underworld sojourn with Persephone is not always framed as literal death and resurrection in Classical Greek texts, though Late Antique writers such as Origen attest beliefs that Adonis rose from the dead.