Birth of Aphrodite (from Pompeii, about 50 AD)
Stories about love
People have been falling in love for hundreds of thousands of years, since they were monkeys and not really even people yet. And they have been telling stories about famous lovers for probably almost that long.
Our earliest love stories go back to about 2500 BC, when people were just beginning to know how to write down stories. These stories tell us about people who did very brave things because of love, and about people who suffered terribly because of love. Sometimes they warn us about people who are mean or selfish when they are in love (that usually turns out badly!).
The gods in love
Some love stories are about the gods, whose love first created the earth – the love of Gaia and Ouranos in Greek myth, for instance. Isis and Osiris is an Egyptian story about love, from Africa. Or check out the story of Lei Kung and Lei Zi, the Chinese gods of thunder and lightning. Or the story of Lakshmi and Vishnu, Indian gods of sunlight and the sun. Later on, the gods often had complicated love stories, like Ares and Aphrodite.
Gaia and Ouranos
Isis and Osiris
Heng O and Shen Yi
Lakshmi and Vishnu
Lei Kung and Lei Zi
Ares and Aphrodite
A scene from the Ramayana
Heroes in love
Other stories are about people. Some people were very brave because of their love. Medea, for example, risked her life to help Jason bring home the Golden Fleece, and Ariadne risked hers to help Theseus kill the Minotaur. In the Indian story of the Ramayana, Prince Rama has all kinds of adventures to rescue his wife Sita.
Rama and Sita
Ariadne and Theseus
Jason and Medea
Sohrab and Rustem
Siegfried and Kriemheld
People in love
Layla and Majnun at school together, from a manuscript of the Khamsa that belonged to Timur’s son and is now in the Hermitage Museum (1431 AD).
Some people’s love caused them a lot of trouble, like Oedipus and Jocasta, in Greek myth, or Pyramus and Thisbe. Or what about Tristan and Isolde? Or the sad Islamic story of Layla and Majnun?
Oedipus and Jocasta
Vis and Ramin
Pyramus and Thisbe
Tristan and Isolde
Layla and Majnun
Rudaba and Zal
Hero and Leander
The Alpamysh
Achilles and Penthesileia
Shakuntala and Dushyanta
Achilles kills Penthesileia just at the moment that they fall in love (Athens, ca. 540 BC)
Doing bad stuff for love
How about some people who acted badly because they were in love? Well, there’s Apollo, the god who cursed Cassandra because she didn’t want to go out with him…
Apollo and Cassandra
Fengshen Yanyi
Phaedra and Hippolytus
Ishtar and Gilgamesh
Phaedra, who lied to get Hippolytus in trouble when he didn’t want to go out with her? The Sumerian goddess Ishtar killed Gilgamesh’s best friend, because Gilgamesh didn’t want to marry her.
Love for your family
Inuit carving of a sea lion
People also love their families – their parents, their children, and their brothers and sisters. There’s Sedna, the Inuit child who sends food to all Inuit people.
Sedna and the Inuit
Love for your friends
Achilles bandaging the wounded Achilles binding up the wounds of Patroclos (Athens, red-figure vase, 500 BC -now in Berlin)
Or what about the stories of Duryodhana and Karna, Achilles and Patroclos, or Damon and Pythias? All of these loved their best friends enough to go through a lot for them.
Duryodhana and Karna
Achilles and Patroclos
Damon and Pythias
Love poetry
People also wrote stories and poems about how love could bring people closer to God. The Islamic poets Rumi and Omar Khayyam wrote about this, for instance.
Who was Rumi?
Omar Khayyam
More about Phaedra and Hippolytus
Bibliography and further reading about the history of love:
