I think that, especially in the late Middle Ages, in the world described by Huizinga, or, on the contrary, in groups with less evolved literary clichés than those of the Middle Empire (taking that from
Hadrian through, at latest, the Gordiani), they might indeed have issued fertile and vital
symbols following, say, a plague or seismic event or a great war. This is not to say that one need admire
Severan culture, only that it seems not yet to have been a period when people became frantic. Consider: after World War I, as bad as anything could be, Europe did produce Dada but not anything like
Eros to counteract
Thanatos. There are some hints of frantic feeling perhaps in Late Romantic Eichendorff?
Anyway, those Weary and Jaunty
Eros coins coincide with the young heirs of the
Severan dynasty. That's when there's a spate of them. They even seem to be issued when the father seems to regard the boy as pre-pubescent, or proto-pubescent, rather than just a little boy. That may be why
poor Diadumenian (not more than just 10 when killed) did not (that I know of)** get any. And neither did the females.
Domna got a
lion and a
Priapus but not an
Eros. Check out
Commodus. It could, I suppose, have started with him,
Marcus Aurelius's sole surviving boy child. One thing I am confident of: the
Eros is a
trope in visual form, like a figure of speech in poetry. Not a symbol, properly, but a token of a notion. The figures are of course common in
terracotta figurines, not only the lovely late
Myrina ones but from the Tanagras of early Hellenistic onward.
There is a sort of correspondence, but the Hypnos or
Thanatos figures are more adolescent. We do find
Eros terracottas in tombs. But, unlike the Etruscans, the
Greeks were loath to put Death explicitly in tombs. The little flying figures found at
Eretria in tombs are not figures of Death as such. I think that, like the sad babies on the corners of some sarcophagi, they embody libido or élan vital or desire or
eros (raw) stymied by death, and saddened by it.
Pat L.
** See below