In classical mythology, Cupid ( , meaning "passionate desire") is the god of desire, erotic love, attraction and affection. He is often portrayed as the son of the love goddess Venus and the god of war Mars. He is also known as Amor (Latin: , "love"). His Greek counterpart is Eros.Larousse Desk Reference Encyclopedia, The Book People, Haydock, 1995, p. 215. Although Eros is generally portrayed as a slender winged youth in Classical Greek art, during the Hellenistic period, he was increasingly portrayed as a chubby boy. During this time, his iconography acquired the bow and arrow that represent his source of power: a person, or even a deity, who is shot by Cupid's arrow is filled with uncontrollable desire. In myths, Cupid is a minor character who serves mostly to set the plot in motion. He is a main character only in the tale of Cupid and Psyche, in which he is wounded by his own weapons and experiences the ordeal of love. Although other extended stories are not told about him, his tradition is rich in poetic themes and visual scenarios, such as "Love conquers all" and the retaliatory punishment or torture of Cupid.
In art, Cupid often appears in multiples as the Amores (in the later terminology of art history, Italian ), the equivalent of the Greek Erotes. Cupids are a frequent motif of both Roman art and later Western art of the classical tradition. In the 15th century, the iconography of Cupid starts to become indistinguishable from the putto.
Cupid continued to be a popular figure in the Middle Ages, when under Christian influence he often had a dual nature as Heavenly and Earthly love. In the Renaissance, a renewed interest in classical philosophy endowed him with complex allegorical meanings. In contemporary popular culture, Cupid is shown drawing his bow to inspire romantic love, often as an icon of Valentine's Day.This introduction is based on the entry on "Cupid" in The Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Harvard University Press, 2010), pp. 244–246. Cupid's powers are similar, though not identical, to Kamadeva, the Hindu god of human love.
Etymology The name Cupīdō ('passionate desire') is a derivative of Latin cupiō, cupĕre ('to desire'), itself from Proto-Italic *kup-i-, which may reflect *kup-ei- ('to desire'; cf. Umbrian cupras, South Picene kuprí). The latter ultimately stems from the Proto-Indo-European verbal stem *kup-(e)i- ('to tremble, desire'; cf. Old Irish accobor 'desire', Sanskrit prá-kupita- 'trembling, quaking', Old Church Slavonic kypĕti 'to simmer, boil').
Origins and birth
The Romans reinterpreted myths and concepts pertaining to the Greek Eros for Cupid in their own literature and art, and medieval and Renaissance mythographers conflate the two freely. In the Greek tradition, Eros had a dual, contradictory genealogy. He was among the primordial gods who came into existence asexually; after his generation, deities were begotten through male-female unions.Leonard Muellner, The Anger of Achilles: Mễnis in Greek Epic (Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 57–58; Jean-Pierre Vernant, "One ... Two ... Three: Erōs," in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 467. In Hesiod's Theogony, only Chaos and Gaia (Earth) are older. Before the existence of gender dichotomy, Eros functioned by causing entities to separate from themselves that which they already contained.Vernant, "One ... Two ... Three: Erōs," p. 465ff.
At the same time, the Eros who was pictured as a boy or slim youth was regarded as the child of a divine couple, the identity of whom varied by source. The influential Renaissance mythographer Natale Conti began his chapter on Cupid/Eros by declaring that the Greeks themselves were unsure about his parentage: Heaven and Earth,Sappho, fragment 31. Ares and Aphrodite,Simonides, fragment 54. Night and Ether,Acusilaus, FGrH 1A 3 frg. 6C. or the Rainbow and Zephyr.Alcaeus, fragment 13. Citations of ancient sources from Conti given by John Mulryan and Steven Brown, Natale Conti's Mythologiae Books I–V (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2006), vol. 1, p. 332. The Greek travel writer Pausanias, he notes, contradicts himself by saying at one point that Eros welcomed Aphrodite into the world, and at another that Eros was the son of Aphrodite and the youngest of the gods.Natale Conti, Mythologiae 4.14.
In Latin literature, Cupid is usually treated as the son of Venus without reference to a father. Seneca says that Vulcan, as the husband of Venus, is the father of Cupid.Seneca, Octavia 560. Cicero, however, says that there were three Cupids, as well as three Venuses: the first Cupid was the son of Mercury and Diana, the second of Mercury and the second Venus, and the third of Mars and the third Venus. This last Cupid was the equivalent of Anteros, "Counter-Love", one of the Erotes, the gods who embody aspects of love.Cicero, De Natura Deorum 3.59–60. The multiple Cupids frolicking in art are the decorative manifestation of these proliferating loves and desires. During the English Renaissance, Christopher Marlowe wrote of "ten thousand Cupids"; in Ben Jonson's wedding masque Hymenaei, "a thousand several-coloured loves ... hop about the nuptial room".M.T. Jones-Davies and Ton Hoenselaars, introduction to Masque of Cupids, edited and annotated by John Jowett, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 1031.
In the later classical tradition, Cupid is most often regarded as the son of Venus and Mars, whose love affair represented an allegory of Love and War."Cupid," The Classical Tradition, p. 244. The duality between the primordial and the sexually conceived Eros accommodated philosophical concepts of Heavenly and Earthly Love even in the Christian era.Entry on "Cupid," The Classical Tradition, p. 244.
