170 Book reviews

Margaret Heraghty is an advanced mental health nurse practitioner in the NHS with many years’ experience working with substance misuse and specialising in dual diagnosis.

Margaret Heraghty Email: [email protected] # 2012, Margaret Heraghty

Anteros: A Forgotten Myth, by Craig E. Stephenson. London and New York: Routledge, 2011, xv157 pp., £22.99/$36.99 (paperback), ISBN 9780415572316

This book argues for the continuing importance of the ancient Greek god Anteros, the brother of Eros (Cupid). Conventionally, Anteros is pitted against Eros. As the god of love, Eros works to cause persons to fall in love. By contrast, Anteros punishes those who spurn the love of others. Yet Anteros is also the god of requited, or ‘returned’, love and he punishes only those who fail to reciprocate love. He complements, not opposes, Eros. Craig Stephenson assiduously traces the place of Anteros vis-a`-vis Eros from ancient times down to the present. Many genres, from literature to painting to sculpture to film, are considered, as is even a cartoon. Stephenson argues that what Anteros symbolizes changes from period to period. As he writes summarily:

The history of the myth of Anteros demonstrates how a mythological image can be reductively forced to serve a single discursive meaning. From his anarchic role in the classical Athenian imagination, Anteros was recuperated by Renaissance Christian moralists and Neoplatonists for the sake of a dogmatic tag that was at odds with his imagery. (p. 93)

Changing meanings, even reversals, are common in the survival of classical figures beyond their ancient appearances and even within them. Perhaps no figure has undergone more reversals than Herakles (see Galinsky, 1972). But reversals testify to malleability rather than to misunderstanding. At heart, Stephenson maintains that Anteros has not been accorded his due. But to make his case, he takes liberties. First of all, he starts in medias res. He begins with the best-known version of the birth of Eros and Anteros:

In one important early story, the infant Eros cannot grow. Aphrodite, his distressed mother, goes to her sister Themis for advice, and this wise Titan recommends that she should have a second son, this one fathered by Ares, the god of war. Anteros will oppose yet strengthen Eros, acting as a loving sibling rival who will shift the stuck dynamic of his older brother in a positive direction. (p. 1)

But how ‘early’ is this myth? Is it Hellenic or Hellenistic? How does Stephenson know? Far more important in Greek mythology than this story of Eros’ birth is that in Hesiod’s far earlier Theogony, the Greek counterpart to the creation myths of Genesis. Here Eros is one of the first four gods who come into existence. Eros is not merely the figure who brings couples together but a principle of the cosmos, on a par International Journal of Jungian Studies 171 with the law of gravity. Most, although not all, of the rest of the gods who emerge in the Theogony do so as a tacit result of the power of Eros. Aphrodite and Themis are born generations after Eros. Anteros is not even mentioned in Hesiod, whom Stephenson never acknowledges. Second, Anteros is a minor deity in the ancient world. Stephenson rightly notes the presence of two altars to Anteros, as described by Pausanias in his Guide to Greece. Pausanias links the more important altar, at the base of the Acropolis, to a supposed case of love spurned:

They say that the altar of ‘Love Returned’ [Anteros] in the city [i.e., Athens] was dedicated by foreign residents, when an Athenian called Meles spurned an alien lover called Timagoras, and told him to climb to the top of the rock and then jump [i.e., to prove his love]; Timagoras had no love for his life and wanted to give the boy absolutely everything he asked for, so he really did throw himself off; but Meles was so remorseful when he saw Timagoras killed that he fell to his death from the same rock. From that day to this the foreign residents have believed in the daemonic spirit of Love Returned which avenged Timagoras. (Pausanias, 1971, I, 30, 1 [vol. 1, p. 88])

But where is Eros in this incident? If Eros is assumed to be the agent trying to bring Meles and Timagoras together, how is Anteros doing other than working on the same side as Eros by punishing Meles for unrequited love? How, then, would Eros and Anteros be at odds? At the other altar recorded by Pausanias, Eros and Anteros are linked:

There is also a third training-ground enclosure called the Soft Ground because of the softness of the surface, which is open to the boys of fighting age throughout the festival. In a corner of the Soft Ground stands a bust of Herakles, and in a corner of the wrestling- pits is a relief of Love [Eros] and Love Repaid [Anteros]: Love has a palm-branch, and Love Repaid is trying to take it from him. (Pausanias, 1971, 6, 23, 5 [vol. 2, p. 357])

Here Eros and Anteros are at once opposed and allied*for Stephenson the ideal relationship. Major gods had many altars. Anteros having had just two hardly makes him important even in ancient times. The writers, Roman or Greek, who discuss him are few: Plato, Aelian, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Nonnos. And none gives him much attention. At the same time Stephenson offers a sociological, not a psychological, interpretation of Pausanias’ first case (see Stephenson, pp. 1718). He rightly observes that the followers of Anteros at the Acropolis are the marginalized. They are foreign residents of Athens. Stephenson then adds a kindred case from Ovid, in which the marginalized are the women of Athens. But this case does not involve Anteros. He is mentioned as one of the now twin sons of Venus (Aphrodite)*not, however, in the Metamorphoses, where Ovid describes the case of the women, but in the Fasti (6, 90), where there is no mention of the women. What Stephenson does here typifies the final ‘liberty’ he takes. For third, Stephenson slides from the presence of Anteros himself to the presence of a side of human nature that Stephenson considers Anteros-like. Few of the many instances that he wonderfully amasses outside the ancient period are of Anteros proper. Stephenson outright laments the absence of any mention of the god, not least in his analyses of Freud, Lacan, Girard and Jung. He does note that two French psychoanalysts wrote a whole book in 1971 on Eros and Anteros (E´ ros et Ante´ros),