Eros

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Eros is the Greek god of love, and the figure under that name shifts more than almost any other in the Greek imagination — from a force older than the gods to a winged child to a philosopher’s name for longing itself. The Romans called him Cupid or Amor; the word erōs itself meant not affection in general but the sharp, particular thing he governs: desire, the pull toward what one lacks. He is never the god of the settled household or of friendship. He is the god of the reach across a gap, and wherever that reaching is felt — between two bodies, between the parts of an unmade cosmos, between a soul and the source it has forgotten — the same name applies. The constancy under the variation is this: Eros is the power by which the separate is drawn toward what completes it.

The first power

In the oldest layer he is cosmogonic. Hesiod’s Theogony, the Greek poem that sets the gods in order of birth, names Eros among the very first powers to come into being. After Chaos, the yawning gap, comes broad-breasted Earth, then dim Tartarus in the depths, and then Eros — called the fairest among the deathless gods, the loosener of limbs, who overpowers the mind and the careful counsel of gods and men alike (Theogony 116–122). The placement is precise and strange. Eros stands at the head of things, before there are generations to fall in love, before there is a second god for a first god to desire. He is not the offspring of an earlier union; he is among the conditions that make union possible. Set at the root of the world, he is the principle by which anything is drawn to anything else, so that the cosmos can begin to couple and multiply. Earth bears Heaven, Heaven covers Earth, and the long succession of the gods unfolds — but the drawing-together that drives the whole sequence is already standing there at the start, fairest and oldest, with no parents of his own.

This cosmogonic Eros is no character with a story. He has no adventures in Hesiod, no cult statue at the center of a major civic temple, no genealogy running backward. He is closer to a metaphysical principle wearing the grammar of a god: the attractive force itself, named and ranked among the first beings because without it the world would lie inert, a heap of separate powers with nothing to make them reach for one another. The Greeks felt the strangeness of this and built on it.

Phanes and the Orphic egg

The poems gathered under the name of Orpheus pushed the primordial Eros further still. In the Orphic theogonies — the hexameter cosmogonies expounded by the late Neoplatonist commentators Proclus, Damascius, Hermias, and Olympiodorus, who are simultaneously the principal witnesses to these poems and the lens through which we read them — the first-born deity to emerge from the cosmic egg is a radiant, winged, bisexual being called Phanes or Protogonos, the Firstborn, the one who shines forth. And Phanes carries, among his names, the name Eros. He is the source from which the gods unfold; Zeus, in the most developed version, swallows Phanes whole and so takes the entire cosmos back into himself before bringing it forth again ordered. Here the equation is total: the first light, the first life, the principle of generation, and the god of desire are one figure. Love is not an emotion that the gods happen to feel once they exist. It is the reason there is a world to feel anything in — the shining, generative outpouring that is the cosmos coming to be. Aristophanes caught the same picture in comic key in the Birds, where Night lays a wind-egg from which golden-winged Eros hatches, and from Eros the race of the birds and all things spring.

Two distinct theologies are already in play, and they belong to traditions that read the cosmos very differently. The Hesiodic Eros is one primordial power among several; the Orphic Eros-Phanes is the single radiant origin, the unity from which multiplicity proceeds. The second of these will matter enormously to the later philosophers, because a god who is the source from which all things emanate and to which they may return is already most of the way to a metaphysics.

The winged boy

A quite different Eros belongs to later art and lyric: not a first power but a latecomer, the son of Aphrodite — in some accounts fathered by Ares, the war god — a beautiful and dangerous boy whose arrows make gods and mortals fall, helpless, for whatever they strike. This is the Eros of archaic and Hellenistic poetry, the small winged figure who appears on vases and in epigram with bow, torch, and sometimes a whip: capricious, often cruel, the explanation for desire that arrives unbidden, unwilled, and against one’s own interest. Sappho calls him the loosener of limbs, the bittersweet, the creature against whom there is no defense. Anacreon and the Hellenistic epigrammatists make him a runaway slave, a mischief-maker, a child playing with knucklebones whose game is the ruin of the grown. Sometimes he multiplies into a swarm of Erotes; sometimes a brother, Anteros — love-returned, or love-avenged — stands beside him.

The arrow is the key image, because it externalizes the experience the god names. Desire does not feel chosen. It strikes from outside, lands in the body, and takes over the will; the arrow makes that visible. The cruelty is not incidental either. The poets who curse Eros are reporting something exact about the thing itself: that the pull toward what one lacks is also a wound, that wanting is a kind of being-injured, that the most beautiful of the gods is the one who hurts most reliably. The capricious boy and the cosmic first power were never fully reconciled into one consistent figure, and Greek writers moved between them freely, because the two pictures answer to two genuine faces of the same experience — the world-making fertility of attraction, and the helpless private suffering of the person it has seized.

