Eros
The first pull. Not the cherub.
In Hesiod, Eros is among the oldest powers in existence — the force that makes separate things reach for each other. The winged boy with the bow came a very long time later.
The Myth
There are two Eroses in Greek literature, and they are almost a thousand years apart.
Hesiod’s Eros is a primordial power, named in the Theogony immediately after Chaos and Gaia: “fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them.” He has no parents and no story. He is a cosmological necessity — the reason anything ever combined with anything else. Without him the universe would have remained a set of separate, sterile facts.
The later Eros — son of Aphrodite, mischievous, armed with a bow, eventually Latinised as Cupid — is a Hellenistic and Roman development. The arrows, the blindfold, the puckish cruelty, the Psyche romance: none of it is in Hesiod. By the time Apollonius of Rhodes writes the Argonautica in the 3rd century BCE, Eros is a difficult child being bribed by his mother with a toy ball.
Plato notices the gap and makes something of it. In the Symposium the speakers argue over precisely this — whether Eros is the oldest of the gods or one of the youngest — and Plato uses the disagreement to separate mere desire from the pull towards the good. Later Neoplatonists went further and made Eros the binding principle of the cosmos itself, which is much closer to Hesiod than to the boy with the bow.
How I Tell It
The hardest thing to write in this chapter was a force with no object. Eros arrives before there is anything to desire — before there are two of anything. So I wrote him as tension rather than feeling: the reason separation is unstable.
Then, shimmering like a spark across the yawning mouth of Chaos, came Eros. The first and deepest force of attraction. Eros was necessity given shape, the will that drove one element toward another, that compelled separation to become union.
It was not love in the human sense, but the sacred tension that binds opposites. Where Chaos scattered, Eros bound. Where Tartarus pulled inward, Eros pushed outward, seeking touch, connection, fusion.