Anteros

A Forgotten Myth

Craig E. Stephenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000707564
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Ancient Art

Anteros: A Forgotten Myth explores how the myth of Anteros disappears and reappears throughout the centuries, from classical Athens to the present day, and looks at how the myth challenges the work of Freud, Lacan, and Jung, among others. It examines the successive cultural experiences that formed and inform the myth and also how the myth sheds light on individual human experience and the psychoanalytic process.

Topics of discussion include:

• Anteros in the Italian Renaissance, the French Enlightenment and English Modernism
• psychologizing Anteros: Freud, Lacan, Girard, and Jung
• three anterotic moments in a consulting room.

This book presents an important argument at the boundaries of the disciplines of analytical psychology, psychoanalysis, art history, and mythology. It will therefore be essential reading for all analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts as well as art historians and those with an interest in the meeting of psychoanalytic thought and mythology.

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Chapter 1
Resident alien

Anteros in classical Greek and Roman settings

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These instances, and others of the kind, have been collected from the old traditions of Greece, and though you, Balbus, are aware of the necessity of opposing them, in order that religious worship may not be disorganised, your school not only does not rebut, but positively confirms them by giving an explanation in each case of their meaning.

(Cicero, 46 BC, The Nature of the Gods, 3, 59)

Of all the ruins of Pompeii, the suburban Villa of Mysteries is among the best preserved, the most beautiful, and the least understood. In a special room of the villa, frescoes show life-size figures painted against vivid red backgrounds. The most likely interpretation of these frescoes is that this room was a triclinium in which women were initiated into a cult of Dionysus, and the murals represent a progression of events related to such an initiation into the ‘mystery’ of the god. No extant text offers a key to interpretation. No direct antecedents of the villa pictures have come to light. But the frescoes, painted between 70 and 60 BC, testify to an inßux of reformed Dionysiac mysteries that came back to the Italian peninsula after they had been ousted by the repression of the Bacchanalia a century earlier.

The ninth (and second last) scene of the Villa of Mysteries frescoes seems to depict a return to ordinary life once the ritual drama has concluded. The now initiated woman sits while her hair is being dressed by a maid. Eros, with his bow on his arm, looks on from behind the corner, while a second Eros, in front of the women, holds up a mirror (Figure 1.2). Modern commentators such as Linda Fierz-David (1988), Nor Hall (1988), and Gilles Sauron (1998) barely comment on these two ‘erotes’. What meaning might they have brought to the drama for the initiates at Pompeii? Perhaps they are Eros and Anteros, his brother.

Anteros may always have been an enigma. Almost everything now known about this god comes from only a few writers: Cicero [106–43 BC], in The Nature of the Gods; Pausanias [143–176 AD ] in his guidebook to Greece; Eunapius [345–420 AD ], in his Lives of the Sophists ; and his contemporary, Themistius [c. 360 AD], who includes the fullest account in his Orations. No doubt this list of sources represents only what has survived. Moreover, if Anteros was indeed associated with a mystery cult, much may have been known but little recorded.

Figure 1.2 Diagram showing the various characters in the frescoes of the Villa of Mysteries, Pompeii, Italy, with located within the two sides of the lower right-hand corner.

Source: Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali, Pompeii.

Sometimes, as in this Roman image in the Villa of Mysteries, Anteros may be present but hardly distinguishable from Eros. Elsewhere, he may be completely overlooked, so much so that he merits no mention in such comprehensive modern handbooks of ancient myths as the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (1959, 1968). Yet even though very little ancient writing about Anteros has survived, the existing fragments suggest that he was a familiar presence with a defined area of influence.

In his ten-volume guidebook to Greece, Pausanias reports on two altars erected to Anteros. The first, in Athens, seems to have been located beneath the Acropolis. Pausanias does not describe it; instead, he tells a story:

The altar within the city called the altar of Anteros they say was dedicated by resident aliens, because the Athenian Meles, spurning the love of Timagoras, a resident alien, bade him ascend to the highest point of the rock and cast himself down. Now Timagoras took no account of his life, and was ready to gratify the youth in any of his requests, so he went and cast himself down. When Meles saw that Timagoras was dead, he suffered such pangs of remorse that he threw himself from the same rock and died. From this time the resident aliens worshipped as Anteros the avenging spirit of Timagoras.

(Pausanias, Description of Greece, I, xxx, 1)

By Pausanias’s account, the presence of Anteros was implicit in the fate of Meles, just as Eros’s hand was implicit in the fate of Timagoras. The Acropolis altar was constructed as much in remembrance of both lover-victims as in awe of the brother-god (Figure 1.3 a, b, and c).

