The Mechanisms of Joy

I was talking to a much-loved friend the other night, we were both hampered by a lack of words for different kinds of love-relations. I was reminded that the Greeks had a number of extra words for love and this took me into a flight of fancy. I promised to identify them all. I knew the first three most often named, because they appear in the New Testament, namely eros, philia and agapé.
The Wikipedia, I notice, stretched the list as far as five by adding storge and thelema although I’m less convinced by them. I would add three significant others, though: epithymia, oikeios and erastés.
I talked of Paul Tillich and his Theology of the Erotic, of Freud, Rollo May and Plato to explain agapé and eros, and of Aleister Crowley to define theléma. I quoted from Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony to explain the mysteries of erastés. I was reminded that this last one “stressed the quality of areté and played down something self-evident: pleasure. Areté means an “excellence” that is also “virtue.” The word always had a moral meaning attached...”
In the end, though, I realised that there is a problem with any discussion of love and the ancient world... they thought in a different way to us. We’ve had our minds twisted up with ideas of romance (as its name suggests, a Roman invention) and witless celebrity. These words just don’t map onto ours at all. In a society which has lost the ideal of the areté, that has no passion for ‘excellence’ and ‘virtue’ it is impossible for us to understand what the Greeks meant. We have replaced virtue with commerce and consumerism, with Jordan and Paris Hilton, with people who are famous only for being famous, with artists and writers who say nothing about anything except themselves, with those who are empty of values. In a culture where no-one can be shamed any more, perhaps we cannot really attain the more advanced forms of love in the way they could. If we want them, we will have to create virtues of our own and uphold them, admire them, desire them, and share them.
I think the ancient Greeks saw their many concepts of love as components that all overlapped and fitted together, each turning the next, none able to stand without the others. I think it’s relevant that we now know they had developed a mechanical computer long before the birth of Christ, a miraculous assembly of cog-wheels and dials that calculated eclipses of the sun and moon, the movements of the planets, the dates of the Olympiads and much more besides. The Antikythera Mechanism was a means of representing the heavens to the people of the Earth - as above, so below. I think it is possible the Greeks thought of love and their culture in the same way, each wheel turning another, none separate from its neighbour, no movement possible without affecting all. In our new age of the computer, can we not engineer something similar again?