The Greeks wrote the book on forms of affection and Western civilization hasn’t done much but muddy the waters ever since. Our umbrella-term “love” didn’t exist in fifth century Athens; instead there were seen to be three very distinct and powerful love-related forces at work in the world: Eros (what we would call “sexual love” only more complex), philia (what we would call “friendship”), and agape (what we would call the “love of God” or the “love of all God’s creatures”).
Having organized the whole business from the ground up, the Greeks were able to appreciate its subtleties. Eros, for instance, while it is the basis for the word ‘erotic’, didn’t refer to the feelings evoked by pornographic vices or even to the heat generated between men and woman, but to all sorts of passions, including spiritual ones, that were based on a yearning for union or self-fulfillment. It also recognized the fact that fulfillment inevitably neutralized desire.
The social implications of philia can’t even be translated into English, and under the joint heading eros/philia the Greeks had room for a whole roster of good feelings, ranging from kindness towards creatures of the same race (physike) to benevolence towards guests (xenike).
On the other side of the cosmic coin was agape (say it like “canapé”, sort of), which implied the giving of affection without expecting anything back and which was later twisted beyond recognition by overenthusiastic religious theologians. None of this is to say that the Greeks’ clearheaded perspective was responsible for their minuscule divorce rate, only that the Greeks spent a lot of time thinking about the meaning of love, whereas the rest have opted just to dance along to it.
An incomplete Education, 3,684 Things you Should Have Learned but Probably Didn’t, 3rd Edition, Judy Jones
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