TikTok Teen Heartthrob Eros or Creepy Cupid Cherub? The Evolution of the God of Love

Published Feb 14, 2023, 8:00 AM

The god of love was a troublemaker, humans rarely came out unscathed. This Valentine's Day we're looking at the messy nature of Eros and Cupid. Help keep LTAMB going by subscribing to Liv's Patreon for bonus content!

CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing.

Sources: Theoi.com; Early Greek Myths by Timothy Gantz.

Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions.

Oh, hi, Hello, they're happy Valentine's Day. You just know there's gonna be trouble when I start an episode like that. This is let's talk about myths, baby, and I am your host, she who really doesn't care for Valentine's Day or any of that nonsense, and thus is bringing you another fun episode where I blow up all your dreams and schemes. Live. That was long winded, but yeah, my name is Live but you probably know that by now. With Valentine's Day falling on a Tuesday this year, I just knew I had to do a special episode dedicated to this weird and capitalistic nonsense holiday, particularly because while there are some bizarre connections with Greek mythology or rather more explicitly Roman, So today we're talking all things love, that is, all things eros and cupid, because I mean, God's no love in Greek mythology is both entirely and completely determined by either Him or Aphrodite, and it rarely rarely goes well, or rather it rarely goes well for both parties. You know, in preparing for this, or thinking what I could do for a Valentine's Day episode, I first I first googled the most romantic Greek myths, just to see what the varied you know, listicles might have come up with that maybe could help me. But wow, I mean, should I have been surprised that all of the so called romantic stories are either stories of women being possessed by men they had little to no interest in, or straight up tragedy and death. No, I most certainly shouldn't have been surprised, and yet here we are. I managed to be surprised because here's what the suggestions that Google gives us for the most explicitly romantic myths of ancient Greece. First, Hero and Leander. Okay, yeah, this is romantic. It's also tragic as fuck and and barely survives in any kind of Greek source, but I will give it to them. It is not a bad suggestion. Next, Orpheus and Euridacy, and like, okay, fine, but I think it's a bit of a stretch, given we get zero indication at any point that your Atacy feels anything. For Orpheus still travel to the underworld for her romantic he fucked up very simple instructions and caused her to dial over again, which is, you know, less than romantic. And then there's Pigmalion in Calita. Would just just ick ick ick. I have covered that on the show before you can look for it, but that is basically the in Cell origin story, a man who couldn't find a real woman who loved him, so he made a woman for himself. Gross Aros and Psyche is obviously on these lists a lot, and like, okay, fine, I know I've convinced all of you that this is the most romantic story ever, and sometimes I actually feel a bit bad about that because if you really think about all of it, it's actually pretty creepy. Like yeah, I mean it's it's all pretty creepy. I do love all of psyches trials, so she proves herself to be a real badass, but still, I mean, it's creepy. And then another that appears a lot on these list is Adalanta and Hippomenes, and I mean, gods, I call all the bullshit on that one, Like, I am sorry, but the story of a woman explicitly not wanting to marry anyone and having a man literally cheat in a contest in order to force her into marriage is not romantic. That's not romantic. And then okay, I found a list that calls itself inspirational love stories from Ancient Greece, and that one is even wilder because I mean inspirational, and what stories do we find inspirational? I will share all of them, just the most egregious, because like this episode is really about arrows. I'm just having fun with this nonsense. But the second on the list is Paris and Helen. Paris and Helen, Yeah, the couple where we have absolutely no sourcing that suggests that she actually really loved him more necessarily even went willingly, let alone the fact that it started the biggest war ever. Chill cool, inspirational. Do you want to start a continent spanning, generation destroying war because of a crush? Do it up? Inspiration? And next in the wild inspirational love stories is Zeus and Europa. Yeah, for real? The woman kidnapped by a man who appeared to her as a bull and then literally swam off to another continent and never let her return home. Chill stuff, super inspiring, about as inspiring as the next one. Apollo and Daphne or Narcissus and Echo inspirational. I too want a man to become so obsessed with me that he stalks me until I'm forced to become in an inanimate object in order to escape him. Or maybe you're inspired by Echo and Narcissus, a pair who are equally ridiculous and weird in different ways and like basically don't care about each other at all. What a