Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay

Desire moves. Eros is a verb

The simultaneity of bitter and sweet that startles us in Sappho’s adjective glukupikron is differently rendered in Homer’s poem. Epic convention represents inner states of feeling in dynamic and linear enactment, so that a divided mind may be read from a sequence of antithetical actions. Homer and Sappho concur, however, in presenting the divinity of desire as an ambivalent being, at once friend and enemy, who informs the erotic experience with emotional paradox.

Eros appears in other genres and poets, too, as a paradox of love and hate. Aristophanes, for example, tells us that the seductive young libertine Alkibiades was able to inspire a feeling like lover’s passion in the Greek dēmos: