ABSTRACT
In addition to Eros and the Charites, another major figure in Aphrodite's entourage is Peitho. 1 Although there is evidence suggesting that Peitho, like the Charites, received cultic veneration at least as early as the 5th century BC, her personality remains undefined. This is all the more surprising, when one considers the importance that the phenomenon of persuasion itself has in erotic poetry as well as in other areas of Greek culture (i.e. persuasion in its different rhetorical, philosophical and also political coinages). In these contexts, Peitho has the status of a concept rather than a goddess. 2 In this chapter I focus on literary contexts involving amatory subjects and consider whether she has in these a role which gives her independence from Aphrodite. Surprisingly, Peitho's genealogies and the stories related to those cults in which she seems to have been worshipped as an independent goddess do not associate her with eroticism. 3 This fact is also reflected by her role in early hexameter poetry. In the Theogony, she is the daughter of Oceanus and Tethys and as such is one of the Nymphs of groves and springs; their only specifically mentioned task is to take care of the young, but Peitho remains without a particular function. 4 This, however, does not necessarily mean that her involvement in love matters is a more recent development which then occasioned an association with Aphrodite. 5 The following section will briefly outline non-erotic connotations of Peitho (ch. 6.2), then her implications in erotic contexts will be considered in more detail (chs. 6.3–6.6).
