Eros
EROS. Eros was the ancient Greek god of sexual (either homosexual or heterosexual) love or desire. The word erōs is the ordinary noun denoting that emotion; it could be personified and treated as an external being because of its unfathomable and irresistible power over humans (and animals and gods). This was, however, a sophisticated, largely literary phenomenon without roots in popular religion. At Thespiae (Boeotia) a sacred stone, perhaps a menhir, was venerated as Eros, but it is doubtful how old the identification was. Otherwise cults of Eros do not seem to have been established before the Classical period. He was often honored in the gymnasia (sports centers), where adolescent males were constant objects of attraction for older men. The Spartans and Cretans are said to have sacrificed to Eros before battles because the soldiers' personal devotion to one another was recognized as an important military factor.
Eros is represented in Greek literature as a beautiful youth, or later as a young boy, and as the son or attendant of Aphrodite, the goddess who presided over sexual union. He is sportive and mischievous; he plays roughly with men; he shoots arrows into them (this first in the dramas of Euripides, c. 480–406 BCE). Poetic conceit may predicate of him whatever is appropriate to the effects he produced. He can be called blind, for instance, because he chooses his victims so indiscriminately. Sometimes, in and after the fifth century BCE, poets speak of the plural erōtes, corresponding to the many separate loves that are always flaring up.
Eros appears in art from the sixth century BCE but becomes much more common in that of the fifth. He is usually shown as winged and carrying a lyre and a garland, both appropriate to the symposium, at which he was always active. Often he hovers above scenes of amorous import. In the fourth century the sculptors Praxiteles and Scopas portrayed him in celebrated statues. Praxiteles's mistress donated one of these to the sanctuary at Thespiae.
Eros had a special significance in cosmogonic myth. Hesiod (c. 730–700 BCE) places him among the first gods to come into being, and several later poets echo this. As they saw cosmic evolution in terms of sexual reproduction of divine entities, Eros was needed from the start to provide the impulse. In a cosmogony composed under the name of Orpheus about 500 BCE, Eros (also called Protogonos, "firstborn," and Phanes, "manifest") came out of a shining egg created by Time; he fertilized the cosmic darkness, and Heaven and Earth were born. This account has connections with Semitic, Iranian, and Indian cosmogonies.
Although partially comparable with some figures (especially winged demons) belonging to the cults of the Middle East, Eros appears to be a peculiar creation of the Greeks. He is worshiped in an atypical way, with few sanctuaries (the most important of which was in the Boeotian town of Thespiae) and a scarce inventory of myths and ritual epithets. Unknown to the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymns, Eros first appears in two passages of Hesiod's Theogony. In the first passage (vv. 120–122) he is presented as the most ancient god after Chaos and Gaia. He has the power to subjugate the mind and the will of both gods and men, and he has neither parents nor other deities for companions.
On the other hand, in Theogony (201) Eros (along with Himeros) is included in Aphrodite's retinue and accompanies her in the same way that the paredros of the Asian religions escorts Ishtar/Astarte. Such a subordinate figure appears different from the representation offered by Hesiod in the preceding verses (v. 120ff.), where Eros is described as a primeval, lonely, and very powerful deity.
This incongruity is only an example of the numerous contradictions in Greek literature, philosophy, and mythography dealing with Eros's character and genealogy. Pausanias (IX 27,3 = Sappho fr. 198, Voigt) claims that Sappho dedicated to Eros "a lot of poems not matching with each other." Evidence for this statement can be obtained by comparing Sappho from 159, where Eros is only a "servant" of the goddess, and Theocritus 13,1–2c (Wendel, p. 258; Sappho fr. 198b), which reports that Sappho described Eros as Aphrodites's son and attributed to him a father of such nobility as Uranus (the Sky); nevertheless it seems that, in a third poem (mentioned by Apollonius Rhodius III 26 = Sapph. fr. 198a), Sappho represented Eros as generated not by Uranus and Aphrodite but by Uranus and Mother Earth.
Different genealogies are suggested by later authors. According to Simonides (fr. 575 P.), Eros is the son of "the deceptive Aphrodite, who bore him to Ares, the contriver of frauds." In an inspired stasimon of the Hippolytus, Euripides says that Eros is a "son of Zeus" (v. 533). Before them, Alcaeus had suggested an original version of the matter by defining Eros as "the most terrible god, whom Iris with fine sandals bore to golden-haired Zephyr" (fr. 327 V). It is not easy to establish whether the poet drew inspiration from certain Lesbian cults or from his own imagination. If one considers the scarceness of concrete cultural evidence, it seems plausible that ancient Greek poets felt free to give personal interpretations of Eros's birth and nature.
Discordant points of view can also be found among historians and philosophers. Whereas Pherekydes (7 B 3 Diels-Kranz), Acusilaus (9 B 1 Diels-Kranz), and Parmenides (28 B 13 Diels-Kranz) seem to follow Hesiod's tradition in placing Eros in the first stage of the theocosmogonic process, Plato's reflection can be considered as a decisive turning point. In Plato's representation (Symposium, 203b–204a), Eros is the son of two figures suspended between myth and allegory, Poros (expedient) and Penia (poverty), and he partakes of the nature of both; he is neither a god nor a mortal, neither a sage nor a fool, but a paradoxical set of contrasting elements.
Plato's influence can be perceived in the Middle Comedy. For instance, a fragment of Alexis's Phaedrus (fr. 247 Kassel–Austin) describes Eros as a strange being, "neither female nor male, neither god nor man, neither foolish nor wise … but with a lot of aspects in one shape." It is worth noting that the iconographic type of Eros as a winged androgyne frequently appears in fourth-century South Italian pottery. A different representation is offered by Praxiteles, whose celebrated Eros looked like a young man with charming eyes.
In the same period the debate on Eros appears to attract the attention of the most important philosophical schools, giving rise to a great number of treatises on this subject. Academics, Peripatetics, Stoics, and Epicureans wrote works (mostly dialogues) with such titles as On Love, Dialogue on Love, and The Art of Loving. Although these works are almost completely lost (except for a few fragments), presumably they dwelt upon the ambiguous and contradictory nature of Eros, especially the god's habit of bringing, under different circumstances, either joy and happiness or grief and downfall (also in Cercidas's second Meliamb, probably influenced by Stoicism).
During the Hellenistic age, Eros was mostly represented as the little, naughty son of Aphrodite and became a stereotyped figure (see Apollonius Rhodius 3.91–99; Theocritus 19). However, he also became the hero of an inspired fable concerning his love story with a beautiful girl named Psyche. The tale probably originated within Platonic circles and owes most of its fame to a work written in the second century CE, that is, Apuleius's Metamorphoses, or The golden ass.
Bibliography
Blanc, Nicole, and Françoise Gury. "Eros." Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae (LIMC) 3, no. 1 (1981), 850–1049.
Calame, Claude. The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Princeton, N.J., 1999.
Cavallini, Eleonora. Il fiore del desiderio: Afrodite e il suo corteggio fra mito e letteratura. Lecce, Italy, 2000.
Fasce, Silvana. Eros: La figura e il culto. Genoa, Italy, 1977.
Lasserre, François. La figure d'Éros dans la poésie grecque. Lausanne, Switzerland, 1946.
Page, Denys. Sappho and Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry. Oxford, U.K., 1955.
Rudhardt, Jean. Le rôle d'Eros et d'Aphrodite dans les cosmogonies grecques. Paris, 1986.
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