Philotes was Friendship and Sexual Love personified — daughter of Nyx, sister of the dark catalogue of Night's children. She was less a divinity than a poetic figure, an abstract personification of the bond of affection between persons. The Pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles took up the term and made of Philia (the same word, in a different inflection) one of the two great cosmic principles, alternating with Strife (Neikos) in the eternal generation and dissolution of the cosmos.
Before thisHydros
Next on the wallApate
Curator’s note
What the sources say, and what later tradition added. The sources for this bay
Hesiod, Theogony 224, gives Philotes as daughter of Nyx. Empedocles's cosmological use of Philotes/Philia and Neikos as the two cosmic forces is in his fragments DK 17, 22, and others, preserved through Aristotle, Simplicius, and others.
Kin in the sources
Each tie is quoted from the entry that states it.
Child ofNyxdaughter of Nyx, sister of the dark catalogue of Night's children
Rival ofErisalternating with Strife (Neikos) in the eternal generation and dissolution of the cosmos
When the sources speak
Dated witnesses for The Primordial Powers. A date marks when the evidence was written down, not when the belief began. The whole timeline
- c. 1600–1100 BCE
- Mycenaean palace tablets in Linear B record offerings and divine names, but little continuous myth.
- c. 1100–800 BCE
- Post-palatial oral traditions and changing cult landscapes precede the surviving alphabetic epics.
- late 8th–7th centuries BCE
- The Iliad, Odyssey, Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days give influential but non-exclusive divine orders.
- 7th–6th centuries BCE
- Homeric Hymns, lyric poetry, colonization, and local sanctuary traditions multiply regional narratives.
- 6th–5th centuries BCE
- Orphic, Pythagorean, and mystery materials develop alternative cosmogonies and afterlife doctrines.
- 5th century BCE
- Athenian tragedy and comedy recast heroic houses and divine justice for civic audiences.
- 4th century BCE
- Philosophers, antiquarians, and local historians interpret or criticize inherited myth.
- 323–31 BCE
- Hellenistic poets and scholars systematize variants across an enlarged Greek world.