Eros

First of all, Victory flies with golden wings, Eros is undoubtedly winged too, and Iris is compared by Homer to a timorous dove.

Firstly, blackwinged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Erebus, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Eros with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest.

That of the Immortals did not exist until Eros had brought together all the ingredients of the world, and from their marriage Heaven, Ocean, Earth and the imperishable race of blessed gods sprang into being.

Mortals call him winged Love, but the immortals call him The winged One, because he must needs grow wings.

There, dear Love, thou hast my recantation, which I have offered and paid as beautifully and as well as I could, especially in the poetical expressions which I was forced to employ on account of Phaedrus.

And we made four divisions of the divine madness, ascribing them to four gods, saying that prophecy was inspired by Apollo, the mystic madness by Dionysus, the poetic by the Muses, and the madness of love, inspired by Aphrodite and Eros, we said was the best.

This very Eros, who is said to be among the most ancient of the gods, no one honoured before Charmus seized a certain youth and set up an altar in the Academy as a thank-offering for a lust brought to fulfilment;

ueluti si is, qui hominem Stichum petere deberet, Erotem petierit;

thus a man who has bought both Stichus and Eros may state in his Demonstratio, ‘Whereas I bought of you the slave Eros,’ and sue for Stichus by another formula, because it is true that the purchaser of both is also the purchaser of each;

Sed sunt qui putant minus recte conprehendi, ut qui forte Stichum et Erotem emerit, recte uideatur ita demonstrare qvod ego de te hominem erotem emi, et si uelit, de Sticho alia formula agat, quia uerum est eum qui duos emerit singulos quoque emisse;

And with her went Eros, and comely Desire followed her at her birth at the first and as she went into the assembly of the gods.

In truth at 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 Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them.

for, I take it, next there are among them feasts and carousals and revellings and courtesans and all the doings of those whose souls are entirely swayed by the indwelling tyrant Eros.

next shall Love’s goodness be my theme.

For in my opinion humanity has entirely failed to perceive the power of Love:

Then if Love lacks beautiful things, and good things are beautiful, he must lack good things too.

” Love, in the sense of Eros, is simply “lust,” refined, ennobled, transfigured.

All I propose is to leave this potent god to shift for himself, without the aid of a policeman.

I have now worked out this doctrine of philosophy in the school of that crooked sophist, Eros.