EROS
The walk

VI

Not every bond is Eros

Greek named more than one way of being bound. It did not leave a numbered set of loves.

English uses one word for too many offices. Himeros, Pothos and Anteros already belong to the company of Eros. Other Greek words name other human work. They are neighbors. They are not a quiz.

Philia

φιλία

Friendship, goodwill, the wish that another fare well.

Aristotle spends two books of the Nicomachean Ethics on philia. He distinguishes bonds of use, of pleasure, and of virtue. The word also covers family and the city. It can sit beside eros. It is not eros with the wanting removed.

Xenia

ξενία

Guest-friendship.

A Homeric office: host and stranger bound by gift, protection, and Zeus Xenios. It is obligation and welcome. It is not a mood.

Philotes

φιλότης

Affection. In Empedocles, a cosmic force.

Empedocles names Love Philotes, set against Strife. Hesiod had already placed Eros near the beginning of a world. Two cosmogonies. Two names. They are not the same poem.

Storge

στοργή

Natural affection, especially of parents and children.

The word exists. High archaic poetry rarely leans on it. Later English made it one of four loves. The Greek is quieter than the chart.

Agape

ἀγάπη

The verb ἀγαπᾶν is old: to regard with affection, to be fond of. The noun becomes central in the Septuagint and the New Testament, where it can name God’s love and the love commanded of persons.

The later theology is later.

Anders Nygren opposed agape to eros as two religions of love. That argument belongs to the twentieth century. It is not Hesiod’s problem, and it is not this house’s verdict.

In 1960 C. S. Lewis published The Four Loves: storge, philia, eros, agape. Later lists added ludus, a Latin word, and pragma, a modern coinage. Those lists can help an English reader notice that love is not one thing. They are not a classical syllabus.

The chart is useful. It is not the source.

This walk stays with Eros because Eros is the problem of being moved toward what we do not yet have, or cannot keep.

The other words remain. They have their own offices.

Notes · 8
  1. The popular English lists of “four,” “six,” or “seven Greek words for love” are later pedagogies. Classical Greek had many words of attachment. It did not publish them as one numbered system. See Neel Burton, “Did the Greeks Really Have 7 or 8 Words for Love?,” Psychology Today, 16 July 2024, noting that some list-words are Latin or modern coinages.
  2. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 8.2–8.3 (1155b–1156b), trans. W. D. Ross, The Works of Aristotle, vol. 9 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908). Public domain. Three forms of philia: for utility, for pleasure, and complete friendship of the good. Source
  3. Homeric xenia is the ritual bond of guest and host under Zeus Xenios. See Odyssey 9.266–271 and the broader hospitality code; Gabriel Herman, Ritualised Friendship and the Greek City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
  4. Empedocles, fragment B17 Diels-Kranz. Love (Philotes) and Strife (Neikos) as alternating cosmic principles. Distinct from Hesiod’s Eros at Theogony 116–122.
  5. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940), s.v. “στοργή”: love, affection, “esp. of parents and children.” The word is real and comparatively quiet in archaic poetry.
  6. The verb ἀγαπᾶν is already Homeric and classical (to greet with affection, to be fond of). The noun ἀγάπη becomes central in the Septuagint and the New Testament; see 1 John 4:8, ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν.
  7. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953; original Swedish 1930–1936). A theological opposition, not a Hesiodic one.
  8. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960). John Alan Lee, Colours of Love (Toronto: New Press, 1973), adds ludus and pragma among others. Ludus is Latin. Pragma in Lee’s sense is a modern coinage.

Eve

Not every bond is Eros

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