Eros

Eros is said to soar with golden wings, armed with a bow and arrow. Whoever he hits with his arrow succumbs to love.

Zeus knew that even he would not be immune to his arrows, so he wanted to kill him immediately after birth. But Aphrodite hid the infant in the forest and had him raised by wild lionesses. As soon as Eros grew up, he returned to Olympus, and his grace and beauty so impressed all the gods that they all welcomed him. Supposedly, he was so busy as Aphrodite's assistant that he invited the Cupids to help him. The Amorites were said to be his brothers.

But Eros himself was helpless in love, unless his brother Anteros helped him. So the myths include several of his love stories.

Eros is also sometimes regarded as a creator god, a view supported by Hesiod's poem Theogoniá ("On the Origin of the Gods" or also "The Birth of the Gods"). The poem describes the origin of Eros as follows: "In truth at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros, fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them ..."

First, then, was Chaos (the abyss, the unstructured abyss, the antithesis and forerunner of the cosmos). Then was born the Earth (Gaia) and in it the Underworld Abyss (Tartarus) and then Love (Eros).