Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  Diotima explains that such a “relationship involves a far stronger bond and far more constant affection than is experienced by people who are united by ordinary children, because the offspring of this relationship are particularly attractive and are closer to immortality than ordinary children [who provide only quasi-immortality by surviving their parents]. We’d all prefer to have children of this sort rather than the human kind, and we cast envious glances at good poets like Homer and Hesiod because the kind of children they leave behind are those that earn their parents renown and ‘fame immortal,’ since the children themselves are immortal.”

  Once you’ve got all this straight, you’re ready for the last rungs of the ascent. By all means, counsels Diotima, a young man should start out by “focusing on physical beauty and initially … love just one person’s body.” Then, he must come “to regard the beauty of all bodies as absolutely identical. Once he’s realized this and so become capable of loving every single beautiful body in the world, his obsession with just one body grows less intense and strikes him as ridiculous and petty.” Next, he must come “to value mental beauty so much more than physical beauty” that he can love “an attractive mind,” even if it resides in an aging or unattractive body. Then, “he must press on toward the things people know, until he can see the beauty there too.” Soon, “the slavish love of isolated cases of youthful beauty or human beauty of any kind is a thing of the past,” as our seeker embarks on “the vast sea of beauty,” enabled to do so by “his boundless love of knowledge,” which “becomes the medium in which he gives birth to plenty of beautiful, expansive reasoning and thinking,” until he catches sight of Beauty “in itself and by itself, constant and eternal” and comes to “see that every other beautiful object somehow partakes of it, but in such a way that their coming to be and ceasing to be don’t increase or diminish it at all, and it remains entirely unaffected.” At last, the seeker has reached the unchanging One of Parmenides, for this Beauty is also Truth and Goodness, the eternal ultimate.

  In her summation, Diotima recommends that “the right kind of love for a boy can help you ascend from the things of this world until you begin to catch sight of that Beauty.” But one must ever bear in mind that “the things of this world” are to be used only “as rungs in a ladder,” assisting your ascent “to that final intellectual endeavor … the sight of Beauty itself, in its perfect, immaculate purity—not beauty tainted by human flesh and coloring and all that mortal rubbish, but absolute Beauty, divine and constant.” One who reaches the absolute can then “give birth to true goodness instead of phantom goodness, because it is truth rather than illusion whose company he is in. And don’t you realize that the gods smile on a person who bears and nurtures true goodness and that, to the extent that any human being does, it is he who has the potential for immortality?” But because each of us must begin on the lowest rung in the ladder of ascent, “in the business of acquiring immortality, it would be hard for human nature to find a better partner than Love.”

  Plato’s innate sense of drama reminds him that his audience can take only so much of this stuff, so he brings us down to earth with the introduction of the Symposium’s final character, the dashing and very drunk Alcibiades, who now clamors in, garlanded in a chaplet of ivy and violets, and interrupts the proceedings. Perhaps even the most sober banqueter has had his fill of seriousness, for they all welcome Alcibiades—the tall, muscular, aristocratic darling of Athens, universally acknowledged as its most beautiful young man—with much cheer. Finding himself seated next to Socrates, Alcibiades professes fear, hinting teasingly that he and Socrates have a kinky relationship. “If he starts to get violent, please protect me,” Alcibiades begs the slight Agathon, probably the symposiast least able to protect anyone. “He gets insanely attached to his lovers and it terrifies me.”

  With very little coaxing, Alcibiades launches into a long tale of his relationship with Socrates, whom he finds irresistibly attractive. Plato is using Alcibiades as an example of one stuck at a middle rung in the ladder of ascent, one who has come “to value mental beauty” but has yet to progress further. Vain, fun-loving Alcibiades keeps falling backward, however, to lower rungs: “[Socrates is] the only person in the world in whose company I’ve felt something which people wouldn’t think I was capable of feeling—shame: I feel shame before him and him alone. What happens is that although I’m perfectly well aware of the inescapable force of his recommendations as to what I should do, yet as soon as I’m away from him, I get seduced by the adulation of the masses!”

