The ''Erōtes'' ( grc-gre, Ἔρωτες; "Loves", or "The two kinds of love"), also known as the ''Amores'' or ''Affairs of the Heart'', is a dialogue written in the

Roman Empire The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post-Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings around the Mediterr ...

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...

. It is an example of contest literature, comparing the love of women and the love of boys, and concluding that the latter is preferable over the former. The dialogue is traditionally attributed to the satirist

Lucian Lucian of Samosata, '; la, Lucianus Samosatensis ( 125 – after 180) was a Hellenized Syrian satirist, rhetorician and pamphleteer Pamphleteer is a historical term for someone who creates or distributes pamphlets, unbound (and therefore ...

and was transmitted as part of the corpus of his writings. Beginning in the early 20th century, some modern scholars have stated that the dialogue was probably not written by Lucian on account of its style, but others—including among those who do not vouch for its authenticity—have posited that the style resembles that of Lucian. As such, the work is normally cited under the name of ''

Pseudo-Lucian Lucian of Samosata, '; la, Lucianus Samosatensis ( 125 – after 180) was a Hellenized Syrian satirist, rhetorician and pamphleteer who is best known for his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, with which he frequently ridiculed superstit ...

'', but acceptance of its authenticity has increased in the 2010s. The ''Erōtes'' is also famous for its vivid description of the

Cnidian Aphrodite The Aphrodite of Knidos (or Cnidus) was an Ancient Greek sculpture of the goddess Aphrodite created by Praxiteles of Athens around the 4th century BC. It is one of the first life-sized representations of the nude female form in Greek history, di ...

Praxiteles Praxiteles (; el, Πραξιτέλης) of Athens, the son of Cephisodotus the Elder, was the most renowned of the Attica sculptors of the 4th century BC. He was the first to sculpt the nude female form in a life-size statue. While no indubita ...

. The same subject is treated in the '' Amatorius'' of

Plutarch Plutarch (; grc-gre, Πλούταρχος, ''Ploútarchos''; ; – after AD 119) was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He is known primarily for his ''P ...

and ''

Leucippe and Clitophon ''The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon'' ( grc, τὰ κατὰ Λευκίππην καὶ Kλειτoφῶντα, ''ta kata Leukippēn kai Kleitophōnta''), written by Achilles Tatius, is one of the five surviving Ancient Greek romances, not ...

'' by

Achilles Tatius Achilles Tatius (Greek: Ἀχιλλεὺς Τάτιος, ''Achilleus Tatios'') of Alexandria was a Roman-era Greek writer of the 2nd century AD whose fame is attached to his only surviving work, the ancient Greek novel, or ''romance'', '' The Adve ...

, but with the opposite conclusion in the former and with the latter reaching no verdict. In terms of structure, the dialogue may be considered similar to

Plato Plato ( ; grc-gre, Πλάτων ; 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC) was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution ...

's works, in which

Socrates Socrates (; ; –399 BC) was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no te ...

is often in contest with another man.

Summary

The ''Amores'' begins as a dialogue between Lycinus and Theomnestus. The second dialogue consists of a contest between Callicratidas and Charicles to decide which is the more desirable: the love for boys or the love for women (respectively).

Authorship

The authorship of the work was first questioned in depth in an essay published in 1907 by a classicist named Robert Bloch. In the late 1990s, Judith Mossman, without weighing in explicitly on the authorship of the text, comments, however, that "many of the literary techniques employed are utterly typical of Lucian himself; if this work is by an imitator, (s)he was a very skillful one." James Jope, defending more explicitly the authenticity of the dialogue, states that it was common in Bloch's era to judge the authenticity of works of literature from classical antiquity "on tenuous grounds", adding that "critics sensitive to irony, ambivalence, and different authorial personae have a very different appreciation of Lucian than Bloch's generation". Like Bloch, Jope also performs an analysis of the vocabulary of the text, but ''contra'' Bloch, he shows that the words employed there, including the rarer and more idiosyncratic ones, used before to deny Lucian's authorship, are actually found in other writings uncontroversially ascribed to him.

Reception

For most of the twentieth century, the ''Amores'' was regarded as inauthentic and was not studied by many scholars. It was brought to renewed scholarly attention in 1984 when

Michel Foucault Paul-Michel Foucault (, ; ; 15 October 192625 June 1984) was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how ...

examined the text in ''

The History of Sexuality ''The History of Sexuality'' (french: L'Histoire de la sexualité) is a four-volume study of sexuality in the Western world by the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault, in which the author examines the emergence of "sexuality" as a di ...

''.

Translations

''Amores'' (English only, Loeb version

References

* {{Lucian Ancient Greek erotic literature Pederastic literature Works by Lucian