Armand D’Angour on the ancient Greeks’ many ways of thinking about love…

How do we talk about Love? Love is about feelings, emotions, beliefs, and behaviors. It is a psychological phenomenon, an irresistible force, an indispensable part of life, and much more besides. It embraces ways of thinking and speaking that differ widely between individuals and cultures.

Love poetry, songs, novels, and films – not to mention psychological and philosophical studies of love – all have their own ways of talking about it. In them we find love analyzed, dissected, admired, lamented, and otherwise depicted in a huge variety of ways.

These depictions raise questions to which very different answers might be given. Is love based on physical attraction? Is it a force for good behavior? How does it relate to sex? Does love make the world go round? Is love divine?

The ancient Greeks too had many different ways of talking about love, but their starting point was that love was, literally, divine: love was personified as the god Eros (Cupid to the Romans) or as the goddess Aphrodite (Venus). These deities are named early on in Greek literature, in the authoritative ancient catalogue of divine origins by the poet Hesiod, his Theogony (Birth of the Gods) composed around 700 BCE.

In addition, the stories, words and expressions of the Greeks’ foremost poet and literary influence, Homer, whose epics the Iliad and Odyssey were composed roughly contemporaneously with Hesiod, gave the Greeks clear points of departure for thinking and debating the meaning and workings of love.

Epic Love

Western literature begins with a love story, intertwined with a tale of heroism, strife, and death. The cause of the Trojan War, the conflict in the background of Homer’s Iliad, was said to have been the Judgment of Paris. The myth tells how the Trojan prince Paris (also known as Alexander) was chosen to judge a contest between three goddesses to decide which of them was the most desirable.

To win his approval, each goddess proposed gifts related to their respective realms. Hera, queen of the gods, offered to make him ruler of Europe and Asia; Athena, goddess of war and handicraft, offered him wisdom and skill in fighting; and Aphrodite offered him the love of the most beautiful woman on earth, Helen of Sparta.

Paris awarded the prize to Aphrodite. Unfortunately, his reward, Helen, was already married to Menelaus, king of Sparta. After visiting the latter’s palace, Paris ran away with Helen and took her back home with him to Troy – sparking endless debate in antiquity about whether he had abducted her by force or whether she fell in love with him and went willingly.

The perfidious “theft” of Helen by Menelaus’s guest led the Greeks to mount an expedition to retrieve her under the leadership of Agamemnon, Menelaus’s brother and the most powerful of the Achaean (Greek) rulers. The ten-year Trojan War that followed – waged for the sake of a woman, later Greeks incredulously remarked – ended with the destruction of Troy and the deaths of many great heroes on both sides, including Achilles, Patroclus, Hector, and Paris.

Love is not only the casus belli, but plays a significant role in the course of the war. Achilles, strongest of the Achaeans, withdraws in anger from battle after Agamemnon takes from him his captured, and cherished, concubine Briseis. He reenters the fray after his beloved friend Patroclus is killed by Hector, brother of Paris. Hector is killed, in turn, by Achilles, whose own death, which lies beyond the frame of Homer’s Iliad, will take place soon afterward. Following the war, Helen is reunited with Menelaus in Sparta, as described by Homer in his other great epic, the Odyssey.

The Odyssey tells of the adventures of Odysseus in his journey back to his palace in Ithaca. Various kinds of love are described in the course of the story. On the magical islands of Calypso and Circe, Odysseus unabashedly enjoys the pleasures of sex. But his enduring affection for his clever and faithful wife Penelope makes him long to return, as eventually he does, to his home.

The kind of loving partnership depicted between him and Penelope is also shown in the Iliad in the love of Andromache for her doomed husband Hector, as well as in the close comradely love that drives Achilles to avenge Patroclus.

In the Odyssey, even the love between human beings and animals is depicted. One of the most touching moments in the epic comes when Odysseus, returning from Troy and his travels, encounters his aged dog Argos, still alive but lying neglected on a dung heap. Odysseus is in disguise, but the enfeebled Argos recognizes him:

Though twenty long and dismal years had passed,
fate granted that he see his lord at last.
Now darkness falls upon his weary eyes:
he feebly wags his tail for joy, and dies.
(adapted from the translation by Alexander Pope)

In song, poetry, and fable, love and death are closely intertwined. The connection persists over the centuries, and emerges as a persistent theme in Plato’s Symposium. Love seems bound to encounter death, but also has the power to transcend it.

This is an extract from How to Talk about Love: An Ancient Guide for Modern Lovers (Princeton University Press, £14.99), a new translation of selections from Plato’s Symposium, by Armand D’Angour.

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Armand D’Angour will be talking about love and Plato on our pre-Valentines “A Drink with the Idler” this Thursday 13 February at 6pm. Free to subscribers – otherwise £7.50.

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