  Alcibiades relates that he has become the suitor of Socrates, wooing him, attempting to charm him into a sexual encounter, to no avail. That the toast of Athens, who can always expect to find himself in the position of erēmenos (boy-beloved), should feel compelled to assume the role of erastēs (elder lover, pursuer) is intolerably shameful. Alcibiades, therefore, convinces himself that Socrates is in love with him (“the only lover I’ve got who’s good enough for me”) and is just “too shy to bring it up.” At last, as Alcibiades tells it, he tricks Socrates into staying the night at his house and slips naked into bed with him: “I put my arms around this remarkable, wonderful man—he is, you know—and lay there all night long.” But Socrates does nothing. “I call on all the gods and goddesses in heaven to witness the truth of this—that I got up the next morning, after having spent the night with Socrates, and for all the naughtiness we’d got up to, I might as well have been sleeping with my father!”

  We are not to take from this story that Socrates does not find Alcibiades just as beautiful as does every other Athenian. True, Socrates has a wife—the shrewish Xanthippe, whom he married late in life—and three small sons, but no Greek constructed a wall of separation between heterosexual and homosexual activity. We are to understand that Socrates has already climbed to the top of Diotima’s ladder and glimpsed the One—the Beautiful, the Good, the True—and is no longer obsessed by this earth’s limited instances of beauty, whether Alcibiades or any of the other handsome students who constantly cluster about him. He is the exemplar of “Platonic love,” as it will be called down the ages.

  Alcibiades is given the final speech because he brings us down to earth, the realm that we, the audience, inhabit. The symposiasts found the candor of Alcibiades amusing “because he was evidently still in love with Socrates,” just as you, dear Reader, are still in love with———. At the Symposium’s end, Plato reminds each of us of where we stand now, as well as what heights the ladder beckons us to.

  After that, Plato informs us, “everything went utterly out of control; all there was left to do was to drink a great deal, and even that was completely unsystematic”—that is, without the direction of the customary president. Morning broke to find some sleeping, others gone home, Socrates still asking questions of the two who stayed awake. After those two fell asleep, Socrates, still sober, “got up and left.”

  THOUGH SOCRATES remains ever the questing philosopher, knowledgeable only about his own ignorance, it would be hard to miss Plato’s seething contempt for ordinary human beings and their pedestrian lives. What would Sappho have said to Plato’s (supposedly Diotima’s) teaching that, as one climbs the ladder of wisdom, “obsession with just one body grows less intense and strikes [one] as ridiculous and petty”? Love of a single human being—“black earth’s most beautiful thing”—ridiculous and petty? How would Andromache have responded to Plato’s high-handed dismissal of childrearing as inferior to writing poetry? Would Plato have even been willing to entertain objections by women—real women, whose real female bodies have known real pleasure and real pain, unlike the purring phantasm Diotima? It would be hard to imagine Plato finding any area of agreement with his younger contemporary the Chinese philosopher Mencius, who proclaimed that “all the babies who are smiled at and hugged will know how to love. Spread these virtues through the world; nothing else need be done.” Nothing else? Plato would have deemed such elementary twaddle unworthy of the noble name “philosophy.
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  The silent sense of superiority that Plato’s mentor, Socrates, exuded in his relentless questioning got him finally into very hot water. He was brought before an Athenian popular court to answer charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of the city. The charge of impiety—really of atheism—Socrates vigorously denied, claiming (probably truthfully) that he was devoted to the gods; nor had he corrupted anyone, only asked them questions. But his radical challenges to the unexamined assumptions of his fellow citizens had led many young people, listening in, to question everything their elders had taught them to revere, causing upsets of all kinds in family life throughout the city. “Corrupting the young” was a charge that must have had for many of his opponents the ring of truth. Furthermore, Socrates confided to the court that he had been entrusted with a daimonion (a godlike something), a divine sign, an inner voice that prompted him since childhood to turn away from the civic obligations expected of every Athenian citizen and toward the exclusive pursuit of truth. A what? A daimonion? This befuddling claim must have struck many jurors—who were probably no more qualified to sit in judgment than were the jurors who sat on the popular courts that followed the French Revolution—as evidence of the impiety of the accused. Socrates was convicted and the death penalty proposed.

  At this point, the convict was allowed by custom to propose a lesser sentence, such as temporary exile—which, in the case of Socrates, would almost certainly have been allowed. Socrates, however, chose a more high-minded route. He proposed that, as the city’s benefactor, he should not be punished in any way but rewarded by his fellow citizens and at the least dined at state expense for life. Exile, imprisonment, a fine—these would all be unjust punishments, whereas death … well, is death a punishment? Who can say? One can almost see the dull, contorted faces of the jurors trying to take this in. Dimly, the suspicion rises in their minds that they are being toyed with, that the convict may not even grant the legitimacy of their august proceedings. Of course, they sentence him to death.

