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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7912836" data-attributes="member: 4937">Oh, OK.  Good.   Yes, had I known we agree I would have used a lot fewer words.    The point is that I'm arguing Greeks of the classical era had no real association with Aphrodite and love as we use the word - not romantic love (for which they had no specific concept*), not even the other sorts of "loves" that they recognized such as philia or storge. This topic can get really heated for a lot of reasons, some academic, some less so, and I was afraid we were about to get into one.*It's probably not the case that romantic love was an completely unknown concept in ancient Greece - there is some evidence for example of feelings something like romantic love between Odysseus and Penelope. It's just not an experience that they could have easily described or communicated to another ancient Greek. A Greek person of the classical era experiencing what we'd now call romantic love would likely have have described it either as eros (if not directed toward their spouse) or as agape (if directed toward one's spouse), but neither word meant exactly what we think of as romantic love. A rapist would have described themselves as experiencing eros toward someone they raped, or a man would feel eros toward a prostitute - neither feeling being remotely what we think of as (romantic) love. Likewise, a parent would have described the love they felt for a favored child they were especially proud of as agape the same as they would have described love for their spouse, but when we say we "love" our children we generally don't mean it in the same sense as we "love" our spouse. What is the case is that romantic love between a man and a woman was such a comparatively unimportant concept, that they didn't feel a need to dwell on it, or despite the plurality of deities that they imagined, create one that personified it. There are no happily married couples in Olympus, nor any that share the mutual attraction, respect, and shared fidelity we associate with the concept.Likewise it really annoys me when eros is translated as any sort of love, since I feel this is a very bad translation. It could be better translated as "madness" than love. So, while my annoyance with the "Love Domain" is rather different than the Twitter user that started the firestorm - I feel her definition equates love with sex, an understandable but poignant mistake - the annoyance that I have shares a lot in common with hers, namely, a feeling that we ought to be very clear about what we mean by "love".And I started out this post intended to use a lot fewer words than I find that I have used.</blockquote>

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