A God Without Parents
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Phaedrus — εἶναι τὸν θεὸν τίμιον, ἦ δʼ ὅς, τεκμήριον δὲ τούτου· γονῆς γὰρ Ἔρωτος οὔτʼ εἰσὶν οὔτε λέγονται ὑπʼ οὐδενὸς οὔτε ἰδιώτου οὔτε ποιητοῦ, ἀλλʼ Ἡσίοδος πρῶτον μὲν Χάος φησὶ γενέσθαι—… αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα Γαῖʼ εὐρύστερνος, πάντων ἕδος ἀσφαλὲς αἰεί, ἠδʼ Ἔρος… Ἡσιόδῳ δὲ καὶ Ἀκουσίλεως σύμφησιν μετὰ τὸ Χάος δύο τούτω γενέσθαι, Γῆν τε καὶ ἔρωτα. Παρμενίδης δὲ τὴν γένεσιν λέγει— πρώτιστον μὲν ἔρωτα θεῶν μητίσατο πάντων.
the god is honored, he said. And here is a proof of this: parents of Eros neither exist nor are they spoken of by anyone — neither layman nor poet. Instead Hesiod says that first of all Chaos came to be — … and then broad-breasted Gaia, the ever-secure seat of all things, and Eros — … and Acusilaus agrees with Hesiod that after Chaos these two came to be, Earth and Eros. And Parmenides speaks of his birth: “first of all the gods, she devised Eros, of all of them.”
Continuing Phaedrus's opening speech, begun in 178a: having called Eros one of the eldest of the gods, he now argues from silence — no one, ordinary person or poet, names any parents for Eros. He quotes Hesiod's Theogony, where Chaos, then broad-breasted Earth, then Eros are among the first things to come to be (Burnet's text has two gaps where lines are missing); notes that Acusilaus agrees; and closes with a line of Parmenides on Eros's origin.
Phaedrus is not simply quoting Hesiod, he is editing him: dropping the underworld's birth keeps Eros in third place. Parmenides supplies the closing witness, and a strange one — the line survives nowhere else, and its subject, “she,” goes unnamed in what Plato quotes here. Elsewhere in Parmenides' poem a goddess governs how things come to be at all; here she is said to have devised Eros before any other god, with a verb, mētiáō, built on mêtis, the same cunning intelligence Zeus swallows in the Theogony to keep at his side for good. Eros, on this reading, is not simply old. He is planned — the product of a calculation that precedes the very gods who will later plan or be planned for in turn. Plato has Phaedrus reach for a philosopher's line without remarking on how strange a claim about love he has just made.
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