Eros and Eris : Love and Strife In and Beyond the Greco-Roman World

This narrative has three related intentions. The first, and primary in sheer volume of discussion, is to consider Greek and Latin literature as a prism through which Greco-Roman civilization may be understood, but through the specific lens of the interweave of two concepts, eros (love) and eris (strife). Neither of these apparently opposed modes of human behavior is presented without the other; the two are repeatedly intertwined with each other, from the description of how our world came into being to the various threads of epic and lyric poetry that offer accounts of human-divine, divine-divine and human-human interaction. Thus, beginning with Hesiod's Theogony and the surviving Homeric epics, (the Iliad and the Odyssey), I go on to consider Greek lyric, tragic and comic poetry-from Sappho and Pindar to Aiskhylos and Sophokles and Euripides to Aristophanes to Menander-and in turn I observe how the issue of eros/eris further plays out in Roman poetry, from Lucretius and Virgil to the panoply of lyric poets that includes Catullus as well as Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid on the one hand and satirists like Juvenal on the other. The theme plays out in the most serious and the most humorous of modes.

           A briefer discussion-a kind of interlude-will include Plato (specifically, the Symposium) and a consideration of the visual arts will single out a handful of works in which this theme is particularly well represented, offering a complement to the literary articulation. My intention is to draw conclusions regarding this aspect of Greco-Roman culture while recognizing differences inherent in Greek versus Roman thinking that mark them both as a continuum and as distinct from each other.

           In what amounts to an extended epilogue, the third component of my narrative traces the eros/eris theme as it continues to play out in Western literature, suggesting this theme as one of the many instruments through which Western civilization erects a complex edifice built on Greek and Roman-and Hebrew biblical (included in this epilogue)-foundations. The discussion extends beyond the Bible to the Chanson de Roland to Dante's Divine Comedy to Pierre Corneille's Le Cid to Nikos Kazantsakis' The Odyssey: A Sequel to the magnificent contemporary poem by Nobel-prize-winner, Derek Walcott, Omeros, and to the musical, West Side Story. More simply put-given my inclusion of a discussion of the Baghavad Gita with respect to this theme-I ask how all of this might reflect more broadly and deeply on what humans are about, across the range of our cultures and civilizations, West and East.