“A meditation that relies as much on the demiurgic aspect of the power of Love as on the gifts of the initiator it embodies – from Hesiod to the Orphic mysteries to Plato. Love ultimately emerges as a vital ethical and mystical agent; an agent that acts through sight, but also through the word; an agent whose genital and sexual foundation is used by symbolic thought and figurative discourse as a vehicle for a journey of initiation.”

In this classic text, Claude Calame narrates the power of Eros in the public and private life of ancient Greece, describes how the Greeks saw and expressed the God of Love, how he was represented in their art and the role he played in their relationships, their poetic endeavours and their mythologies.