ABSTRACT
Tyrants flourished in the Greek world in the eighth through sixth centuries, are important phases in the transition from aristocratic rule to constitutional government, whether democratic or oligarchic. To call eros and the other desires tyrants, then, is to link them to lawlessness and excess as well as to characterize them as compulsive forces without check or limit. This is what Euripides intends in his fragment that calls Eros the "tyrant of gods and men", a tyrant who in the Hippolytus is seen also as a conqueror "ravaging and raining ruin" on all the mortals he visits, an autocrat who uses violence to enslave those he conquers. Any component of the wind/sea/storm complex can be compared to eros. Eros is consistently characterized with epithets signifying destructiveness, suffering, pain, and numerous other frightening disorders, making him what Byron called the "very god of evil". Sophocles in the Trachiniae exploits a long tradition of erotic disease imagery.
