Eros

• 1. Introduction

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  Eros, the Greek god of love and sex, has been worshipped, argued over, and reimagined for roughly three thousand years, and the figure most people picture today, a chubby cherub clutching a bow on Valentine's Day cards, barely resembles the ancient original. In the earliest Greek sources, Eros was not a child at all. He was a primordial force, one of the first four things to exist in the universe, alongside Chaos, Gaia, and Tartarus. How did a cosmic entity who supposedly hatched from an egg in the infinite deeps of Erebus end up as a holiday mascot? And what does the myth of a god who fell in love with a mortal princess named Psyche tell us about how the Greeks understood the relationship between love and the human soul? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Before the Gods Were Born

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  Hesiod, writing around 700 BC in his Theogony, placed Eros as the fourth thing to come into existence. Chaos came first, then Gaia, then Tartarus, and only then Eros. That positioning was not accidental. For Hesiod, love was a force that had to exist before anything else could combine and reproduce. The philosopher Parmenides, writing around 400 BC, went even further and made Eros the very first of all the gods.

  Aristophanes offered a stranger and more poetic version in his comedy The Birds, performed in 414 BC. There, Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Erebus. After long ages, Eros sprang from it, bearing glittering golden wings and moving as swiftly as a whirlwind. He mated with dark Chaos in the depths of Tartarus, and from that union humanity emerged as the first beings to see the light.

  In Orphic tradition, this primordial Eros carried multiple names: Phanes, meaning the illuminated one; Erikepaios, meaning power; and Metis, meaning thought. He was called Protogonos, meaning first-born, because he was believed to be the first immortal that the human mind could conceive. According to one Orphic account, Zeus swallowed Phanes whole, absorbing his creative power and remaking the world from within himself.

• 3. Son of Aphrodite

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  By the sixth and fifth centuries BC, a very different Eros had taken shape in Greek lyric poetry. The poet Simonides identified him as the son of Aphrodite and Ares, the god of war. In this later tradition, Eros was still a young man with wings and arrows, but his character shifted from cosmic architect to mischievous agent of Aphrodite.

  The Argonautica provides a vivid snapshot of how this dynamic worked. Hera addresses Athena directly and proposes that they approach Aphrodite to persuade her boy, Eros, to loose an arrow at Medea and make her fall in love with Jason. Eros is here a tool, almost a weapon that one goddess borrows from another.

  Ovid's Metamorphoses added a further twist. In that account, while Eros was kissing his mother, a jutting arrow grazed her breast without either of them noticing. The wound ran deeper than it seemed, and Aphrodite found herself enraptured by Adonis. Even the god of love's own mother was not immune to his arrows, and those arrows, as Ovid catalogued, came in two types: golden ones that ignite love, and lead ones that turn the heart toward revulsion. The lead arrows are most visible in the story of Apollo and Daphne, where Eros struck Apollo with gold to make him desperate with longing, and struck the nymph Daphne with lead to make her flee.

• 4. Eros and Psyche

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  Apuleius set down the story of Eros and Psyche in his Latin novel The Golden Ass, but the tale was already old by then, a folktale circulating through the Greco-Roman world long before anyone committed it to writing. Apuleius wrote in a picaresque Roman style, and in his version Eros and Aphrodite go by their Latin names, Cupid and Venus, while Psyche alone keeps her Greek name.

  The conflict begins with Aphrodite's jealousy. Men were abandoning her temples to worship a mortal princess, Psyche, whose beauty rivalled the gods. Aphrodite commanded Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the ugliest creature on earth. Instead, Eros fell in love with Psyche himself and took her to his home as his wife. Their peace ended when Psyche's jealous sisters persuaded her to betray her husband's trust. Wounded both emotionally and physically, Eros left.

  What followed was Psyche's long search. She visited the Temple of Demeter and the Temple of Hera in turn, looking for guidance. She eventually came to Aphrodite's own temple, and Aphrodite set her four increasingly difficult tasks. Psyche completed all four through supernatural help. After a near-death experience, Zeus transformed Psyche into an immortal so she could live among the gods permanently. She and Eros had a daughter together named Voluptas, or Hedone, meaning physical pleasure and bliss.

