"Love's Philosophy": Aeschylus Fr. 44 and the Cosmological Power of Erōs

While scholars have long acknowledged the central role of Aeschylus fr. 44 Radt in reconstructing Aeschylus' lost Danaid trilogy, they have often taken for granted its praise of erōs as a cosmological force of attraction and generation. Yet this understanding of erōs is a peculiar one, with no precise parallels either in earlier texts or in the surviving Aeschylean corpus. I argue that, in thematizing erōs in the Danaid trilogy, Aeschylus directly engages with contemporary developments in the philosophical understanding of erōs as a universal principle and is thus himself an important figure for the introduction and development of this tradition in classical Athens.