love story there's is? Fuck? Sometimes I just love to google Greek myths stuff because nine of the stuff out there just has zero grasp on what actual exists in the ancient sources and how truly wild and wakie and gross and bizarre it all is. I mean, in the best way but inspirational. Zeus and Europa, and as a bonus, Odysseus and Penelope also appear on a lot of these lists, and while I think their story might actually be one of the least weird and problematic, it ultimately comes after Odysseus spent about twenty years periodically cheating on his wife with a whole swath of women, both consensually and newly enslaved. So I mean a perfect love story, their's is not, because well, love isn't particularly good or appealing in most of Greek mythology, and that's why I'm here today. That's usually to do with the man who this episode is actually about Arrows Cupid, the god of love and desire. This is episode one TikTok teen Heartthrob Arrows or creepy Cupid Cherub, the evolution of the god of love. What is romance in the ancient Greek world? Without looking into any smarter person's interpretation of this question, I would say that just really wasn't in the realm of what we consider today. The love stories of Greek myths aren't so much about romance but tragedy more often than not. I won't guess what that says about how the ancient Greek saw the very idea of love, or rather the idea of loving and fulfilling relationship, because it seems to me that every couple that might have actually had a chance of being happy in love with one another at least ends in tragedy. Okay, maybe like not everyone, but absolutely definitely most of them, and certainly all the queer ones. For you, So, what did ancient Greek mythology actually think about love and desire? Well, to put it in the simplest of terms, they thought that it was all and I mean all of it determined by arrows and Aphrodite, and at the same time they didn't think that, let's get into it now. I would love to know more about what we do or do not know in terms of what like the everyday person in the ancient world thought about these topics. But frankly, I have zero idea where to look, and after that five weeks of heavy historical spartan research, I absolutely need to go back to straight up myth for a while because it is something I actually know how to do and it doesn't burn me out to near exhaustion. So today is myth, or rather how the myths treat love and desire, and most specifically Arrows later Cupid the god of love and desire, because that's one thing that's always been really clear to me in reading the Age and sources. These things are one and the same. You cannot have love without Arrows or Aphrodite, and you cannot have desire without one of them either. They determine who you love, who you desire, and if you love or desire someone, it was at their own hands. There seems to be no other option, and that is in large part just because of how mythology was viewed in the ancient world, particularly in archaic sources and classical to even if there is a bit more of an examination on what humanity is beyond the gods. But the gods are the concepts, so they control, they are the embodiment of those things. It's most obvious when I talk about the personification gods when you wonderful listeners ache for stories of Nike, god is a victory, or Thanatos, god of death. These gods and hundreds of others are essentially without stories in the ancient world because it wasn't about the stories, it was about the concepts that they embodied, that they personified. While Arrows features into many many stories, the same does apply to him. He is love, desire, and thus, particularly in the ancient Greek sources, when those things are at hand, it is because of him, and beyond controlling the love and sex lives of others, Arrows actually has little involvement in much at all. And I know you're all screaming the name Psyche at me, but I will remind you that the entire story of Cupid and Psyche exists only in Roman sourcing, and not even technically what we would see as traditional mythology, because it's actually just a side story in a Roman novel called The Metamorphoses, or better known as The Golden Ass by Appilaus. That doesn't make it any less valid, But if we're talking about mythology specifically, and Greek even more specifically, it just does not fit. While Psyche as a goddess does appear to have existed in Greek tradition and was probably involved with Arrows, their actual story of like their romantic whole beginnings and everything in there, is entirely Roman, and as far as we know, so what is arrows in Greek myth? Oh? Gods? He is so many things. First, though, we have to separate the ideas of arrows the ideas of love and desire. There are kind of two different gods of love, two different gods called arrows in the Greek tradition. It is partially a matter of sourcing and time periods and lots more, but also there are pretty explicitly separate gods broadly, so I think it's best understood as there being these two different gods and thus two different types of love. See and he