The secret affair between Ares and Aphrodite produced Eros, Anteros, Phobos, Deimos, and Harmonia. Their union was exposed when Hephaestus trapped them in a golden net.
⚠ Hesiod's Theogony (120) places Eros among the first beings to emerge from Chaos, a primordial force predating the Olympians. The parentage from Ares and Aphrodite is the later Hellenistic tradition (Simonides fr. 575; Bibliotheca 1.3.3, Apollodorus).
From Chaos arose the first beings of the cosmos: broad-bosomed Gaia, murky Tartarus beneath the earth, Eros the fairest of the immortals, dark Erebus, and black Nyx.
Eros and Psyche were wed on Olympus after Zeus granted Psyche immortality. Their union produced a daughter, Hedone, the personification of pleasure.
In Theocritus's first Idyll, the dying Daphnis defies Eros, declaring he will remain a grief to Love even in the underworld. His death resulted from resisting and then succumbing to erotic passion.
The Erotes are the winged love gods who attend Aphrodite: Eros chief among them, with Anteros, Himeros, Pothos, and Hedylogos, each embodying a distinct facet of desire in Hellenistic tradition.
Eros and Cupid are the same winged archer of desire — golden arrows to kindle love, leaden arrows to kill it — transmitted from Greek into Roman worship with his mother Aphrodite becoming Venus.
Eros remained small and could not grow until Aphrodite bore Anteros as his companion — only when love found its answer did the god of desire come into his full stature.
Aphrodite sent her son Eros to make Psyche fall in love with something hideous. Instead Eros fell in love with Psyche himself, defying his mother and causing a rift between them.
After Apollo mocked his archery, Eros shot Apollo with a golden arrow of love and Daphne with a leaden arrow of aversion, causing Apollo's hopeless pursuit of the fleeing nymph.
Eros struck Daphne with a leaden arrow of aversion while shooting Apollo with gold, making the nymph the unwilling object of Apollo's pursuit until she transformed into a laurel tree.
Hesiod places Eros and Himeros side by side at Aphrodite's birth from the sea foam and again as attendants of the Muses on Helicon, pairing desire with longing at the moments where beauty first enters the world.
At Aphrodite's bidding, Eros shot Medea with an arrow as she first glimpsed Jason in her father's court, kindling the desperate love that drove her to betray Aeetes, steal the Golden Fleece, and follow Jason to Greece.
When the river god Ameinus, rejected by Narcissus, prayed for retribution, Eros struck Narcissus with desire for his own reflection, condemning him to waste away gazing at the face he could never possess.
⚠ In Ovid's Metamorphoses 3.402-406, Nemesis curses Narcissus; Conon's Narrationes 24 substitutes a rejected suitor Ameinus whose prayer to the gods triggers the punishment.
Eros fell in love with the mortal princess Psyche and secretly married her. After Psyche broke his trust by looking upon him, Eros fled until her trials won her immortality and their reunion on Olympus.
Zeus granted Psyche immortality at Eros's petition, allowing the divine wedding of Eros and Psyche to take place on Olympus. Their union produced Hedone, the personification of pleasure.
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