With his image seen most often during February and June (the Valentines’ month and the traditional wedding season), Cupid typically conjures up images of a cherubic infant wielding a bow and arrow, but this wasn’t always the case. The modern figure of Cupid is not exactly the one that Westerners have always known.
Cupid has been adapted, and that’s nothing new for the love-god of mythology. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, Cupid has rolled with the times.
The Greek Origins of a Roman God
A weeping Eros is brought back by a maid to his mother Venus who had punished him for igniting Mars’s desire for another woman. “Eros Punished,” circa 25 B.C., by a Pompeian painter. National Archaeological Museum of Naples, Italy. (Public Domain)
Many stories in Greek mythology vary according to the source and period of time. Before 700 B. C., Cupid, or Eros, as the Greeks called him, was primordial: No male-female unity brought him into being. Eros came into the world parentless, a force emerging from original matter. Eros was no baby: He was a slim, handsome youth. He was armed, mischievous, and almost delinquent. Yet he would survive to be relevant later in Christian, romantic, and commercial observance….