Attributes and themes
Cupid is winged, allegedly because lovers are flighty and likely to change their minds, and boyish because love is irrational. His symbols are the arrow and torch, "because love wounds and inflames the heart". These attributes and their interpretation were established by late antiquity, as summarized by Isidore of Seville (d. 636 AD) in his Etymologiae.Isidore, Etymologies 8.11.80. Cupid is also sometimes depicted blindfolded and described as blind, not so much in the sense of sightless—since the sight of the beloved can be a spur to love—as blinkered and arbitrary. As described by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1590s):Geoffrey Miles, Classical Mythology in English Literature: A Critical Anthology (Routledge, 1999), p. 24.
In Botticelli's Allegory of Spring (1482), also known by its Italian title La Primavera, Cupid is shown blindfolded while shooting his arrow, positioned above the central figure of Venus.Jennifer Speake and Thomas G. Bergin, entry on "Cupid," Encyclopedia of the Renaissance and the Reformation (Market House Books, rev. ed. 2004), p. 129.
Particularly in ancient Roman art, cupids may also carry or be surrounded by fruits, animals, or attributes of the Seasons or the wine-god Dionysus, symbolizing the earth's generative capacity.Jean Sorabella, "A Roman Sarcophagus and Its Patron," Metropolitan Museum Journal 36 (2001), p. 75.
Having all these associations, Cupid is considered to share parallels with the Hindu god Kama. Entry: "Kama"
Cupid's arrows
Cupid carries two kinds of arrows, or darts, one with a sharp golden point, and the other with a blunt tip of lead. A person wounded by the golden arrow is filled with uncontrollable desire, but the one struck by the lead feels aversion and desires only to flee. The use of these arrows is described by the Latin poet Ovid in the first book of his Metamorphoses. When Apollo taunts Cupid as the lesser archer, Cupid shoots him with the golden arrow, but strikes the object of his desire, the nymph Daphne, with the lead. Trapped by Apollo's unwanted advances, Daphne prays to her father, the river god Peneus, who turns her into a laurel, the tree sacred to Apollo. It is the first of several unsuccessful or tragic love affairs for Apollo.Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.463–473. This theme is somewhat mirrored in the story of Echo and Narcissus, as the goddess Juno forces the nymph Echo's love upon Narcissus, who is cursed by the goddess Nemesis to be self absorbed and unresponsive to her desires.Book III, Ovid's Metamorphoses
A variation is found in The Kingis Quair, a 15th-century poem attributed to James I of Scotland, in which Cupid has three arrows: gold, for a gentle "smiting" that is easily cured; the more compelling silver; and steel, for a love-wound that never heals.The Kingis Quair, lines 92–99; Walter W. Skeat, Chaucerian and Other Pieces (Oxford University Press, 1897, 1935), sup. vol., note 1315, p. 551.
Cupid and the bees
In the tale of Cupid the honey thief, the child-god is stung by bees when he steals honey from their hive. He cries and runs to his mother Venus,Susan Youens, Hugo Wolf and His Mörike Songs (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 118: "When he runs crying to his mother Venus". complaining that so small a creature should not cause such painful wounds. Venus laughs, and points out the poetic justice: he too is small, and yet delivers the sting of love.
The story was first told about Eros in the nineteenth Idyll of Theocritus (3rd century BC).Theocritus, Idyll 19. It also appears in Anacreontic poetry. It was retold numerous times in both art and poetry during the Renaissance. The theme brought the Amoretti poetry cycle (1595) of Edmund Spenser to a conclusion,Jane Kingsley-Smith, Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 12. and furnished subject matter for at least twenty works by Lucas Cranach the Elder and his workshop.Charles Sterling et al., Fifteenth- to Eighteenth-Century European Paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection: France, Central Europe, The Netherlands, Spain, and Great Britain (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), pp. 43–44. The German poet and classicist Karl Philipp Conz (1762–1827) framed the tale as Schadenfreude ("taking pleasure in someone else's pain") in a poem by the same title.Youens, Hugo Wolf and His Mörike Songs, p. 119. In a version by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, a writer of the German Enlightenment, the incident prompts Cupid to turn himself into a bee: Through this sting was Amor made wiser.The untiring deceiverconcocted another battle-plan:he lurked beneath the carnations and rosesand when a maiden came to pick them,he flew out as a bee and stung her.Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Die Biene; Youens, Hugo Wolf and His Mörike Songs, p. 119.
The image of Cupid as a bee is part of a complex tradition of poetic imagery involving the flower of youth, the sting of love as a deflowering, and honey as a secretion of love.Youens, Hugo Wolf and His Mörike Songs, pp. 117–120.
Cupid and dolphins
In both ancient and later art, Cupid is often shown riding a dolphin. On ancient Roman sarcophagi, the image may represent the soul's journey, originally associated with Dionysian religion.Janet Huskinson, Roman Children's Sarcophagi: Their Decoration and Its Social Significance (Oxford University Press, 1996), passim; Joan P. Alcock, "Pisces in Britannia: The Eating and Portrayal of Fish in Roman Britain," in Fish: Food from the Waters. Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1997 (Prospect Books, 1998), p. 25. A mosaic from late Roman Britain shows a procession emerging from the mouth of the sea god Neptune, first dolphins and then sea birds, ascending to Cupid. One interpretation of this allegory is that Neptune represents the soul's origin in the matter from which life was fashioned, with Cupid triumphing as the soul's desired destiny.Dominic Perring, "'Gnosticism' in Fourth-Century Britain: The Frampton Mosaics Reconsidered," Britannia 34 (2003), p. 108.