"Love's Philosophy": Aeschylus Fr. 44 and the Cosmological Power of Erōs

Abstract: While scholars have long acknowledged the central role of Aeschylus fr. 44 Radt in reconstructing Aeschylus' lost Danaid trilogy, they have often taken for granted its praise of erōs as a cosmological force of attraction and generation. Yet this understanding of erōs is a peculiar one, with no precise parallels either in earlier texts or in the surviving Aeschylean corpus. I argue that, in thematizing erōs in the Danaid trilogy, Aeschylus directly engages with contemporary developments in the philosophical understanding of erōs as a universal principle and is thus himself an important figure for the introduction and development of this tradition in classical Athens.