see. It's theogony Arros. Love was one of the first beings to come into existence, to spring from that chaos that started everything. This arrows is sometimes called the Protaganos Arrows, that is firstborn. This arrows is a primordial being, ancient and all powerful, all encompassing. I call him Big Love. And then there's the other arrows, the arrows that we know from the stories, the son of Aphrodite. Even in he see it. These two arrows are separated, though it isn't entirely explicit who this second arrows is born from. This Arrows in that case at least might have been born either from Aphrodite alone or from the genitals of Uranos itself or Aphrodite am the genitals of Uranos, because you know, she's born from the castration phone and possibly gets impregnated by it and then birds arrows at the same time. Maybe very normal stuff. Not to worry. In that case too, he actually comes into being alongside a sibling him Arrows Desire, who is like not really mentioned beyond this moment. He's much more of a personification God than Arrows. Regardless, we get these two different ideas of love, what I call big love and little love. Big love. This Protaganos Arrows, at least how I describe it, is the very idea of love, the kind of love that just naturally exists within humanity, within the world. It's like the notion of it at all, like nothing would exist without it and the procreation that comes along with it. It is big love and little love. The arrows that is the son of Aphrodite, the Heros that is running around with his bow and arrow, fucking up lives and starting wars. That's little love. That's the day to day love. That's relationships and spats, sex and desire. It's the very human, very contagious and dangerous and overpowering love, the kind of love that can come and go. It starts hot and it fizzles out entirely. That is little love today Where can earned with little love? But mostly because there's little else to say about big love because it is too big. It doesn't really figure into stories or myths at all. Beyond this important introduction by Heciad. It is there, It is all around us. It started everything, but it doesn't care about your day to day. That is what Erro, son of Aphrodite, is for. And boy does he go about love in a different way, a much more fun way. As long as you're not the one experiencing it. One of the best examples of how the concept of love, at least in some cases, is understood in Greek mythology, in my opinion, is found in the argon Nautica, the epic poem from the Hellenistic period that tells the story of Jason and the Argonauts. I've covered this story a lot and have actually read the whole epic poem on the podcast, and one of those most incredible and entertaining moments is when Medeia falls in love with Jason, because, particularly in this worse she falls in love completely due to the machinations of Arrows and Aphrodite. They force this love upon her and it takes over her life, almost makes her a different person entirely, and it's so clear that it isn't anything that she would have wished upon herself. That's how it goes. In all of the stories that feature Arrows and often Aphrodite, they control love. Basically, they are love itself. Because Aphrodite is the Olympian of the two, she is much more of a role outside of inflicting love on others, but Arrows like that's his whole job, at least when it comes to the surviving Greek mythology, because remember, Cupid and Psyche is called Cupid and Psyche for a reason. While that story is great and detailed in the most rare of ways, it is very very Roman. Like I said, Psyche existed in Greek myth that is for sure. But she was, and she was probably with Arrows romantically. But the story of their relationship knowledge trials, that's very Roman. I didn't mean to say this twice, but I'm keeping it in. But to me, it makes perfect sense that the story was invented during the Roman period because Aarros really does play a very particular role in the surviving Greek myths, and it isn't one that requires him to have his own story. His own relationships aren't the point, because his entire role throughout mythology is just to be the catalyst for other people's love stories. It all comes back to that age old thing that I spend so much of my time telling you all that the stories from the ancient Greek world aren't like the stories we create today. They served an entirely different purpose back then, and that results in stories that might sometimes seem lacking to us, or confusing, or generally like unfinished. But they're not. It isn't that Aarros isn't getting the love story he deserves, or that he's an unimportant character. It's that he is himself a plot device rather than a main character. Aarros the word simply means love. It's both the word love and the god's name. Hence why his entire point is to serve this rule, and why there can be two Arosis of different forms. It just means love. I think a lot of people find this kind of disappointing because they want stories of these characters. They want plots and details, excitement and romance. They want what we think of today when we think of stories and storytelling broadly, but frankly, I much prefer the intricacies of Greek myth, the realization that it isn't that he's missing stories or lacking details, It's that he is the detail. For everyone else. Aros is love and love is arrows. So let's look at those times that Aarros served as this plot device, this detail within Greek myth, shall we. One of the things that stands out most from the ancient Greek depiction of arrows is well, he's kind of an asshole. There are few to those stories where the love that Arrows inflicts upon humans or God's is good and beneficial to both parties. He is more troublemaker than romantic, more dangerous than benevolent. Frankly, it makes for more entertaining stories for us. But I do think it's important to realize how the concept of love, and thus the concept of the Greek god Arrows, was actually viewed in the sourcing that we have. As always, I have gone to my favorite place on the Internet, theoi dot Com, to take a look at how certain sources viewed Arrows and his means of inflicting love upon unsuspecting people. So let's look at a few choice quotes that really emphasize how he is sometimes viewed, particularly when he is serving as a plot device. So first we have a little fragment of poetry from the sixth century BC. A guy named Theognis. He wrote about Aarros's work inflicting love on some of the most famous of heroes. Quote cruel Arrows, the many I took you up and nursed you. Because of you, Troy's acropolis was destroyed, and great theseus Aegius's son and noble Ajax Oilias's son through your acts of recklessness. Now, this line is really interesting because it seems to serve to take the blame away from the heroes themselves. He is talking about Paris's abduction of Helen, then Theseus's earlier abduction of Helen, and then Ajax's rape of Cassandra, which happened during the war itself. And not only is he placing the onus on arrows, cruel arrows for all of these things, but on Mania who in referencing the Mania who are spirits of Mania, those kind of personification gods that I talked about so often. Now, obviously we can't know the poet's full intention here, whether he's actually trying to take the blame completely off of these heroes or whether he's just singing about how these things happen. But regardless, I think it could be read as a means of moralizing these heroes, like taking the blame off of them for acts that are objectively bad and instead placing it on arrows like just love as a concept and Mania within it. And then, of course we have the example that I talked about earlier. But I'm now going to show you actual evidence from that incredible moment in the Argonautica when Medeia falls in love with Jason, not because of any natural inclination or attraction, but because the gods of love explicitly force it upon her. The descriptions of this are just like they are, they're too good to pass up. Like this line quote, Medeia's whole body was possessed by agony, a searing pain which shot along her nerves and deep into the nape of her neck, that vulnerable spot where the relentless archer of arrows causes the keenest pangs. She's literally in pain agony at the experience of quote unquote falling in love with Jason. And it's not just Medeia who knows it's happening either. Later, there's a scene where Selene the Moon herself talks to Medeia about what's happening to her. She says, quote, the little god of mischief has given you Jason and many a heartache with him. Well go your way, but clever as you are, steal yourself now to face a life of size and misery. Like no part of this experience seems to be even remotely enjoyable for Medeia and every single person around her knows it, except I guess for Jason. Rather all the gods know it, and they're just all like, oh, I guess Hara just gets to do this to this woman. She just gets to use the gods of love to do whatever she needs, like no problems here, And just to really emphasize it, like how much this is absolutely beyond Medeia's control. Here is another quote about Arrows himself or rather love itself, the combination really, because it's this section of this epic poem that really wants to drill in to everyone's minds not only how fucking awful love can be sometimes, but also how completely out of human control it can feel. It is poignant, like Apollonius is really making the point beyond Medeia here. It's about humanity and love and how it's all inflicted by the gods and we're all kind of powerless in the end. Fun right, Anyway, Here's the quote unconscionable Arrows, bane and tormentor of mankind, parent of strife, fountain of tears, source of a thousand ills, Rise mighty, power her, and fall on the sons of our enemies with all the force you used upon Medeia when you filled her with incensate fury. Anyway, have I mentioned how obsessed I am with the depiction of arrows, love and Apolloni's Argonautica. It's incredible, It's amazing, dark, weird, so good, Fuck you, Jason. The most glaring question that arises when we consider the modern notion of Cupid, that weird cherubic baby with a bow and arrow who haunts the aisles of Hallmark this time of year is where in Zeus's name did the baby bit come from? Or I think we're better off starting with where did the multiplying of arrows come into play? Because that happens before the babies. This idea of multiple deities surrounding the idea of love and it comes from the ancient Greek world before it transitions into the weird Cherubic babies of our time. These gods are called the rotes. The erotes are an interesting bunch because they are most commonly found in poetry rather than mythology. Now, while most ancient mythological sources are also poetry, poetry wasn't always mythological. We might see it as mythological now because it's always featuring the names of the gods, like invocations and things like that. But it isn't actually mythological tellings. It's just how these things went in the ancient world. Like you're talking about love in a poem, you're gonna use Aros his name because it means love. There are references to the Eurotas found in poetry by Sappho, Pindar and others, but those two are probably the most famous ancient Greek poets, so they're the perfect way to introduce the eurotes as a concept. But before we get too deep into that, who are the Eurotas that you might ask? Or you just want to give me an excuse to share more Greek mythological names. Awesome, thank you for doing me that favor. You know how I love it. The number of a rotes that there are, though, and their names is not remotely agreed upon. Like if you think the number of, say the gray Eye is uncertain or the number of nymphs, you clearly haven't found the eurotes because basically their gods of love and passion, and they are also baffling, mostly because like I said, they're more important to poets than they are to mythographers. That means that doesn't really matter who they were, what their names might have been, or how many there might have been. That existent because the purpose of them was just to convey the varied aspects of love and sex. But again because I want to say their names. According to my beloved Theoi dot com, these are the possible names of all the possible erotes. So Eros is number one. Yes, he counts, as in a rote, both big love and little love count because love him. Eros is the other. He's the god of sexual desire. He's as ancient as Arrows too. In the sources he appears and he see it's theogony, like I mentioned at the top, born alongside Arrows after Aphrodite's birth from the castration foam. Then there's a lesser, more question mark of a rotes. There's heavy Logos, the god of sweet talk and flattery, Hermaphroditos. I've told their story before, and they too sometimes count as in a Rote, the god of intersexuality, whose story is a bummer. Then there's aunt Arros, the god of mutual love or like having your love returned him aias the god of wedding ceremonies, and Pathos, the god of passionate longing, and a plant that is threatening to take a for my apartment. Like I said, these a rote is the very concept of them don't really appear in mythology proper, that is, the general stories and anecdotes that form myth. Instead, they appear in poetry of the ancient world, just lyric poetry. And I want to look at some of those pieces. Like so many characters, they're just little references here, and they're things like Pindar calling Aphrodite quote the heavenly mother of a Rotes, or another line where he says, quote, may I delight in the graces of Aphrodisian erotes. This really just means love broadly, because again this is just a word for love, and like so many words in ancient Greek writing, it becomes personified, made real. Of course, like I said, there's also our beloved Sappho, the woman poet from Les boss slur Island, as my Twitter followers will know it. In her love poetry, she sings things like quote sweet speaking a rotes, or better, she calls out the arrotes for they're less enjoyable aspects of love and desire, telling them quote you are violent and wicked and you do not know against whom you will hurl your weapons. God's I love Sappho. So these are rotes, while minimally important in the grander scheme of Greek mythology, are likely the reason that we have the idea of multiple cupids or cherubs. This weird little habit the world has of having a bunch of chubby babies flying around with bows and arrows and hearts everywhere. But obviously there's still the cupid of it all, let alone what I will call the babyfacation of the God of Love. As always, the thing we have to keep in mind when looking anything like this is just how much time passes between all of our sources. Aros is introduced to us both Big Love and Little Love, and he see it's theogomy, which was is one of the oldest surviving sources that we have from the ancient Greek world. It is very old, like seventh or eighth century BC old. While he see it doesn't really give us much on either Arrows as a character. Based on slightly later visual depictions and stories that we have, we can tell pretty clearly that he is most often depicted as a teenaged son of Aphrodite, he's kind of puckish. He's a troublemaker who sets people on the course of love, not for romantic reasons, but basically just a funk with them. While I haven't been able to go through all the varied references to Arrows in ancient Greek sources in imagery, I think it's pretty clear across the board, at least when it comes to his stories stories that he is sort of teenaged. That said, in Greek pottery, children are often presented as just tiny adults, so it's kind of tough to tell if he's being seen as like a teenager, like a young adult, and he's appearing smaller due to space constraints on the pieces of pottery, or if he's actually being understood to be a child. They're just they're little, and they're human, and they don't look like babies. It just looks like tiny adults. It's the wonders of Greek pottery. We love and we hate it regardless. By about the fourth century, there's less certainty as to arrows His age. He's depicted more and more as a child in art, particularly at least based on what I've seen in Hellenistic statues. I'm thinking of one specifically, this deeply iconic piece that's in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, where Arrows becomes pretty explicitly a baby. I wish I knew how to find more details on how and when this babification happens exactly, but quite frankly, I need to stick to the mythology right now because my brain is melted into a fine goo after all those weeks researching the in depth history of Sparta. So we're going based on what I know and what I have seen, And like I said, the Hellenistic period saw a real transition in Greece, both in terms of leadership and culture and very prominently art. So Hellenistic statues are some of the most incredible pieces that you will ever see. Like, if you imagine the most beautifully detailed sculptures from the ancient world, you're probably imagining the Hellenistic sculptures. The piece I'm thinking of specifically is Aphrodite being approached by Pan and Arrows is Tiny's babies flying up next to her and Pan is basically trying to assault her, while Alphrodite finds him off with a sandal in her hand. It's one of the best and most entertaining pieces. And yes, every time I post it anywhere there will be someone referencing a chunk law, which I won't pretend I fully understand or even know how to pronounce, because I'm a very white Canadian. But through this at you alone, I have learned that threatening to hit your children or people generally with one sandal is a timeless tradition that spanned continents. So how nice I guess in any case, by the first or second century b c. It seems like Arrows has become a baby in the eyes of at least the visual depictions. And then, well, we have Rome to account for. I won't dwell on this, but I do want to remind you that, contrary to the things I'm sure that I have said in the early days of this podcast, Rome did not, in fact steal their mythology from Greece. They were influenced, yes, and they often have gods that can be seen as the same as Greek gods but with different Roman names, but that is simply due to their proximity to Greece, like Greek influence and other factors that all just lead to similar gods in some shared mythology. But they are shared, not stolen. In any event. The Roman idea of arrows is, of course Cupid. Other than Appolachus's golden ass. I'm not really familiar with many Roman myths of Cupid, so we're just going to focus on the concept of him, because well the Rome. In Rome, too, we have two different Cupids. We have the Cupid of Cupid and Psyche, a young man who is certainly old enough to fall in love and have a woman fight for him. And then we have the Cupid of some Roman artwork mosaics and wall paintings and the like. A cursory search of again, my beloved the Oi dot com tells me that there too, we have Cupid depicted at different ages, but they often have one thing in common. He likes to ride sea life. You heard me. It's unrelated to everything we're talking about, except that he is a child and he likes to ride a top sea life. Go google it, you won't regret it. Keep it riding dolphins, keep it riding weird goat fish guys, keep it riding crabs. Honestly, Roman art featuring Cupid is a real joy that I did not know that I needed until this very moment. The Romans to or at least regions under the Roman Empire, but also pretty inherently Greco Roman. That's confusing, I know, but that's how it works. They depict the Arrotes as well, being very similar to Cupid, except that there are simply more of them. So through the Roman period we've got both the god of love Cupid and the Arrotes not only living on from their Greek origins but also maintaining those childlike elements that came about in the Greek sources. The name Cupid, of course, then becomes this dominant name for the god of love, because the Roman names for most of the gods become dominant. To put in the absolute simplest of terms, when in fact, I'm sure there is so much more to say about how exactly this happens and why, but basically it's just that, well, Latin becomes the dominant language, and