Anteros

Anteros is a god of requited love in Greek mythology, whose name means “love returned” or “counter-love”. Cicero names him as a son of Ares and Aphrodite, and at Athens the foreign residents worshipped him as the avenging spirit of a lover who had been scorned. He is closely linked with Eros.

Parents

Cicero, listing the different gods who bear the same name, distinguishes several Venuses. The third, a daughter of Jupiter and Dione, married Vulcan, but by Mars (Ares) she is said to have had Anteros (De Natura Deorum 3.59). In his list of three Cupids (Eros), Cicero adds that the third, the son of Mars and the third Venus, is the same as Anteros; the first was born of Mercury (Hermes) and the first Diana, the second of Mercury and the second Venus (De Natura Deorum 3.60). Anteros is therefore, in Cicero, a son of Ares and Aphrodite and a form of Eros himself. In the Theogony, Aphrodite bears Phobos, Deimos and Harmonia to Ares (Theogony 933–937); Anteros is not named there.

The altar of Anteros at Athens

Pausanias reports that within the city of Athens stood an altar called the altar of Anteros. The foreign residents of Athens were said to have set it up because of the following story. The Athenian Meles scorned the love of Timagoras, a resident alien, and told him to go up to the highest point of the Acropolis rock and throw himself down. Timagoras, who valued his life so little that he would grant the youth anything, did so. When Meles saw that Timagoras was dead, he was so tormented by remorse that he threw himself from the same rock and died. From that time the resident aliens worshipped the avenging spirit of Timagoras as Anteros (Description of Greece 1.30.1). In the same passage Pausanias notes that the Athenian Charmus was the first to dedicate an altar to Eros at the entrance of the Academy.

Eros and Anteros at Elis

In one of the wrestling schools of the gymnasium at Elis, Pausanias saw a relief of Eros and of “Love Returned”, as Anteros was called there. Eros holds a palm branch, and Anteros is trying to take the palm from him (Description of Greece 6.23.5).

Anteros in Plato and Lucian

The word anteros is also used of the love returned by the beloved. In Plato’s Phaedrus, the beloved, drawn to the lover who loves him, comes to hold within himself an image of love, a love in return (anteros), which he calls and believes to be not love but friendship (Phaedrus 255d). Lucian lists “the might of Eros and of Anteros” among the themes of the old stories that a dancer must know (On the Dance 38).

Anteros Sources

Cicero, De Natura Deorum 3.59–60; Pausanias 1.30.1, 6.23.5; Plato, Phaedrus 255d; Lucian, On the Dance 38; Hesiod, Theogony 933–937.

See Also: Ares, Aphrodite, Eros, Phobos, Deimos, Harmonia