Socrates in Love

by Armand D'Angour

  Douris goes on to record that Pericles instructed that the crucified Samians should be clubbed to death after ten days, and their bodies thrown out without burial rites. Such an action will have been considered an offence against the gods. It would certainly have warranted, in the eyes of superstitious Greeks, some form of divine retribution against Athens; and plague was considered a typical form of divine punishment for such a transgression. However, no such consequence transpired immediately; but when the plague that was to claim Pericles as a victim (as well as his two older sons, Xanthippus and Paralus) struck Athens in 430 BC, many were bound to think that it was the gods’ delayed punishment for the Athenians’ unconscionable conduct on Samos ten years earlier.

  Secondly, Pericles’ remorseless and disproportionate assault on Samos was widely said to have been the result of his wish to gratify his partner Aspasia, whose family came from Miletus, Samos’s arch-rival. The Greeks were familiar enough with the notion, expressed by the French phrase ‘cherchez la femme’, that one might identify a woman’s hand behind events and actions: the greatest of their poets, Homer, had identified Helen of Troy as the cause of the Trojan War. The comic playwrights of the day, Aristophanes’ older rivals Cratinus and Eupolis, attacked Aspasia in grossly sexist terms for her malign influence on Athenian politics, describing her in such uncomplimentary terms as ‘a harlot’ and ‘mother of a bastard’ (the child of a non-Athenian woman could be considered illegitimate), and lampooning her native Miletus as the city that had cornered the market for the export of dildoes.4 Pericles’ response to these insults was to propose a temporary censorship law, the first of its kind to be passed in Athens, banning attacks on living persons.5

  Has Plato, then, left a clue to Diotima’s true identity by raising the matter of the delayed plague? Is ‘Diotima’ in the Symposium a disguise for a real person, Aspasia? The reference to events of 440 BC would undoubtedly call to the minds of some of Plato’s readers Pericles’ siege of Samos, Aspasia’s alleged role in promoting it, and the grisly death of the Samians on Pericles’ orders – a misdeed that might well have spurred an anxious Aspasia to seek to appease divine displeasure by arranging expiatory sacrifices to be held.6

  A further clue resides in the very meaning of the name ‘Diotima’, ‘honoured by Zeus’. Pericles was regularly given the nickname ‘Zeus’ by the comic poets (particularly Cratinus), and this will have reflected popular usage. The comparison with the chief of the gods was an acknowledgement of his political dominance as well as his lofty ‘Olympian’ oratory. Moreover, the exceptional honour with which he treated Aspasia – whom the comedians dubbed ‘Hera’, wife of Zeus – was noted: Plutarch reports that he was known for giving her a loving kiss twice a day, on leaving the house and on returning.7 Such behaviour was evidently quite unusual in the life of ancient Athenians.

  These clues to Diotima’s identity are, in retrospect, impossible to mistake. They seem designed by Plato to confirm that the figure of Aspasia, acknowledged in Menexenus as Socrates’ instructor, underlies that of the ‘wise woman’ who had long earlier imparted to the young Socrates the doctrine he was about to expound. Why would Plato, whose knowledge of Aspasia’s alleged role in the Samian affair and its aftermath cannot be doubted, have wanted to mask her identity, albeit with a disguise thin enough to be penetrated by anyone not blinkered by historical prejudice who might be inclined to expend the slightest thought on the matter?

  While the Samian campaign was presented as a military success by Pericles and generally so viewed by Athenians, the action would surely have left, in Socrates’ eyes as well as those of other Greeks, a stain on the characters of both Pericles and Aspasia. To avoid such a taint negatively influencing readers’ views of Diotima’s doctrine of love in the Symposium, Plato would not have wanted to be explicit in naming Aspasia as that doctrine’s originator, even if Socrates had ever done so himself.

