How do apparently external events enter and take control of one’s psyche? This question, especially in its erotic versions, obsessed the Greeks. We have seen how Homer framed the question in his Iliad, as an encounter between Helen and Aphrodite on the wall of Troy. . . . Aphrodite materializes out of nowhere, in the midst of an otherwise ordinary afternoon, and enjoins desire upon Helen. There is a flurry of resistance on Helen’s part; Aphrodite flattens it with a single threat. Desire is a moment with no way out. Consistently throughout the Greek lyric corpus, as well as in the poetry of tragedy and comedy, eros is an experience that assaults the lover from without and proceeds to take control of his body, his mind and the quality of his life. Eros comes out of nowhere, on wings, to invest the lover, to deprive his body of vital organs and material substance, to enfeeble his mind and distort its thinking, to replace normal conditions of health and sanity with disease and madness. The poets represent eros as an invasion, an illness, an insanity, a wild animal, a natural disaster. His action is to melt, break down, bite into, burn, devour, wear away, whirl around, sting, pierce, wound, poison, suffocate, drag off or grind the lover into a powder. Eros employs nets, arrows, fire, hammers, hurricanes, fevers, boxing gloves, or bits and bridles in making his assault. No one can fight Eros off. . . . Very few see him coming. He lights on you from somewhere outside yourself and, as soon as he does, you are taken over, changed radically. You cannot resist the change or control it or come to terms with it. It is in general a change for the worse, at best a mixed blessing (glukupikron [“sweetbitter”], as Sappho says). That is the poets’ standard attitude and conviction.