the god of love, or love personified, called Eros by the Greeks, and by the Romans AMOR or CUPIDO. There were three divinities, or rather three forms of the same deity, with this appellation. The first Eros is described by Hesiod as the fairest among the gods. The second, who may be regarded as almost identical with the first, is the Eros of the philosophers and mysteries, by whom, as the uniting power of love, the discordant elements of chaos were brought into harmonious order. The third is the Eros of the epigrammatists and erotic poets. This deity is represented as the youngest of all the gods, and gave rise to that notion of the deity most familiar to the moderns. He is called the son of Venus; and his father is either Mars, Jupiter, or Mercury. Originally this god was represented as a youth of beautiful aspect; and it was only posterior to the time of Alexander the Great that he came to be depicted by the poets as a wanton and mischievous boy, from whose pranks neither gods nor men were secure. In this form he presided over love, as the symbol of reproduction; and in token of his power over every variety of animated nature he is represented in the designs of classic art as riding on the backs of lions and other wild beasts which he has tamed, sporting with the monsters of the deep, stealing the arms of Hercules, and even breaking the thunderbolts of the father of gods and men. One of the earliest and most pleasing descriptions of Eros in the form under which he is most familiar to the moderns is to be found in the *Ode to Cupid*, attributed to Anacreon. Until about the time when this ode was written, the intercourse of the sexes had been characterized much more by passion than by sentiment, and the writer of the Anacreontic Odes, whoever he may have been, was one of the first to introduce those little tenderesses which constitute the spiritual part of the affection, and to give a new and higher conception of the idea of Cupid. From the ode in question is borrowed the popular notion of the appearance of the god, as a winged child, sometimes blindfold, and bearing a bow and a quiver filled with arrows. Praxiteles, however, one of the most illustrious of all the Greek sculptors, designed as his *beau idéal* of Cupid a full-grown youth of the most perfect symmetry of form and faultless beauty of feature. For an account of the beautiful legend of Cupid and Psyche, see Psyche. Intimately associated with Eros was Anteros, originally an antagonistic being to the god of love, but afterwards the avenging deity of unrequited affection.

Cupid was worshipped with especial solemnity at Thespiae in Boeotia, at Samos, Sparta, Athens, and Megara; in some of which cities his festivals, known as Erotia or Erotidia, were celebrated every five years.