Love at First Sight

Love at First Sight (Looking through binoculars of classical concept)

Around the world most of the people go mad for love. Love is such a wonderful feeling that we feel it as the bliss of life. Most of the people believe in love at first sight. Some of them even spend whole of their life longing to marry their love which seems to be love at first sight.

Let’s see what concept the classical world holds for “Love at First Sight.” The most general classical perception of it is termed as passionate love, immense madness under the influence of opposite sex, a kind of third world bliss or as the Greeks say “Madness acquired from Gods.”

This passionate love is resembled through euphemism and psychological representation of “Love arrows” or “Love darts”. The origin of which is usually given as the mythological Eros or Cupid and rarely by other Greek mythological gods like Rumor. It is a belief the arrows used to resemble beautiful love objects itself. It seems that if these arrows stuck lover’s eyes then they would travel to pierce his or her heart, making them too go mad in love or can be said as “Love sickness.” The image of the "arrow's wound" was sometimes used to create oxymorons and rhetorical antithesis concerning its pleasure and pain.

If seen through numerous Greek and Roman literary works, you will find many times this word “Love at First Sight”. In these works, “Love at First Sight” was defined as an abrupt and immediate enticing of the lover through the action of these processes. Just have a peep at some of the mythological stories about “Love at First Sight.” In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Narcissus becomes immediately spellbound and charmed by his own (unbeknownst to him) image. In Achilles Tatius's Leucippe and Clitophon, the lover Clitophon thus describes his own experience of the phenomenon: "As soon as I had seen her, I was lost. For Beauty's wound is sharper than any weapon's and it runs through the eyes down to the soul. It is through the eye that love's wound passes, and I now became a prey to a host of emotions...” "Love at first sight" was not, however, the only mode of entering into passionate love in classical texts; at times the passion could occur after the initial meeting or could precede the first glimpse

Let us see more such instances of “Love at First Sight” in tomorrow’s upcoming blog….