Eros

Desire before there are parents

The early Greek poet Hesiod tells how the world began in his Theogony, a poem about the birth of the gods. Chaos comes first, then Earth, Tartarus and Eros. Eros appears before Heaven, before Night and before the families of gods from which a child could be born.

Hesiod gives him no mother or father. Eros is there from the start, as the power that loosens the limbs and overcomes the judgement of gods and human beings.

This is not yet the playful child who shoots arrows at lovers. Hesiod’s Eros is a force the world needs before it can fill with life. Separate beings must be drawn together before one generation can follow another. So desire enters the poem near its beginning, because the family tree of the gods cannot grow without it.

How a first power became someone’s son

Later writers often place Eros inside the family of the Olympian gods, but they do not agree on his parents. Ancient scholars collected versions in which Aphrodite is his mother, sometimes with Ares as his father. Other versions link him with Hermes, Artemis, Zephyrus, Iris, Porus, Penia or Zeus.

These stories meet a different need from Hesiod’s. A god who acts in stories and keeps company with Aphrodite is easier to picture as a child than as a power older than Heaven.

The versions should not be forced into a single life story. The Eros of the beginning and the young companion of Aphrodite share the same power, but they explain it in different ways. For that reason this page leaves the parentage panel empty. Naming one couple would treat a disputed later version as if it held for the whole tradition.

The god shown as a stone

At Thespiae, a town in Boeotia, the Greek traveller Pausanias found a cult, or local form of worship, that claimed to be very old. The people of Thespiae honoured Eros above all other gods, he says. Their oldest image of him was an unworked stone. Pausanias did not know who began the practice.

The stone does not choose between the force of the world’s beginning, the beautiful youth and the playful child. It shows the god as present without giving desire a body. Later the same cult at Thespiae owned famous statues, including work linked with the sculptor Praxiteles. Even so, the unshaped stone stayed part of how the cult remembered its beginning.

Two altars in Athens

Outside the Academy at Athens stood an altar to Eros. Its inscription named Charmus as the first Athenian to dedicate one to the god. The place later became famous for philosophy, but Pausanias records the altar and draws no such link.

A second altar, inside the city, belonged to Anteros. The name can mean love returned, love opposed or love avenged. Its founding story is tragic. Meles, an Athenian, rejects Timagoras, a foreigner living in the city, and tells him to throw himself from a high rock. Timagoras obeys. Then remorse drives Meles to throw himself from the same place. The foreigners living in Athens set up the altar to the power that avenged the first death.

The story gives desire a public and moral side. Here love is more than a private feeling or a dart from a god. Rejection turns into cruelty, rank divides the two men, and people without full Athenian citizenship build the memorial.

From youth to winged child

Greek sculptors of the Classical age showed Eros as a beautiful youth. The smaller winged boy with a bow, arrows or a torch became more and more familiar later, and passed into the Roman Cupid.

That change does not make the later image false. It changes the tone of the same dangerous power. A child can seem playful even while it overturns adult judgement.

No single form holds all of Eros. Hesiod’s force without parents, the stone at Thespiae, the perfect youth and the winged child each answer a different question. In every form the effect is the same: minds lose control, and bodies move toward one another before reason has recovered.