thus so do the god's names. Latin gets taken on by the Catholic Church, so it just remains in a way that ancient Greek didn't, not that it wasn't still read and used, but in terms of dominant languages that then spread across the European continent, it's Latin, but the full blown baby a rubic Cupid that we think of now with it appears on all the bizarre Valentine's Day decor of at least North America is still yet to be born enter the Renaissance. It seems to me that this is as simple as just artist depictions of Cupid transforming how the culture saw him. A cute, chubby baby Cupid with his little wings and his bow and arrow is considerably cuter to paint in that typical Renaissance style than a teenager. Is there more to it? Oh? I am certain that there is. However, I am simply theorizing at this point because we have left behind the Greek mythology origins and entered into the live is too tired from Sparta to do deep research era. So I have covered all that actually matters about Greek and Roman and their god of love, and now we're just thinking aloud about why he's such a weird little baby in later artwork. I don't know. I think it's the Renaissance. I had such goals for diving deep into this episode, but frankly, I was biting off more than I could chew, And this episode is more than enough. Ultimately, we only care about Greco Roman myth eology anyway, don't we. When I started writing this episode, I wanted to talk about the question of how and why the idea of arrows later Cupid turned into exclusively a weird little baby shooting arrows at people on overly commercialized greeting cards. But I kind of had it in my head that it would be this kind of simple transition from arrows as a teenager or young adult through time to keep it as a baby cherub. But it really didn't go that way. I often forget that arrows in Greek art and iconography is often a baby himself, or rather just very small, because again, one of the joys of ancient Greek pottery is that babies and children are typically just tiny adults. I love them. They're weird and so yeah, even in the ancient Greek world, we get this young baby arrows and an older, more nefarious arrows. There isn't a through line, and there isn't any kind of continuity, even just a general timeline. It's it's kind of all happening at once in this really interesting way. And then you add in the two gods of love or rather the two possible gods of love. This like big love and little love, and you get this incredibly and wonderfully complex character who is simultaneously all of those things and well barely a character at all. In the ancient Greek sources, he is almost exclusively an agent of chaos, or just an agent of love, but that love is hugely chaotic. But he never really in the stories for himself. He's never the subject. He's always the verb, if that actually makes any sense grammatically. It's only when we get to the story of Cupid and Psyche in the Roman period that we get a Cupid who actually gets to take part in the act of love rather than just being the agent of it. One day I will cover that story again. It is truly something else, and God's do I know how much you all love it? Those are still some of my most popular episodes, because everyone loves a good love story, right. I bet you thought this episode was going to be that Eros is a menace, but he is also utterly fascinating Nerds. How do I continue to manage to make these episodes so long? I figured I would really have to stretch this one out because of how much Arrows didn't actually feature into the stories and the way that we want him to. But Nope, there's too much to say about the concepts and the ideas and gods. I do love mythology for all its intricacies and weirdness and pure chaotic wonder. So I've talked enough for today. Let's end it with a fun five star review. Consider giving me one, won't you? This one comes from the wonderful user j stem Pal. It could just be those letters I don't know from my own country of Canada, rebalancing the scales. Other than the sheer fact that Myths Baby is an excellent pod that is very clear about delving into myths from a modern feminist perspective. I'm writing this to counter the last one star review. Anytime someone uses the shrill in reference to a woman, their opinion is automatically invalid and sent to baby Jail. Keep up the amazing work, Live, thank you. I agree, we do not use the word shrill. Let's talk go Miss Baby as a written produced by me Live Albert MICHAELA. Smith is the hermes to my Olympians and handles so many podcasts related things. She's an absolute gem and I couldn't do it without her. Stephanie Foley works to transcribe the podcast for YouTube captions and accessibility. The podcast is hosted and monetized by a cast. Help me continue bringing you the world of Greek mythology and the Ancient Mediterranean by becoming a patron, where I'll get bonus episodes and more. Visit patreon dot com slash Mith's Baby, or click the link in this episode's description. Thank you, you wonderful nerds. You are awesome. I am live and God I love this ship so much