Word of the Day
EROS (AIR-ahss)
Common clues: Symbol of love; Desire deified; Greek Cupid; Aphrodite’s son; God of love
Crossword puzzle frequency: 5 times a year
Frequency in English language: 38003 / 86800
News: Agape In Daily Life
In Greek mythology, Eros was the god responsible for lust, love, and sex; he was also worshipped as a fertility deity. His name is the root of words such as erotic. His Roman equivalent was Cupid, "desire", also known as Amor, "love". He was often associated with Aphrodite. He was like Dionysus, sometimes referred to as Eleutherios, "the liberator".
Edouard
Toudouze (1848-1907):Eros
and Aphrodite, 1872. Musee
des Beaux-Arts, Rennes.
Throughout Greek thought, there appear to be two sides to the conception of Eros; in the first, he is a primeval deity who embodies not only the force of erotic love but also the creative urge of ever-flowing nature, the first-born Light that is responsible for the coming into being and ordering of all things in the cosmos. In Hesiod's Theogony, the most famous Greek creation myth, Eros sprang forth from the primordial Chaos together with Gaia, Earth, and Tartarus, the underworld; according to Aristophanes' play The Birds, he burgeons forth from an egg laid by Night conceived with Darkness. In the Eleusinian Mysteries, he was worshipped as Protogonus, the first-born.
Alternately, later in antiquity, Eros was the son of Aphrodite and either Ares or Hephaestus, or of Porus and Penia, or sometimes of Iris and Zephyrus; this Eros was an attendant to Aphrodite, harnessing the primordial force of love and directing it into mortals, an apt role for the issue of a union between "Love" and either "War" or "Fire." In some myths, he is portrayed as being playful, frequently causing trouble for gods and mortals; in others, he is mindful of the power he wields, sometimes refusing the entreaties of his mother and other gods to interfere in the course of some mortals' lives. In some versions he had brothers named Anteros, the embodiment of unrequited love, and Himerus.
In art, Eros was usually depicted as a winged young boy or infant, with his bow and arrows in hand. He had two kinds of arrows: one was golden with dove feathers that caused instant love; the other was lead with owl feathers that caused indifference. The poet Sappho described him as "bittersweet" and "cruel" to his victims; he was also unscrupulous, mischievous and charismatic. In his ancient identification with Protogones and Phanes he was adorned represented as a bull, a serpent, a lion, and with the heads of a ram.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Eros".
|
|
