“Love is blind” is a popular and well-known idiom that reaches back to at least the early 1400s, but likely earlier. The idiom is easy to understand and is capable of conveying a great deal when used in plays, poems, stories, and in everyday conversation.
Propertius was from the Augustan age so it was natural that his poetic allusions were borrowed from the Greeks. And the Greeks commonly portrayed Eros as a blind-folded archer shooting his arrows randomly at unsuspecting mortals. But almost anyone can attest to knowing of cases where love truly was blind to what everyone else could see.
“Love is blind” is a popular and well-known idiom that reaches back to at least the early 1400s, but likely earlier. The idiom is easy to understand and is capable of conveying a great deal when used in plays, poems, stories, and in everyday conversation.
Propertius was from the Augustan age so it was natural that his poetic allusions were borrowed from the Greeks. And the Greeks commonly portrayed Eros as a blind-folded archer shooting his arrows randomly at unsuspecting mortals. But almost anyone can attest to knowing of cases where love truly was blind to what everyone else could see.