But now, add to this drama of human suffering an explicit image of the god himself. Pausanias found, in the open gymnasium at Elis, a second altar built to Anteros and, in the wrestling school of an adjoining enclosed gymnasium, a bas-relief depicting him. In this carving, a figure of Eros holds a palm branch, and his brother Anteros tries to wrest it from him (Pausanias, Description of Greece, 6, 23, 3 & 5) (Figure ii).

Pausanias presents two seemingly contradictory images of Anteros. In the first image, Anteros is intuited as an avenger of slighted love, and thus he is in league with Eros: he strikes Meles with suicidal remorse for his offences against Timagoras and, by extension, against Eros. But in the second, Anteros appears in opposition to Eros, wrestling his brother at the gymnasium site for possession of a palm-branch.

Eros and his brother appear more gently and in a natural setting in an anecdote told by Eunapius in his Lives of the Sophists. The philosopher Iamblichus came with his disciples to the warm springs of Gadara, in Syria. While he bathed there, the natives told him that two of the springs were known as Eros and Anteros. Iamblichus uttered a charm and drew forth from one spring a light-haired Eros and from the other his dark-haired brother. The two held fast to Iamblichus ‘as to a father’ until he returned each to his watery dwelling place. Eunapius offers no explanation for the anecdote, but here, in these two bubbling springs, is a fraternal complementarity of opposites: Eros is granted the light and Anteros the dark (Eunapius, p. 368) (Figure 1.4).

Two additional details concerning Anteros’s genealogy can be attributed to the imaginations of Cicero and Themistius. Cicero wrote his study The Nature of the Gods at around the same time as the construction of the Villa of Mysteries; he is the first (as far as modern scholars know) to identify Anteros as the son of Ares/Mars and Aphrodite/Venus:

The first Venus was the daughter of Caelus and Dies; her shrine at Elis I have myself seen. The second was sprung from the foam; we are told that she and Mercury were parents of Cupid…. The third, daughter of Jupiter and Dione, was married to Vulcan, but her son Anteros is said to have been fathered by Mars.

(Cicero, 46 BC, The Nature of the Gods, 3, 59)

Thus Cicero gives both Eros and Anteros a place in the gods’ family tree. Anteros is the son of the warring and conflictual Ares/Mars; his brother Eros is the son of Hermes/Mercury the bridge-maker, the connector of worlds.

But it is the philosopher Themistius who, four centuries after Cicero and contemporarily with Eunapius, tells the full story:

When Aphrodite bore Eros, the lad was fair and like his mother in every way, save that he did not grow to a stature befitting his beauty, nor did he put on flesh; but he long remained at the size which he had had at birth. This matter perplexed his mother and the Muses who nursed him, and presenting themselves before Themis (for Apollo did not yet possess Delphi) they begged for a cure to this strange and wondrous mischance. So Themis spoke. ‘Why’, said she, ‘I will solve your difficulty, for you have not yet learned the nature of the child. Your true Eros, Aphrodite, might indeed be born by himself, but could not possibly grow by himself; if you wish Eros to grow you need Anteros. These two brothers will be of the same nature, and each will be cause of the other’s growth; for as they see each other they will alike grow, but if either is left alone they will both waste away.’ So Aphrodite gave birth to Anteros, and Eros shot up at once; his wings sprouted and he grew tall. The circumstances of his establishment being so remarkable, he often passes through incredible vicissitudes, now waxing, now waning, and again increasing. But he needs his brother always beside him; sensing him large, he strives to prove himself greater, or finding him small and slight he often wastes unwillingly away.

(Themistius, Orations, 24)

Figure 1.3 a, b, and c. Erotes Pursuing a Youth. From Athens (Royal Stables). Vase, c. 480 BC, by the vase painter and potter Douris. National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Copyright © Hellenic Ministry of Culture/Archaeological Receipts Fund.

This story forms part of an argument in which Themistius tries to persuade his Nicomedian audience that Rhetoric and Philosophy are interdependent and can develop only in each other’s presence. To lend weight to the analogy, Themistius presents the myth as both ancient and famous, but he cites no sources, and none exists today.

Figure 1.4 Dark-haired Anteros and Light-haired Eros. Vase, c. 470 BC. Copyright © Hessische Hausstiftung, Museum Schloss Fasanerie, Eichenzell/Fulda, Germany.

All stories of the god Anteros from medieval to early modern times have been constructed from these five references. Anteros appears to represent a dark deity, an avenger of offences against the god of love, but he is also imagined as a counterforce without which Eros cannot mature. A crucially important question is this: how might Anteros embody these contradictory attributes simultaneously?

The etymology of the Greek word anteros may provide the first clue. The prefix ant- denotes ‘equal to’; a common mistake is to read this Greek prefix for the Latin anti, ‘against’ (Merrill, 1944, p. 274).

One of the earliest uses of the word anteros in Greek literature is in Plato’s Phaedrus, which predates Cicero’s genealogy of the god by more than three hundred years. Plato [427–374 BC] reinforces the reading of the prefix as ‘equal to’ and the image of alliance with Eros. Socrates, he says, explains how a reciprocating love may rise in the heart of a person who is the beloved: ‘And when the other is beside him, he [the beloved] shares his respite from anguish; when he is absent, he likewise shares his longing and being longed for, since he possesses that counterlove (i.e., anteros) which is the image of love’ (Plato, Phaedrus, 255d). Whether Plato uses the word ‘anteros’ in this sentence to signify the god or the passion is not clear. Ruth Padel (1992) points out that early Greek language may not even have made such a differentiation; in the tragedies, for example, it is not always possible to discriminate between a god’s existence in the realm of the imaginal and its presence within the suffering mind and body of a human protagonist. But by the time of the writing of Phaedrus (and perhaps even in opposition to earlier conventions), Plato’s Socrates would most likely have intended not a deity but only a personifying of the passion aroused in the beloved.

Still, if Plato’s first recorded use of anteros denotes ‘love-in-return’, then the archetypal image of Anteros as a dark brother wrestling with Eros presents a puzzle. For example, what, then, to make of the detail that Cicero contributed? Anteros was conceived in a voluntary sexual union between an oppositional, war-making father and the goddess of beauty, when rape was much more characteristic of the coupling of gods. Venus and Mars come together out of mutual affection, even though they love as adulterers in the eyes of cuckolded Vulcan, who entraps them in bed under a bronze hunting-net, much to the amusement of Mercury. It is intriguing to remember that Cicero owned property at Pompeii. Was the proprietor of the Villa of Mysteries with its Dionysian frescoes his contemporary, even his neighbour (as Gilles Sauron suggests, 1998, pp. 33–34)? However it came about, Cicero intuited for Anteros a genealogy (perhaps even a precise image of his conception) that embodies the paradox, hinting at both opposition and reciprocity in loving.

As in the imaginal realm of the gods, so in ours: is it possible that, like his parents on Olympus, Anteros carried into the human realm images of compensation for the conventions of erotic love of classical Athens? We read of individuals ‘pierced by the arrows of Eros’ and suffering irrational and often terrifying experiences of the god (Thornton, 1997). And yet, at the same time, we know that Athenian lovers were required to confine the expression of their passions to conventional social behaviour. The possibilities for loving were set out on a vertical axis of social rank; the dynamic called ‘erotic love’ was enacted between a small group of adult male citizens who possessed social power within the city-state and subordinate groups who lacked civil rights to varying degrees: women, foreigners, slaves, and children. Athenians classed sexual desire as deviant when it violated the conventionally defined gender roles on this power axis. Sex as the bodily expression of erotic love between an adult male citizen and a member of any of the subordinate groups may have been acceptable as long as it respected the social structure: ‘What was approved and even celebrated by free classical Athenian males was not homosexuality per se but a certain hierarchical relation of structured inequality between a free adult male and an adolescent youth of citizen status or a foreigner or a slave’ (Halperin, 1990a, pp. 31–35).

Artemidorus of Daldis, a contemporary of Pausanias, travelled extensively in Greece, Italy, and Asia Minor during the second century, but instead of describing what he saw, his Oneirocritica (1975/1992) describes dreams and outlines, without necessarily endorsing, other people’s rules for interpreting them. Artemidorus records how positive or negative portents might ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figure
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: On a forgotten myth
• 1 Resident alien: Resident alien: Anteros in classical Greek and Roman settings
• 2 La Récupération: Anteros in the Italian Renaissance
• 3 Anteros as Contr’amour in the French Enlightenment
• 4 Chthonic Anteros in the French Romantic cosmology
• 5 Anteros at the threshold of English Modernism
• 6 Contemporary artists of the anterotic
• 7 Psychologizing Anteros: Freud, Lacan, Girard
• 8 Psychologizing Anteros: Jung
• 9 Three anterotic moments in a consulting room
• 10 An open end: Anteros as a more visible mystery
• Bibliography
• Index