Diotima’s daimon

Plato gave the god his most consequential reading, and did it by demoting him. In the Symposium, a dialogue staged as a drinking party where each guest delivers a speech in praise of Eros, the speakers offer the inherited pictures in turn — Phaedrus calling him the oldest of the gods, citing Hesiod; Aristophanes telling the myth of the divided beings who seek their lost halves; Agathon praising him as the youngest and most beautiful. Then Socrates reports what he was taught by Diotima, a priestess of Mantinea, and overturns the consensus. Eros, she says, is no god at all. A god lacks nothing, and what lacks nothing does not desire; but Eros is desire, and so Eros must lack. He is therefore a great daimon, a spirit stretched between the mortal and the divine, a messenger carrying things upward and downward across the gap that separates gods from men.

His nature is read straight off his parentage. At the feast for Aphrodite’s birth, Diotima says, Poros — Resource, or Plenty, the son of Cunning — lay drunk in the garden, and Penia — Poverty — having nothing, lay down beside him to conceive a child against her own destitution, and so Eros was got (Symposium 203b–c). From his mother he inherits need: he is poor, hard, shoeless, homeless, always lacking. From his father he inherits the means of pursuit: he is a schemer, a hunter, resourceful, reaching always for the beautiful and the good. He is neither wise nor ignorant but exactly in between, which is why he is a philosophos, a lover of wisdom — for the wise do not seek what they already have, and the ignorant do not know enough to seek it, and only the one who is aware of his own lack will reach. Desire, on this account, is structurally a form of philosophy. The wound the poets cursed becomes the engine of ascent.

For rightly followed, Diotima teaches, Eros climbs. It begins with desire for a single beautiful body, but the lover who is led correctly comes to see that the beauty in one body is sister to the beauty in all, and so loves all beautiful bodies; then he comes to value the beauty of souls above that of the body, and turns to the beauty in laws and ways of living, and then to the beauty of the sciences and of knowledge itself — until, on the last rung, he catches sight, suddenly, of Beauty itself: not beautiful in one respect and ugly in another, not beautiful here and not there, not beauty in a face or a hand or any particular thing, but the Beautiful absolute, eternal, neither growing nor fading, of which every beautiful thing partakes (Symposium 210a–212a). This is the ladder of love, the scala amoris of every later tradition that read it. The single longing that began in the body, rightly disciplined, is the same longing that ends in the vision of the Form. Eros is what carries the soul up the whole staircase, and at the top the lover gives birth not to mortal images of beauty but to true virtue, and becomes, as far as a human may, beloved of the gods and deathless.

The Phaedrus keeps the same upward motion in a different image. There the soul is a charioteer driving two winged horses, and once it loses its wings it falls and is embodied; but the sight of earthly beauty recalls the Beauty it saw before birth, and under that shock the stumps of the wings begin to swell and grow again, warm and itching and aching as feathers push through — the soul, in the grip of beauty, sprouting back the wings that will lift it home (Phaedrus 246–256). Madness, in this dialogue, is reclassified: the lover’s derangement is the best of the divine madnesses, because it is the soul remembering what it truly wants. Eros is no longer the archer who strikes from outside. He is the name for the recognition, triggered by a beautiful face, that the soul has seen something higher and has been trying to get back to it ever since.

The return of all things

The later Platonists took this with full metaphysical seriousness. In the generation of Plotinus, the third-century founder of what later ages would call Neoplatonism, the whole of reality is a single outflow: from the One proceeds Intellect, the Nous; from Intellect proceeds Soul; and from Soul, the sensible world — an unfolding by emanation, each level overflowing into the next without diminishing. But every level also yearns back. Procession outward is matched by reversion inward, and the name for that reversion, the upward hunger of the lower for the higher, is Eros.

In the tractate that the tradition titles On Love — the Third Ennead, Fifth Tractate — Plotinus opens with exactly the question the Greeks had circled for centuries: what is Love? A god, a spirit, a state of the soul? And he answers by taking Diotima literally as metaphysics. Eros is born of Poverty and Resource because the soul is itself the offspring of lack and abundance: it has fallen from fullness and reaches back toward it, and the reaching is its very constitution. There is the particular love that fastens on a beautiful person, and there is the Eros that is the soul’s own orientation, hardwired, toward the Good from which it came. Beauty, treated in his first-written treatise, the First Ennead’s tractate On Beauty, is what wakes this reaching: the soul recognizes in a beautiful thing the form it shares with the source, and is drawn — but the ascent, rightly understood, is inward, not outward. One does not travel to Beauty across space. One turns, withdraws, and finds it at the center, the soul fleeing, in his famous phrase, alone to the Alone. Eros, here, is the structural fact that the universe is not only an outpouring but a homecoming, that everything that has gone forth from the One is also, by its very nature, leaning back toward it.