  In this instance, moreover, the doctrine in question was one about the workings of love, which surely affected the young Socrates’ thought and behaviour as deeply as anything he ever experienced. The philosopher was steeped in a literary and poetic tradition that considered love to be central to man’s life and conduct – the myths told by Homer and the tragedians, and the love songs of Archilochus, Sappho, Anacreon and the other lyric poets. His philosophical views about how one should live will also have been formed by important experiences in his younger days. Among the most vital of those experiences were, I suggest, his acquaintance and personal interactions with Aspasia, who was recognised as the most eloquent woman of her time and, though generally unacknowledged as such by historians ancient and modern, should on these grounds merit recognition as the most intellectually influential woman of antiquity.

  Praising Eros

  Composed in the 380s BC, by which time Socrates had been dead for more than ten years, the Symposium claims to describe an occasion several decades earlier. We cannot assume that events happened as Plato describes them. There may have been a party, and Socrates may have been present. We cannot know for certain whether there was a discussion such as Plato describes, nor that the details were as Plato gives them.

  Plato was born around 424 BC, so he would have been a boy in 416 BC, the dramatic date at which the scene of the Symposium is set.8 In that year, the young, stylish, and flamboyantly effeminate Athenian playwright Agathon was awarded the first prize in the Lenaia, a religious festival held at the end of winter, for a tragic drama of his composition. Agathon’s play was performed in the Theatre of Dionysus in front of thousands of spectators who came from the towns and villages of Attica. Because of the time of year at which the Lenaia was held, few Greeks took to the seas, so (unlike the situation at the City Dionysia, at which Clouds had been performed in 423 BC) there would have been few if any non-Athenian visitors present at the festival.

  Two nights later a group of Agathon’s friends gathered at his house for a party to celebrate the prize at a symposion. The Greek word literally means ‘drinking together’ rather than the more cerebral kind of symposium it has come to connote. Plato recounts, however, that the group agrees that everyone has drunk enough over the past forty-eight hours. Some are still nursing hangovers, and one of them, the physician Eryximachus, is particularly conscious of the dangers of excessive indulgence in wine. So they come to a decision that, rather than drinking yet more, they will spend the evening making speeches in honour of love – or, rather, in honour of Eros, the divine personification of love, and all that he stands for.

  Why love? Why Eros? Most of the men present in the so-called ‘dialogue’ – the term is used of all Plato’s writings even though the actual level of interchange between speakers varies widely – are presented as being devoted friends or lovers. With the exceptions of Socrates himself and the comic playwright Aristophanes, they are pictured as attending the dinner party together with partners or close friends. The suggestion for the topic of their discussion comes from one of the younger men, Phaedrus, a long-time friend of Eryximachus. He claims that Love – that is, the god Eros – has never been formally praised by poets or orators but deserves to be, and he exhibits a youthful enthusiasm to present his own speech of praise.

  Following Phaedrus’s eulogy of Eros, half a dozen participants including Aristophanes take turns in the course of the evening to present their own conceptions of love, serious and otherwise. The fact that Aristophanes himself is shown as present at the symposium has been taken to indicate that, despite his mocking depiction of the character of ‘Socrates’ in Clouds, in real life the two men were (at least later) on good terms. The comic poet’s contribution to the praise of Eros in the dialogue takes the form of a myth, a diverting tour de force that constitutes the most memorable of all the speeches presented in the Symposium.

  Originally, Aristophanes says, human beings were composites of male and female. They were round in shape, roly-poly creatures with four arms and four legs, and two faces looking in opposite directions, four ears, two sets of genit
als, and so on. Their overbearing strength made them excessively ambitious, so they actually tried to ascend to heaven to attack the gods. Zeus and the other gods debated about what to do. They didn’t want to annihilate the humans because that would mean the end of all the honours and sacrifices they might get. So Zeus came up with a plan to weaken these creatures by dividing each one into two: he cut them down the middle, as if slicing a hard-boiled egg in half with a wire. When the original creature was cut in two, each half longed for the other half, and they tried desperately to graft themselves back onto each other, without success. And so it continues, says Aristophanes. Each of us is just a half of a human being, and we are on an eternal quest to find our matching half. Love is the force that makes us try to restore our original natures and become whole again.

