What is love? How do you define love? Is there such a thing as true love? The Ancient Greeks believed love to be the eternal bond with another person. They believed love is essential to life and love itself was a major part of life. Love is not just I like him, marry him and then live together. The Ancient Greeks broke down love into four types: Eros was the love of affection and obsession. Phileo was the love of friendship. Storage was the love of family and relatives. The last love agape, this was unconditional love that you would do anything for. Without love there is no light, there is no life, and there is no order.
Aristotle once said, "Friendship is a single soul dueling in two bodies." The Ancient Greeks did believe in soul mates. A soul mate is no just someone you are instantly hot for, although attraction is often the beacon which draws us to them first. The soul mate bond is for more complex, more subtle, more than anything that could be devised by conventional relationship expectations. A soul mate bond goes to the very depth of your being to the essence of who you are, beyond any social codes, deeper than your ego identity, and more eternal than your physic
The power struggle between man and woman always was like a bubble in the tablecloth. The struggle would show up every now and then in the myths. For example, in the myth of the Calydonian Boar Hunt, Atlanta was clearly the best hunter of them all but the men insisted that they were better and therefore they attacked the boar with aggression. Most of the men died and Atlanta stepped down and let Meleager kill the ferocious boar. This clearly shows how man wants to dominate woman at any cost. Women on the other hand do want to dominate but they have sneaky ways to do so. Woman can manipulate man with sex, money, and a feeling of power, but wants she gets what she wants, she will crush the man.
The Ancient Greeks has influenced the way we love dramatically. Both the Ancient Greeks and our modern world strive to find our soul mate and find the truer and deeper meaning of love. We both have affairs that end relationships and begin new ones that could be worse or better. Because of love we have intimacy may escape alienation, enjoy friendship and avoid rancor.
In the myth of Psyche and Eros, Psyche broke the one true element that is essential to keep love. She broke her trust with her husband Eros. Later, Psyche was assigned labors to punish her because Aphrodite did not like her. On her last labor her curiosity
