Eros: the Primordial of Love and Desire

Eros was the Primordial entity of Love and Desire, one of the first beings born out of Chaos at the beginning of creation. He came into existence in the Void before the world had form, a sibling of Gaia, Erebus, Nyx, and Tartarus, the eldest generation of the Primordials. Where his brothers and sisters embodied the earth, the heavens, the darkness, the night, and the abyss, Eros was the act of procreating new life through love, the force that drove generation itself in the early cosmos. He takes no part in the wars the games show, yet his name survived on mortal tongues into the age of Kratos. (Theogony; God of War: Ascension)

Born out of Chaos#

In the beginning there was Chaos, the void from which all of creation came, at once a disordered state of the universe and the deity embedded within it. Out of that formlessness emerged the first of the Protogenoi, the primordial gods who came before Titans and Olympians alike. The earth, named Gaia, came out of Chaos first, and after her the infernal pit named Tartarus. Then came the act of procreating new life through love, and that force the Greeks called Eros. Soon afterward Chaos spawned the darkness, Erebus, and the night, Nyx, who joined together to bring forth the light, Aether, and the day, Hemera. So the young cosmos filled with its first powers, and Eros was counted among the most prominent of the Primordials beside Chaos, Gaia, Erebus, Nyx, and Tartarus. (Theogony)

Eros emerged self-formed at the beginning of time alongside his siblings, and he was the driving force behind the generation of new life in the early cosmos. Where the other elder Primordials were places and states of being, Eros was a principle at work within all of them, desire itself given divine form. Other Greek accounts told his birth differently. In Aristophanes' comedy Birds, black-winged Night laid a wind-egg in the depths of Erebus, and from it sprang Eros with golden wings, who then mated with Chaos and brought forth the race of birds. (Theogony; Birds)

Power over love and desire#

As the god of Love and Desire, Eros ruled over love, lust, and desire, the same domain that Aphrodite, the Olympian goddess of love, governed in a later age. Hesiod calls him the fairest of the deathless gods, the loosener of limbs who overpowers the mind and good counsel of gods and men alike. (Theogony)

The winged son of Aphrodite#

The Greeks did not tell a single story of Eros. In some accounts he was the eldest of powers, self-created out of Chaos before the world began. In others he was a far younger god, the son of Ares and Aphrodite, pictured as a winged youth armed with a bow and arrows. That younger likeness was honored in the home of the love goddess herself: two statues of a winged youth bearing bows and arrows crowned the frame of Aphrodite's bed within her chamber, images in the manner of her demigod son. (Theogony; Simonides, fragment 575; God of War III)

One tradition told of a trouble in his childhood. Aphrodite grew worried that her son remained a child and might stay one forever, and she brought the boy to Themis for counsel. Themis judged that Eros was not growing because of his solitude, and she told Aphrodite to give him a brother. Aphrodite then bore a second god of love, Anteros, and in his brother's company Eros at last began to grow. In this younger form he was the god of erotic desire, the kindler of passion between mortals and immortals alike, a gentler office than the world-shaping generation the eldest accounts ascribed to him. (Orations 24)

A name invoked in the age of Kratos#

Eros took no known hand in the wars that consumed the Olympian age, yet his name endured among mortals. When the Spartan Kratos broke his blood oath to Ares and was hunted by The Furies, the Fury Tisiphone sought to snare the Spartan's mind with illusions of pleasure and ease. Within one such vision, a woman, delighted by Kratos's presence, hailed him as a gift Eros had sent them, glorying in his arrival. (God of War: Ascension)

The greeting was spoken inside a Fury's deception, yet it reflected how the mortals of that age understood the god. To them Eros remained the giver of love's gifts, a power to be praised when desire was answered, and his name came readily to those who lived for pleasure. Whether the Primordial himself still watched the mortal world by then, no record tells. Among the first beings of creation, he remained the least seen and the most quietly present, at work wherever new life was made. (God of War: Ascension)