Mind & EmotionGreek → English
Eros
/ˈɛrɑːs/noun
Sexual love or desire, treated as a force in psychology and philosophy.
The Greek roots
ἔρως
érōs
desire, passionate love
Literally: “desire”
Follow a root:ἔρως3 words
The story of the word
Greek kept its loves in separate words: ἔρως for wanting, φιλία for friendship, στοργή for family affection, ἀγάπη for the giving kind the New Testament chose. Freud took Eros in 1920 for the life drive and set Thanatos, death, opposite it, which is how the word entered English psychology as a common noun. The god himself begins in Hesiod as one of the first powers in existence and only later shrinks into a boy with a bow.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → English
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
eroticerogenouseroticaautoerotic
In a sentence
The book reads the whole novel as a struggle between eros and duty.
Plato's Symposium is a long argument about what eros is for.