  Deliberately comic and absurd as this account is, in fleshing out the idea that love means ‘finding one’s other half’ Aristophanes’ mythical tale seems to point to a familiar and seductive truth. But if one draws out the implications of the story, a less satisfactory picture of love emerges. First, people will always be doomed to fail in their quest to find love, since their original ‘other halves’ have died and are long gone; so human beings today can never find the original wholeness they crave, but must make do with someone who cannot be their original complement. Perhaps more important, however, is the implication that the ultimate ideal of love is to find a mirror image of oneself, allowing the lover to settle back into the kind of omnipotent self-absorption that led to Zeus’s disapproval in the first place. The fulfilled lover would only be recapitulating the imagined wholeness of infancy, rather than growing in new psychological and spiritual directions under the influence of an independent, benignly critical, lover.

  This outcome is contrary to what Socrates in his presentation claims is key to love’s importance and power. When he takes the floor, he says that he will not just be telling a story or plausible tale. He will tell the truth about love, he says, as he himself once heard it from Diotima. In Plato’s report of the conversation, the doctrine leads its hearers into the heart of a mystery.

  Love, according to Diotima, may be understood using the image of a ladder. The bottom rungs involve bodily desire for attractive individuals. Stimulated by their beauty, lovers seek to perpetuate their love by begetting children through intercourse with their love objects. As one scales the ladder, however, the nature of the object of love changes. What is truly loved turns out to be not just another body or person, but the qualities of goodness and beauty attached to that person – the qualities that make an individual worthy of love. Such qualities, Diotima says, generate a desire in the lover to perpetuate a relationship with the beloved that will never die. The highest rungs of the ladder, then, present to the lover the eternal values of goodness or beauty. In this state, enlightened individuals transcend the material world, seeking to produce not physical offspring through intercourse, but abiding ideas stimulated by the beauty they encounter.

  Well enough might this revelation be described as a mystery. Of the innumerable attempts to propose answers to the question of what love is, Plato’s Symposium remains one of the most mysterious. It has given rise to the popular notion of ‘Platonic’ love – a deep affection between two people that does not have a sexual component, even if one might assume otherwise – and has been the subject of discussion over the millennia since Plato wrote the dialogue.

  Plato makes clear that he himself was not present at the party he depicts; given its dramatic date of 416 BC, he would have been a boy of eight at the time. Instead, he tells the story through the mouth of a certain Aristodemus, who wasn’t there either, but had heard it from someone who was – who in turn had told the story to Plato’s brother Glaucon. This artful distancing of the narrative casts doubt over whether the story has any solid basis in fact, and whether it can be anything other than an invented account of the proceedings. Maybe the Symposium should be understood, after all, not as Socrates’ or anyone else’s account of the notion of love, but as Plato’s own exploration of the phenomenon. What has the real Socrates got to do with love?

  Socrates the lover

  While for many the topic of love may seem less representative of Socrates’ ideas and experiences than, say, those of justice, the good life, and the search for truth, for others love in its various manifestations is fundamental to his life and work. While its fullest and most celebrated elaboration is to be found in the Symposium, love also informs Socrates’ innumerable interactions with friends, admirers, and disciples in the course of a life devoted, as Plato shows it, to philosophy – a word whose form in Greek, philosophia, means ‘love of wisdom’.

  Can we move from acknowledging that Socrates was a deeply love-engaged philosopher to the notion of Socrates in love? The romantic implications of that phrase inevitably raise uncertain biographical implications. It asks us to imagine the philosopher in thrall to an object of desire or a beloved person; but the prevailing image of Socrates, derived from the writings of Plato and Xenophon, is of someone whose love life was expressly subordinated to more elevated ethical, philosophical, and educational goals. These authors are keen to show that it was his activities in relation to those high-minded pursuits, rather than any episodes of a more personal or erotic nature, that led to the historical events for which he is best known, his trial and death.