  The Greeks identified Psyche with the human soul itself. The word psyche in Ancient Greek means soul, spirit, breath, life, or animating force. Ancient mosaics depicted her with butterfly wings, because psyche was also the Greek word for butterfly. The myth of Eros and Psyche was therefore read as the story of love pursuing and finally winning the soul.

• 5. Arrows, Bees, and Rivals

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  An Anacreon fragment preserved by Athenaeus describes a moment that collapses the cosmic and the personal: the author laments that Eros struck him with a purple ball, causing him to fall in love with a woman who is attracted to other women and who rejects him because of his white hair. Eros here is not merely a metaphor. He is an active, sometimes cruel presence whose interventions leave specific human beings with very specific wounds.

  The bee-sting motif offered a gentler way to think about that cruelty. The earliest version appears in the Anacreontea, attributed to the sixth-century-BC author Anacreon, where Eros runs crying to Aphrodite after being stung by a bee, comparing the insect to a snake with wings. Aphrodite's reply is pointed: if the bee's small sting hurts so much, what does Eros think he inflicts on others with his arrows? Theocritus expanded the anecdote in his Idylls. Little Eros tries to steal honey from a beehive, is stung across all his fingers, and races to his mother in tears. Aphrodite smiles and compares him to the bees directly: small in size, capable of pain far out of proportion to that size.

  Lucian's Dialogues of the Gods pushed the satire further. Zeus himself confronts Eros for making him fall in love with mortal women and causing him to deceive them. Aphrodite warns Eros not to treat all the gods as his playthings. Sappho noted the one firm limit on Eros's power: writing of Artemis, she states that limb-loosening Eros never goes near her, and the same protection covered Hestia and Athena, the other virgin goddesses who had taken vows of purity.

• 6. God of Friendship and War

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  Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoic philosophy, held a view of Eros that had little to do with romantic conquest. According to Pontianus of Nicomedia, a character in the Deipnosophistae of Athenaeus, Zeno argued that Eros was the god of friendship and liberty.

  That reading found institutional expression in Sparta. The Lacedaemonians offered sacrifices to Eros before battle, believing that victory and safety depended on the bonds of friendship between soldiers standing side by side. The Cretans held the same practice, sacrificing to Eros in their battle lines. Erxias recorded that the Samians consecrated a gymnasium to Eros, and the festival established in his honour there was called the Eleutheria, meaning liberty.

  In Athens, the fourth day of every month was sacred to Eros, a date he shared with Herakles, Hermes, and Aphrodite. The Thespians held an entire festival cycle in his name called the Erotidia, meaning the festivals of Eros. Eros also carried the epithet Kleidouchos, meaning holding the keys, because he held the key to hearts. His other epithet, Pandemos, meant common to all the people, signalling that love was not restricted to any single class or group. A fertility cult dedicated to Eros existed in Thespiae into late antiquity, long after many other local cults had faded.

• 7. From Putto to Cherub

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  In early Greek poetry and art, Eros was a handsome young adult male who embodied sexual power. By the later satirical poets, he had become a blindfolded child. That transformation had enormous consequences for Western visual culture.

  Eros and Cupid were both associated in art tradition with the figure called a Putto, plural Putti, a term for a depiction of a winged boy. The Putto's iconography appears to have influenced the figure known as a Cherub, plural Cherubim. Both figures spread widely through Christian art across the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The distinction Apuleius drew in The Golden Ass is telling: in his telling of the Eros and Psyche story, Cupid is depicted as a young adult, explicitly not the fat winged child associated with the putto amorino.

  That fat winged child is the version that survived into modernity as the emblem of Valentine's Day. The line runs from the primordial egg in the infinite deeps of Erebus, through the lyric poets who made Eros Aphrodite's son, through the satirists who stripped away his dignity and blindfolded him, and finally to the greeting-card cherub whose lead arrows and golden arrows alike have been forgotten. The Anacreontea's bee-sting story, retold across antiquity and again through the Renaissance, turned out to be an early sign of the direction travel: a powerful god rendered small, cute, and a little ridiculous, stung by creatures far tinier than himself.