Eros, from the beginning of the cosmos to the boy with the bow

Before becoming the winged child who shoots arrows, Eros was for the Greeks a primordial power, older than the Olympian gods. His story is that of a figure who changes nature from century to century: a force that generates the world in the archaic poets, a sweet pain in lyric poetry, a philosophical daimon in Plato, a capricious rascal in Hellenistic art.

A power of the beginnings

In Hesiod's Theogony Eros appears immediately after Chaos, Gaia and Tartarus, among the first entities to exist. The poet calls him the most beautiful of the immortal gods, able to loosen the limbs and to master the mind and judgement of men and gods. At this stage Eros has no parents: he is the principle that makes possible the unions from which all the later generations of gods will be born.

Other cosmogonies gave him a different origin. In Aristophanes' Birds, a comedy staged in 414 BC, the chorus tells how black-winged Night laid an egg in the bosom of Erebus, and from that egg came golden-winged Eros. The story probably parodies doctrines circulating in Orphic circles, in which a first-born god hatched from the cosmic egg, called Phanes or Protogonos, was sometimes identified with Eros.

The bittersweet of the lyric poets

With the lyric poetry of the seventh and sixth centuries BC Eros ceases to be only a cosmic principle and becomes an inner experience. Sappho of Lesbos calls him glykypikron, bittersweet, and describes him as an irresistible force that shakes the soul as the wind falls upon the oaks of the mountain. Anacreon imagines him as a smith striking with a great axe, Ibycus as a hunter casting the nets of Cypris: different images to express the same sudden violence.

These verses also give shape to the long-lasting idea of a god who strikes without warning and without distinction. Not by chance his genealogy changes: many authors now make him the son of Aphrodite, sometimes of Ares, placing him within the circle of the goddess of love. The cosmic god and the companion of Aphrodite would long coexist in Greek culture, without excluding each other.

Eros in Plato's Symposium

The most influential text on Eros is Plato's Symposium, written in the first half of the fourth century BC. During a banquet at the house of the poet Agathon, the guests in turn deliver a speech in praise of the god. Aristophanes tells the myth of the double beings cut in two by Zeus, who ever since have been seeking their lost half. Socrates, instead, reports what he was supposedly taught by the priestess Diotima of Mantinea, a figure many scholars regard as a literary invention.

According to Diotima, Eros is not a god but a daimon, a being halfway between humans and gods. He was conceived during the feast for Aphrodite's birth by Poros, resource, and Penia, poverty: this is why he is always needy and always inventive. Desire, Socrates explains, is a ladder that rises from the beauty of one body to that of souls and of knowledge, up to the contemplation of beauty itself.

Thespiae and the Hellenistic boy

Eros also had a genuine cult. At Thespiae, in Boeotia, he was worshipped from very early times; Pausanias, in the second century AD, reports that his oldest image was an unworked stone. There the Erotidia were celebrated, festivals with athletic and musical contests. For the city Praxiteles made a famous statue of the god, which according to an ancient anecdote had been the sculptor's gift to the courtesan Phryne, herself a native of Thespiae.

In the Hellenistic age the god grew ever younger. Apollonius of Rhodes, in the Argonautica, shows him playing knucklebones with Ganymede and cheating to win, before Aphrodite sends him to make Medea fall in love with Jason. From that capricious boy descend the Roman Cupid, the cupids of Pompeian paintings and the putti of the Renaissance: the ancient force of the beginnings now survives in the guise of a child.