The school that followed systematized this. In the curriculum fixed by Iamblichus and elaborated by Proclus, the Phaedrus and Symposium were the theological dialogues, read for what they disclosed about the orders of gods and the soul’s ascent; the Orphic theogonies, with their Eros-Phanes at the dawn of all things, were treated as a sacred canon parallel to the Chaldean Oracles, and were expounded as the symbolic articulation of the same Platonic metaphysics. For these thinkers desire was not merely a topic but the very current of the cosmos: a love that pours down from the gods, holding the chain of being together, and a love that draws the soul back up the chain toward its origin. The soul’s homeward eros, in this developed pagan Platonism, runs alongside theurgy, the ritual ascent — the affective pull and the sacred work understood as two aspects of one return. The god of the bedroom and the principle that governs the structure of reality had become, for these readers, the same god, fully and without remainder.

When Marsilio Ficino re-Latinized Plato in fifteenth-century Florence, it was this Eros he inherited. His commentary on the Symposium, the De amore, made the ladder of love the master concept of Renaissance Platonism, coined the very phrase Platonic love, and threaded it through the prisca theologia he traced from Orpheus and Hermes through Pythagoras to Plato — the divine circle in which love descends from God into the cosmos and returns, drawing the lover up the same ladder Diotima had climbed. The desire that the Hellenistic poets had cursed as a swarm of stinging boys was now the soul’s deepest motion toward God.

The texts and the readers

The cosmogonic Eros is recoverable only obliquely. Hesiod’s Theogony survives whole and names him at lines 116–122; the standard public-domain English remains that of Hugh Evelyn-White, hosted with the Greek at the Theoi Classical Texts Library. The Orphic Eros-Phanes is harder, because the Orphic poems survive only in fragments and in the quotations of later authors. The modern reconstruction of that tradition runs from Otto Kern’s Orphicorum Fragmenta (1922) to Martin L. West’s The Orphic Poems (1983) and Alberto Bernabé’s Teubner edition (2004–2007); Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion (1985) remains the standard single-volume orientation to Eros across cult and cosmogony, and to the contested question of how much unity the Orphic material ever had.

The philosophical Eros is, by contrast, abundantly preserved. Diotima’s teaching and the ladder of love stand in the Symposium at 178–212; the soul’s wings, in the Phaedrus at 245–257. Benjamin Jowett’s Victorian translation — the Symposium rendered as the Banquet, and the Phaedrus — became the version that mediated Plato to the English-speaking world, decorous and sometimes prudish on exactly the erotic material it renders. The fullest scholarly treatment of how Plato sets philosophical ascent in the vocabulary of the mystery cults is Christoph Riedweg’s Mysterienterminologie bei Platon (1987); on the Symposium as a meditation on desire, education, and what survives of the beloved at the summit, Frisbee Sheffield’s Plato’s Symposium: The Ethics of Desire (2006) is standard. The Plotinian reading sits in the Third Ennead’s tractate On Love and, on beauty as the trigger of ascent, in the First Ennead’s On Beauty, both in Stephen MacKenna’s 1917–1930 translation, whose own page-by-page text is freely available at the Internet Sacred Text Archive. Lloyd Gerson’s Cambridge Companion to Plotinus (1996) and John Dillon’s The Middle Platonists (1977) map the route from the dialogues to the late-antique systematizers.

The god, then, comes down in two forms that never quite fuse and never quite separate. As the first power and as Phanes he is the world’s builder, the attraction that makes a cosmos out of a heap of separate things and keeps the whole chain of being coupled. As Diotima’s daimon and Plotinus’s reversion he is the soul’s elevator, the same hunger turned upward, the longing that climbs from a single face to the Beautiful itself. The cosmogonies place him at the beginning, before there was anything for desire to want; the philosophers place him in the soul, as the want that rests in nothing it finds. Greek thought never reconciled the world-fastening power with the force that pulls a person clear of the world, and was content to leave them side by side — Eros at the root of things and Eros at the root of the climb, called by one name and asked to do two jobs that were never made to meet.

→ In the library: Plato — Symposium (Jowett) · Plato — Phaedrus (Jowett) · Plotinus — Third Ennead, On Love (MacKenna) · Plotinus — First Ennead, On Beauty (MacKenna)

→ Related: Necessity · Neoplatonism · The One · Emanation · Nous · Soul · Plato · Platonism · Proclus · Iamblichus · Theurgy · Marsilio Ficino · Orpheus · Renaissance Neoplatonism · Dionysus