The Pursuit of Love

Chase or be chased?

Eros (or Cupid in Rome) was the mischievous god whose arrows stung the victims of unrequited passion. In the 5th century BC the Greeks came up with another divine character, Anteros (anti-Eros), who was the god of requited love - but he never really caught on; requited passion is not as romantic as the other, more painful, kind. The image of the archer god in London’s Piccadilly Circus is often called Eros, but in fact the sculptor Alfred Gilbert intended it to be Anteros — “reflective and mature love, as opposed to Eros or Cupid, the frivolous tyrant”.

What is one to do with unrequited love? The earliest poem on the subject (from around 600 BC) is Sappho’s poem 1, where the poet begs Aphrodite (goddess of love and the mother of Eros) to win the love of a girl who has rejected her. Aphrodite visits the distraught poet and utters the lovely, reassuring lines:

"Although she flees now, soon she will pursue.
If she refuses gifts, soon she will give.
If she does not love now, soon she will love,
     unwilling though she be."

καὶ γὰρ αἰ φεύγει, ταχέως διώξει,
αἰ δὲ δῶρα μὴ δέκετ’, ἀλλὰ δώσει,
αἰ δὲ μὴ φίλει, ταχέως φιλήσει
     κωὐκ ἐθέλοισα.

Half a millennium later, the Roman poet Catullus was in a similar quandary, but he didn’t have the reassurance of the love goddess Venus that his girl would return his infatuation. Instead, he writes despondently (and in a metre called ‘limping iambics’, which prolongs the penultimate syllable of the verse in Latin)

Don’t live in hope, don’t chase her when she flees,
but let your heart grow hard, be resolute.
Goodbye, girl. Now Catullus is steadfast;
he won’t pursue a girl against her will.

nec quae fugit sectare, nec miser vive,
sed obstinata mente perfer, obdura.
Vale puella, iam Catullus obdurat,
nec te requiret nec rogabit invitam.

Another few centuries later, the unknown poet of Pervigilium Veneris (Love’s Vigil) returned to the more hopeful outcome promised to Sappho, finishing his poem with the line evocatively quoted at the end of John Fowles’ moving novel The Magus:

cras amet qui numquam amavit quique amavit cras amet

They will love who’ve never loved, and those who’ve loved will love again.

Note:

I accept the stricture of classicist reader David Taylor, who notes that the Latin of the last citation with subjunctive (amet) is more correctly translated “Let (him) love…” In this case I’ve translated the implicit optimism of the phrase, suggesting that both lover and non-lover should not lose hope.