Eros- Greek GodDeity"The Limb-Loosener"

The Primordial Force

In Hesiod's Theogony, Eros emerged from Chaos alongside Gaia and Tartarus, before the Titans, before the gods. Hesiod calls him "fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men." Without him, Erebus and Nyx would not have coupled. Nothing after Chaos would have been born.

The Orphic traditions placed him deeper still. Called Phanes or Protogonus, the First-Born, he hatched from a cosmic egg in the darkness before the world, four-faced and golden-winged, bearing the seeds of all the gods within him. At Thespiae in Boeotia, an ancient stone, rough and uncarved, was venerated as Eros long before any sculptor gave the god a human form. The stone remained sacred even after Praxiteles carved a famous marble Eros for the city in the fourth century BCE. Every four years the Thespians held the Erotidia, athletic and musical contests in his honor.

The Archer

Later poets gave Eros a different shape: a winged boy with a bow, son of Aphrodite and Ares. His golden arrows kindled love. His leaden arrows killed it.

When Apollo mocked his bow, Eros answered with two shots. He struck Apollo with a golden arrow and the nymph Daphne with a leaden one. In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Apollo chased her through the forest. She begged her father, the river god Peneus, to destroy the beauty that had caught Apollo's eye. Her skin hardened to bark and her feet took root. She became the laurel tree. Apollo crowned himself with her branches and wore the laurel forever after.

In Apollonius's Argonautica, Aphrodite finds Eros on Olympus playing knucklebones with Ganymede. He is cheating. She bribes him with a golden ball, chased with dark blue enamel, to shoot Medea and make the Colchian princess fall in love with Jason. Eros flies to Colchis, crouches unseen at Jason's feet, nocks the arrow, and draws. The shaft hits Medea under the heart. She turns pale, then flushes. Jason notices nothing.

Eros and Psyche

The mortal princess Psyche was so beautiful that people worshipped her instead of Aphrodite. The goddess sent Eros to make the girl fall in love with the most wretched creature alive. Eros pricked himself with his own arrow and fell in love with Psyche instead.

He brought her to a hidden palace where he visited only in darkness, forbidding her to see his face. Her sisters convinced her that her invisible husband was a monster. One night Psyche lit an oil lamp and found not a monster but the most beautiful of the gods asleep beside her. His bow and quiver lay at the foot of the bed. She touched one of the arrows and pricked her finger. A drop of oil fell from the lamp onto his shoulder. He woke, and he fled.

Psyche wandered the earth searching for him. She came at last to Aphrodite, who seized her by the hair, dashed her head against the floor, and set her impossible tasks. Ants sorted a mountain of grain for her. A tower whispered the route to the underworld, where she walked among the dead to retrieve a box of Persephone's beauty. On the way back, she opened the box and collapsed into deathlike sleep.

Eros, recovered from his wound, flew to her side. He wiped the sleep from her face and carried her to Olympus, where he petitioned Zeus to make her immortal. Zeus agreed. They were married among the gods. Their daughter was called Hedone: Pleasure.

The Symposium

At a drinking party in Athens, the guests of Plato's Symposium each praise Eros in turn. Aristophanes tells the strangest myth. The original humans were double-bodied: eight limbs, two faces. They rolled like wheels and were fast enough to threaten Olympus. Zeus split each in half and turned their faces to the wound, so they would remember what they had lost. Love is the search for the missing piece.

Socrates tells what the priestess Diotima taught him. Eros is not a god but a daimon, a spirit between mortal and divine. He was conceived at Aphrodite's birthday feast, his father Poros (Resource) drunk and sleeping in the garden, his mother Penia (Poverty) lying down beside him. Eros shares both natures: always seeking, never full.

The Sacred Band

The Sacred Band of Thebes, one hundred and fifty paired lovers, trained and fought as a single unit. They sacrificed to Eros before battle. Plutarch records the reasoning: no man would disgrace himself or abandon his post in front of his beloved.

The general Gorgidas formed them around 378 BCE. At Leuctra in 371, they broke the Spartan line for the first time in memory. The Band remained undefeated for decades. At Chaeronea in 338 BCE, Philip of Macedon's army surrounded them. Every man fell where he stood. Philip walked among the dead and wept.