  However, Plato also records Socrates as claiming that he was ‘always in love’, while Xenophon has Socrates say ‘I cannot name a time when I was not in love with someone or other.’ Along with numerous other testimonies, such statements confirm that Socrates was no stranger to amorous feelings and attachments. Both authors record that Socrates loved one person above all: the ever-youthful, beautiful Alcibiades. Socrates was twenty years his senior, but had known him from a young age: in Plato’s Protagoras, which is set around 435 BC when Alcibiades would have been about fifteen and Socrates thirty-four, they are depicted as having already known each other for some time. In the Symposium Alcibiades (now in his mid-thirties) is made to deny, ruefully but emphatically, that Socrates was ever his lover in anything but a spiritual sense – hence our use of the term ‘Platonic’ love. The very insistence makes clear, however, that the participants at the symposium – as well as readers of the Symposium – would have found Socrates’ alleged abstinence a matter for surprise.9

  Details of other attachments, or of persons with whom Socrates might have been ‘in love’, are hard to find. To be sure, we read that the handsome young Charmides, in Plato’s dialogue of that name, was the momentary object of Socrates’ infatuation. Plato there presents Socrates as overcome by raw physical desire at the sight of Charmides’ bare flesh. That moment quickly gives way to a deeper intellectual and philosophical interaction: a discussion of self-control is appropriately the subject matter of that dialogue.

  Might Xanthippe, then, be identified as an object of his romantic infatuation? Her name has been thought to indicate family connections with Athens’ Alcmaeonid leader, Pericles, whose father’s name was Xanthippus (as was that of his eldest son). If so, she would have been of high birth and may have brought a dowry to Socrates to help support his lifestyle as an older man. On Plato’s testimony, she was the mother of Socrates’ three children – Sophroniscus, Menexenus, and Lamprocles – and she remained with him until his death. The biographers characterise her as a spirited and demanding woman, and later authors even disparage her, in misogynistic terms, as a ‘shrew’. However, Socrates can only have met Xanthippe when he was in his fifties, and perhaps no earlier than 416 BC. At that date she will have been no older than twenty, since she was carrying the infant Lamprocles in her arms at the time of Socrates’ death seventeen years later.10 Whatever Socrates’ amorous feelings towards Xanthippe may have been, this was not the youthful love affair that might have changed the direction of this life and thought.

  Furthermore, Plato’s account seems to have sanitised the vexed reality of Socrates’ marital status. Authoritative sources –
Aristotle and Aristoxenus – record that the philosopher married twice; others even charged him with bigamy, claiming that a wife called Myrto lived together with him and Xanthippe. Myrto was the daughter of Lysimachus, a close friend of Socrates’ father from his deme of Alopeke; and the historian Plutarch reports the innocent explanation that Socrates and Xanthippe simply gave her lodging after she had been widowed and was living in straitened circumstances.11 Socrates would have been of a similar age to Myrto, and is likely to have known her from childhood from their shared connections in Alopeke.

  Both Aristotle and his pupil Aristoxenus state that Socrates married Myrto and that they had two sons, Sophroniscus and Menexenus. These authors would not have contradicted Plato’s account without good reason. Aristoxenus goes on to say that Xanthippe, whom he describes as ‘a citizen woman but of a commoner class’, became involved with Socrates much later, and was the mother of their youngest son Lamprocles.12 The aristocratic Myrto, then, may indeed have been Socrates’ only legitimate wife and the mother of his two older sons.13 However, in the Apology Plato has Socrates state that he has ‘three sons, one already a youth, and two who are still children’.14 If Plato was seeking to massage the facts so as to show his teacher in a sympathetic light, it would make sense to suggest that Socrates had three young dependants – and to elide any mention of a previous marriage to the high-born Myrto.