Happy Valentine's Day from Antiquity

But be very afraid!

A friend of mine, and former Classics major, used to wear, proudly, a bracelet with the phrase omnia vincit Amor engraved on it. In social gatherings, I would ask people what they thought the phrase meant, and what kind of message the bracelet was meant to convey. A romantic manifesto of some sort, to be sure, perhaps an old-fashioned romantic protest that, even in our consumerist, mercantile world, other values, lifestyles, commitments can still be followed. Maybe it’s really love that is the soul of soulless circumstances, and so not a bad meme to cull from Vergil for Valentine’s Day.

But the phrase that quickly follows changes things:

Omnia vincit Amor, et nos cedamus Amori.

Love conquers all. And let us yield to love.

We might like the thought of embracing love, but do we really want to bend the knee? We’re already caught up in a key difference between modern and ancient views of love: love isn’t meant to be embraced as much as obeyed. The kind of yielding Gallus, the speaker in Vergil’s final Eclogue, has in mind is not particularly appealing. His feverish, unrequited love for the absent Lycoris leads to assorted efforts to forget her that all fail (war, travel, the usual ‘cures’ for ancient love). And so he surrenders, broken. Ovid will soon extend (and extend, and extend) the metaphor, and think of yielding to love as a strategy. Don’t resist, it only makes things worse! Admit we are all love’s slaves, and you have a chance of loosening love’s grip. Indeed a good chunk of ancient love poetry is written less in praise of love, and more in fear of it. When Phaedrus complains in Plato’s Symposium that no poets praise love, the real question is why the drinkers and diners are so willing to take on the project.

If Greek literature has an equivalent meme to omnia vincit Amor, it probably comes from the ode to love in Sophocles’ Antigone (781ff), puzzlingly sung as Creon sends Antigone to her living tomb. But in this phrase too there is a surprise:

Ἔρως ἀνίκατε μάχαν, Ἔρως, ὃς ἐν κτήμασι πίπτεις...

Love, who can’t be conquered in battle, Love, who falls on possessions…

The first three words seem simple enough; love, once again, can’t be defeated, though adding ‘in battle’ suggests that this is no easy metaphor: ‘no, love is war’. Apparently the phrase is still thrown around in modern-day Greece when a teenager or college student starts showing the tell-tale symptoms for the first time. But the follow-up is harder to translate. Most people go for some version of ‘fall upon’ possessions, though the use of ‘ἐν’ in this sense has only one real parallel, in the Iliad. I’ve always thought a more natural meaning was ‘fall amid possessions’ (there’s a Homeric parallel for this too) in which case the idea would be that love does very well in battle, but, if you surround it with consumer goods, with material things, love falls and dies. Perhaps Sophocles was after the ambiguity, but in either sense the idea is clear: love is at war with things, and perhaps ‘things’ are also at war with love.

This might be helpful in coming to terms with the curious modern phenomenon, the Valentine’s Day industry. This year, US consumers are set to break records, spending close to 28 billion dollars. Not bad! But what I find interesting is that most of this will be on things that aren’t worth anything, and so are not in any obvious way possessions. Candy, flowers, greeting cards make up the bulk of it, together with dinners. I’m not sure how much will be spent on silly inflatable hearts, or throwaway cuddly toys, but let’s add those to the list of things that are almost instantly perishable. We show our everlasting love by giving things with a very short shelf-life, as if, in our love-behavior, we’ve all read Sophocles, and only offer up gifts that we subconsciously know won’t stir up Love’s possession-hating wrath. Love, Billy Bragg once sang, ‘is just a moment of giving’: so why not give gifts that only last a moment? The one outlier on the love-gift list is jewellery, and this surely is a possession. But is giving an expensive piece of jewellery the ultimate provocation to love, or instead a sign that it’s time for Eros to leave the scene so a couple can get down to the serious business of settling down?

And here is perhaps the final big difference between modernity and antiquity. Love, in its erotic form, is less a bedrock of social stability than a challenge to it. Ancient love and marriage do not go together like the proverbial horse and carriage. My favorite example is from Herodotus. Most Classicists, I suspect, when thinking of love and war, think of Troy, and Helen, and the face and the ships. But it’s worth remembering that Herodotus starts his explanation of the cause of the Greco-Persian wars with the very strange love story of Gyges, Candaules, and an unnamed wife. For 22 generations, five hundred and five years, the Lydians had a stable patriarchal monarchy, with father passing the throne down to son. But when Candaules becomes king, something bizarre happens:

ὁ Κανδαύλης ἠράσθη τῆς ἑωυτοῦ γυναικός. (Herodotus 1.8)

Candaules then fell in love with his own wife.

The effect of this heinous category mistake, allowing Love to interfere with the business of marriage, throws the whole world out of joint, and will soon replace a king with a tyrant, open up the chasm between East and West, Greek and barbarian, and send darts of erotically-inspired confusion through the whole of The Histories. Without this Eros-inspired coup to overthrow a marriage, perhaps the Greeks and the Persians would have lived separately, and happily, ever after. Admittedly, it wouldn’t be much of a history. I leave you to read the tale for yourself, one of the most brilliantly written love stories from antiquity, and full of interpretive puzzles that perplex as much as they delight. Think of it as this Editor’s gift. Meanwhile, happy Valentine’s Day, and spend your portion of the $27.58 billion wisely.