Erotes

Region/Culture: Southern Europe (Greek, later Roman)
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities — a company of winged love-spirits
Mythical Attributes: A swarm of winged gods who kindle desire, longing, and affection in gods and mortals with their golden bows and arrows.
Role in Mythos: They form the retinue of Aphrodite, multiplying the single god Eros into a host of love-spirits who attend her at births, weddings, and seductions.
Relation to Humans: The Erotes govern the loves of mortals, striking them with arrows that cannot be reasoned with or refused. They are charming and dangerous in equal measure, capable of folly, cruelty, and exquisite tenderness toward the people they pierce.

The orchard is loud with them before anything else gives them away. Wings the colour of dark blue and purple and beaten gold cut the warm air over the apple trees, and the sound of all that beating settles into something close to music. They have hung their quivers on the branches and left their embroidered mantles in the grass, and now they swing up through the leaves after the red and yellow fruit, too many to count, laughing, dropping half-eaten apples for a hare to find below. No ladders. They simply fly to where the fruit hangs and take it.

This is what the Erotes are: not a single god of love but a whole company of them, a multiplication of Eros into a winged host that follows Aphrodite everywhere she goes. The poets could never agree on how many there were. Hesiod kept it spare, naming only two who stood beside the foam-born goddess at the moment she rose from the sea, Eros and Himeros, Love and Desire. Later writers added a third, Pothos, the ache of longing, and made a triad of them. Then the lyric poets opened the gates entirely and let them breed into a numberless swarm, little gods hatching like chicks. One late poem describes the nest plainly: in the heart, one Pothos is getting his wings, another is still an egg, another half-hatched, and the fully grown ones feed the babies, and the babies grow up to beget more in their turn.

Each name marks out a different province of the same vast country. Anteros answers love with love returned, and turns avenger when devotion is scorned. Himeros is raw physical wanting. Pothos is the longing for what is absent, the lover gone or out of reach. Hedylogos handles sweet-talk and flattery, the honeyed words before the thing itself. Hymenaios carries the wedding torch. Hermaphroditos, once a winged youth like his brothers, was fused forever with the nymph Salmacis when she prayed never to be parted from him, and so became a single body holding both. They are aspects more than individuals, the way a single appetite can wear a dozen faces.

Their parentage is as crowded as their number. Most often the mother is Aphrodite, who is called the mother of the Erotes again and again across a thousand years of verse. But some say the fathers vary: Ares for the war-tempered ones, Hermes for the cunning ones, Zeus for others still. Cicero, counting carefully, found three separate Cupids born to three separate pairings. One tradition hands the Erotes over to the Nymphs entirely, making them children of the water-spirits who govern all the many things that mortals love, which is why there are so many of them.

What they do, they do with arrows. The quivers are studded with gold and the darts inside them gold as well, and no one struck is given a choice in the matter. They are mischievous and, by their own admission, do not always know whom they are about to wound. In one painted scene a pair of them play catch with an apple, kissing it before each throw, just beginning to fall in love, while a second pair shoot arrows into each other’s bare breasts to make certain the desire already there will never cool. That is the whole of their work in miniature: starting love, and then nailing it down so it cannot leave.

They turn up wherever love is doing something. They ride swans with golden bridles across a marsh, jeering and unseating one another like jockeys. They row little boats and sail little ships in mosaic after mosaic. They crowd around Aphrodite’s couch begging to be told whose heart to transfix next, whether to trouble the sea or the land or to set the gods quarrelling again. At the wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia they decked the bridal chamber and hung golden fruit above the bed. At a funeral pyre they lit the flames with their own torches for a wife who chose to die for love of her husband, and insisted their fire was the sweeter for it. Love, in their hands, attends the cradle and the grave both.

Their power is simple and close to absolute. They can make a king’s daughter betray her own father, as Scylla of Megara did when desire for Minos moved her to cut the fatal lock of hair from her sleeping father’s head. Phobos and Deimos, Rout and Terror, sons of war, have been shown taking the Erotes’ side in a fight, and even Ares shrinking back in shame before them. There is not much that can stand against a god who shoots love into you through the eyes.

Yet for all that, they have almost no story of their own. They were creatures of poetry and paint, summoned to decorate the affairs of greater gods, and they own no myth cycle, no death, no genealogy that holds still. Their weakness is exactly this thinness: they are everywhere and nowhere, a mood given wings. Strip away Aphrodite and the wedding songs and the orchards and there is little left of them to grasp, which is perhaps the truest thing about desire that the Greeks ever managed to draw.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the Erotes in Greek mythology?

The Erotes are a collective of winged love-gods in Greek mythology, essentially a multiplication of the single god Eros into a whole company of love-spirits. They form the retinue of Aphrodite and govern the various forms of desire, longing, and affection. Their number was never fixed: early poets named only two or three, while later writers multiplied them into a countless swarm.

What are the names of the individual Erotes?

The named Erotes each personify a different aspect of love: Eros (love itself), Anteros (love returned), Himeros (physical desire), Pothos (longing for the absent), Hedylogos (sweet-talk and flattery), Hymenaios (the wedding ceremony), and Hermaphroditos (the merging of two forms into one). Some appear chiefly in poetry, others mainly in vase painting, but all belong to Aphrodite’s circle.

Who were the parents of the Erotes?

Aphrodite is named as the mother of the Erotes far more often than anyone else, across both Greek and Roman sources. The fathers vary by tradition and by individual Eros, with Ares, Hermes, and Zeus all named in different accounts. One tradition instead makes the Erotes children of the Nymphs, who were said to govern all the many things that mortals love.

What do the Erotes look like?

In Greek vase painting the Erotes were shown as nude winged youths or boys, usually carrying golden quivers and arrows, sometimes crowned with garlands but often wearing only their own curling hair. In later Greco-Roman art, especially floor mosaics, they were increasingly depicted as plump winged infants, the chubby putti that became the familiar image of Cupid.

What is the difference between Eros and the Erotes?

Eros is a single god of love, while the Erotes are the plural host he was multiplied into by later poets and artists. Where Eros has a developed mythology of his own, including the tale of Eros and Psyche, the Erotes as a group have almost no independent myths and exist chiefly as Aphrodite’s attendants and as decorative love-spirits in poetry and art.