Eros: in early Attic Legend and Art

Abstract

The Greek Love-god of the fifth and fourth centuries before our era may perhaps be looked upon as an amalgamation of three distinct divine entities. Eros was Love, the creative desire of nature, and as such the soul within god and man; Eros was the love-child, son of Aphrodite-Cypris; Eros was the idealisation of human beauty beloved.In the ancient cult centres of Thespiae and Parium the god was apparently not so much the personification of human love as a great physical and elemental force of nature. As such he ranks among the three primaeval Forces in the Theogony of Hesiod, who opens with these words his tale of creation (116 ff.): ‘Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympos and dim Tartaros in the wide-pathed earth, and Eros, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and counsels within them of all gods and all men.’ This is apparently the Eros who figured in the earliest Orphic Theogony, concerning which A. B. Cook has collected a wealth of material. He reconstructs partially the contents, which possibly told that in the beginning was Nyx. Black-winged Nyx laid an egg from which ‘sprang golden-winged Eros. Apparently heaven and earth were regarded as the upper and lower halves of the vast egg.’