My latest novel, Aphrodite’s Tears, begins with the chance meeting of two strangers, Oriel and Damian, on a beach one evening. I write:

The dark waves murmured on the sand, their gently rolling edges lit a luminous blue under the moonlight. Everything was cloaked in unreality and it was as if the two of them were caught in a dream. Oriel sensed that the mysterious stranger before her was also aware of the extraordinary atmosphere that engulfed them.

In this strange, dreamlike world, barriers melt, and the two share a night of passion. But come the morning, the dream is gone – and with it Damian, leaving Oriel alone.

Fast-forward six years, and Oriel is a respected archaeologist who answers a job advertisement for a subsea exploration around a small, private Ionian island. It’s a dream job – until Oriel arrives on the island and discovers the man who has employed her is none other than the man from her past, Damian.

Oriel determines to see the job through; after all, she is a professional. But it is somewhat hard to focus on her work when Damian quickly makes clear he has feelings for her. Oriel fails to see how he can love her; after all, they barely know each other. A local fisherman whom she befriends named Mattias has a theory:

Mattias shook his head and grinned as he lit his pipe. ‘Aman! You and Damian are as stubborn as each other. I’ve already told you, I’m sure Damian loves you. I think that it was love at first sight for you both all those years ago and you just need to recognize it.’

Oriel, however, is not convinced. She tells Mattias: ‘I don’t believe in love at first sight and, anyhow, that can’t be real love because it means you’re falling in love with someone’s appearance, not their character. And that is exactly what happened with me on Aegina. He looked like a Greek god appearing from the depths of the sea in the moonlight, at a time when I was hurting. What do you expect?’

Mattias’s response: ‘No one believes in love at first sight … until that special person comes along and steals your heart.’

Mattias is a wise man – and he is Greek through and through. For it was his ancestors, the Ancient Greeks, who first claimed there was a phenomenon in which a person would develop a kind of instant love for another. This, they believed, was a theia mania (madness from the gods), and it was caused by Eros shooting an arrow through the eye, which would then travel down to and lodge within the heart.

Here is how the Ancient Greek Achilles Tatius described love at first sight in his romance The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon:

‘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…’

Plato believed that men and women were two halves of one whole and that we instinctively seek out our soulmate. He wrote:

‘when [a lover] … is fortunate enough to meet his other half, they are both so intoxicated with affection, with friendship, and with love, that they cannot bear to let each other out of sight for a single instant.’

Ever since Ancient Greek times, love at first sight has been a popular trope in the arts. Romeo and Juliet is an enduring example; here is Romeo, entirely swept away upon his first sight of Juliet:

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!

It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night

Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear;

Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!

So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows,

As yonder lady o’er her fellows shows.

The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand,

And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand.

Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!

For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night.

It seems Eros is busy up above, for Juliet is similarly afflicted with the theia mania. Short minutes later, after Romeo has kissed her and wooed her, she learns that he is a Montague, enemy of her family, and cries:

My only love sprung from my only hate!

Too early seen unknown, and known too late!

Prodigious birth of love it is to me,

That I must love a loathed enemy.

According to my heroine Oriel, who argues that love at first sight is not real, Juliet must merely be in love with Romeo’s appearance here, not his character. Yet… that surely isn’t so, for the very next day Juliet will betray her family and marry her Romeo – and ultimately, die to be with him.

And while intelligent, practical, careful Oriel can tell her head that any feelings between herself and Damian are just attraction, not love, she knows deep down that something is holding her on the island – ‘something in her heart, clamouring for recognition’. And it will not be quietened.