Welcome to my home! I am Pothos, son of Aphrodite and the west wind Zephyros, and twin brother of Himeros. My half-brothers are Eros, Anteros and Hermaphroditos, and together with Hymenaios and Hedylogos we comprise the Erotes - the winged youths who form Aphrodite's host.

Each of us is a personification of some aspect of love or sexuality. While my brother Himeros represents attainable sexual desire (and speaks for himself most eloquently in his own home), I represent passionate longing towards something unattainable or absent, "the longing toward the unattainable, the ungraspable, the incomprehensible, that idealization which is attendant upon all love and which is always beyond capture."

Plato explains our relationship thus: "And the word pothos (yearning) signifies that it pertains not to that which is present, but to that which is elsewhere (allothi pou) or absent, and therefore the same feeling which is called himeros when its object is present, is called pothos when it is absent." (Cratylus 400d & 419e - 420b).

Perhaps, since the object of this yearning I represent can only be reached in a better, more perfect world, it comes as no surprise that I am also associated with death. Pliny mentions, "The most remarkabe flower of all is the pothos, of which there are two varieties, one with the flower of the hyacinth, and another with a white flower, which is generally found growing about graves and is better able to stand hard weather" (Natural History Book XXI), while Theophrastus uses pothos as the name of the blue larkspur or delphinium placed on graves (Plants 6.8.3)