Love, Myth and the Human Condition: Reflections From Classical Literature

Across centuries, classical narratives have traced the complexity of love.

These stories endure long after they’re first told — embedded into memory, resurfacing in unexpected moments, shaping how people conceptualize devotion, longing and attachment. Around Valentine’s Day, as hearts and roses saturate the cultural imagination, the idea of a preferred love story becomes less about romance and more about recognition of a story resonating with others. 

For professors in Loyola’s Classical Civilizations and Theology departments, love stories aren’t just confined to greeting cards or rom-coms. Instead, these love stories live in ancient poems, myths and spiritual allegories — stories where love is persistent, patient or transformative. 

These narratives center on devotion, longing and loss, revealing love in its many forms.

For associate professor of classics Leana Boychenko, love stories begin with different variations. Boychenko said her fascination with myths started early as she studied various iterations of the same stories, realizing no single telling was definitive. 

“Part of what makes myth so meaningful is that there are many versions,” Boychenko said. “Storytelling is central to human experience. We are natural storytellers, and it is remarkable that such narratives have endured across time.”

Boychenko said the multiplicity of ancient stories is part of why classical love stories endure in the contemporary world. For her, these stories adapt, shift and resurface in new forms. In her classes, Boychenko said she returns to Homer’s “Iliad” not as a tale of war, but as a study in attachment and choice.

Achilles’ famous dilemma — glory or longevity — is framed by love for honor, love for legacy and love for the deferred.

This semester, the professor said she’s pairing Homer with Hispanic-American literature, tracing how ancient emotional structures reappear in modern storytelling. In María Cristina Mena’s short stories, the character Aquiles mirrors Achilles’ dilemma, but it’s Carmelita, his love interest, who offers a quieter counterweight form of devotion resisting heroic spectacle. 

“Stories of profound loss are often conveyed through beautiful language,” Boychenko said.

For Boychenko, beauty is the vehicle for grief and longing. She said one of her favorite love stories appears in an unlikely place — “Idyll XI” by Theocritus, where the cyclops Polyphemus sings of his unrequited love for the sea nymph Galatea. Unlike the violent monster of Homer’s “Odyssey,” Boychenko said this cyclops is tender and exposed, turning desire into song.

Lecturer Edith Pennoyer Livermore came to the classics through a different path. Originally trained in English literature, Livermore said her work grew through teaching and community engagement, where storytelling became a way to cultivate empathy. For Livermore, love stories aren’t distractions from reality, but serve as frameworks for understanding it.

“Mythology is not just history,” Livermore said. “It’s a way to express uncertainty, devotion, loyalty and perseverance.”

Livermore said one of her favorite love stories is the myth of Hades and Persephone — a story often flattened into a tale of abduction. The classics professor said she prefers to linger in the stories’ quiet tensions of death intertwined with rebirth, and separation paired with return.

“Hades, the invisible one, marries Persephone, goddess of springtime,” Livermore said. “It’s a gentle, beautiful divine love, not fearsome like the Disney version. It is the god of death joined with the goddess of new life — an enduring story of transformation and hope.”

Livermore said she also returns to “The Odyssey” as a love story rooted in endurance. Penelope waits 20 years, raising her children alone while resisting relentless pressure to remarry. Odysseus survives war, shipwreck and temptation. For Livermore, he’s driven not by conquest, but by the pull to arrive home. 

“It’s a story of love which endures,” Livermore said. “It’s in the heart.”

The idea of love as devotion dissolving the self also appears in Islamic literature, according to assistant professor of Islamic Studies Emin Gulecyuz.

Gulecyuz said the story of Layla and Majnun is his favorite as it followed him across his academic life. The Islamic Studies scholar said this story serves as a meditation on devotion pushed to its limits, only to reach God in the end.

“The most well-known love story in Islamic literature is the story of Layla and Majnun,” Gulecyuz said. “Majnun is actually an attribute. His name was Qays, but he was in this maddening love for Layla that he literally lost his mind and was then named Majnun — the crazy lover.”

Rather than moving toward fulfillment, the story of Layla and Majnun resists any reasonable resolution, according to Gulecyuz. 

Love, in the story, intensifies as distance grows, shifting from desire for the beloved toward something more abstract — a state in which longing becomes the defining condition for the relationship.

“Qays was pursuing his beloved day and night, and eventually he realized that it is an unachievable goal,” Gulecyuz said. “He experienced annihilation of his self in this maddening love.”

Gulecyuz said in Islamic scholarship, annihilation isn’t tragic –- it’s an instructional manual. The love story of despair and longing becomes an allegory for divine love — a shift from worldly attachment toward transcendence. 

“Muslim scholars usually associate this story with the idea of finding divine love in this worldly life,” Gulecyuz said. “At the end of this worldly love, it takes you to understanding the impermanent nature of this world and appreciating the value of loving God and annihilating yourself in the love of God.”

Across disciplines, what emerges within these stories is recognition of human nature. Love, in its ancient forms, is rarely gentle. It unsettles, disorients and exposes the limits of the self — sometimes leaving behind devotion, and other times erasure. 

Livermore said mythographer Joseph Campbell explains humans don’t seek abstract meaning so much as they seek experience as the lived encounter with beauty, truth, love and hardship. 

“For Campbell, myths endure because they mirror the inner life, revealing universal patterns of the psyche across cultures and giving form to what we undergo in our daily lives and in our brush with the mystery of the divine,” Livermore said.

For Boychenko, the tension between beauty and darkness is precisely why these stories persist.

As she has returned to these myths over time, Boychenko said her understanding of them has deepened. Stories she once read simply for their beauty gradually revealed their darker undercurrents. Yet, she said the difficult parts don’t weaken the stories’ appeal — they make them more human.

“It’s an interesting thing to think about why we enjoy dark stories and how that speaks to us as humans,” Boychenko said. “Myth becomes a way of making meaning, a way of explaining our experiences, even the painful ones.”

Livermore said what draws her to these stories isn’t their ending, but their attentiveness to detail. For her, she said she sees love in the ancients’ care for beauty — the way they listened to the earth, to one another and to silence.

According to the professor, the heart of these stories often lies in a form of love that defies simple definition. Rather than limiting them to romance, she said she turns to the ancient concept of Eros — not the modern idea of passion, but a larger, generative force.

“In myth, love isn’t something you can really limit or name,” Livermore said. “Eros is the desire that never gives up — the life‑force that moves everything. It’s the desire for adventure, for innocence, for survival. In Penelope’s case, it’s the love of her home, her child, the small rhythms of her daily life.”

For Livermore, this emotion reveals why ancient stories endure, with experience taking precedence over resolution.

“The ancients took time to cultivate beauty for its own sake,” Livermore said. “Love is intertwined with experience — with the desire for life itself.”