  In the famous last scene of Plato’s Phaedo, before he drinks the hemlock Socrates comforts his friends, assuring them that death—which is either a dreamless sleep or a passage to the place of true Justice—is nothing to fear. He hopes to meet at last Homer and Hesiod and the heroes of the Iliad. No evil can befall a man who is good. As his last act, he forgives his accusers and the jurors who convicted and sentenced him. In peace and calm, Socrates takes the poison and dies. This exemplary “martyrdom” on behalf of the Truth will be seen by the intellectuals of the early Christian centuries as further proof of the saintliness of Socrates, whose life and death contain so many surprising parallels to the life and death of Christ as related in the four gospels of the New Testament.

  The death of Socrates was certainly a watershed in Plato’s life, turning him into a vocal opponent of democracy, convinced forever after that this celebrated Athenian political invention was a dangerous sham, which could only be destructive of goodness and wisdom. The relationship between a man’s life and his thought is always a conundrum. Nietzsche’s idea, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, that every philosophy can be read as a disguised personal confession, an involuntary memoir, has much validity, but it can’t settle the question of whether Socrates’s execution was solely responsible for turning Plato against democracy or whether this event was simply confirmation of the trajectory Plato was already on. Did this death provide Plato with a road-to-Damascus revelation, turning his whole life upside down, or did it merely strengthen long-established prejudices? The latter is more likely. Years before Socrates was put on trial, he was seen to be intimate with a group of young aristocrats, Alcibiades among them, who were openly contemptuous of democracy (as well as of Athenian religious beliefs) and who may have come by their contempt as a result of listening to Socrates’s relentless questioning.

  In Plato’s middle and later writings, especially in the Republic and the Laws, he paints a detailed picture of the ideal Greek polis, a state without a whiff of democracy, solidly built on enlightened Socratic-Platonic principles. Most people are like the inhabitants of the Cave, the Platonic “myth” excerpted at the head of this chapter, able to see only flickering shadows, many levels removed from anything real. They need to be governed by guardians, philosopher-kings who have been strictly educated to know always what is right and just for themselves and for others. Knowing what is right, they will always choose what is right, provided all the usual temptations—such as the foolishness of the poets and the wildness of the musicians—have been strictly eliminated from their education. Because of their purified education, the philosopher-kings will be able to rise to the World of the Forms, to commune with absolute Truth, Goodness, Justice, though the great mass of humanity will remain ever trapped in the obscurities of the Cave, hopeless “lovers of sights and sounds,” mistaking the paltry pleasures of evanescent physical phenomena for truth. Because of such inherent human weakness, Plato reluctantly banished all poetry, art, and music from his ideal state; these things only lead people into trouble. (What would the real-life Socrates, the carver of stone whose fondest hope was to meet Homer and Hesiod the other side of the grave, have thought of these exclusions?)

  Besides the guardians, the keepers of wisdom, Plato’s society has two lesser classes: the soldiers, whose virtue is courage, and the producers, of whom little is expected except that they do their jobs and satisfy their low appetites with as much restraint as possible. Though such an “ideal” has little appeal to those who lived through the bleak twentieth-century utopias of fascism and communism, there seems always to be someone somewhere who dreams of implementing a new version of Plato’s polis, a world of puritanical perfection, controlled by a narrow elite, who know what is best for everyone. Plato made the fatal error of equating knowledge with virtue and assuming that if one knows what is right he will do what is right. After so much additional history, after so many failed utopias, we should know better, we who should try to envision only pretty good societies—relatively balanced, more or less functioning societies in which happiness is made as general as possible without anyone (or any class) ever getting everything he wants. Moderate Solon was far more down-to-earth than the haunted author of the Republic.

  Am I being unfair to Plato? Maybe. If, as Nietzsche claimed, one can read a person’s life in his philosophy, one can also read almost any book that way, including this one. And I confess that certain formative experiences have left me with little patience for those who “know what is best” for everyone else. Others are more receptive to Plato—not a few of them as different from one another as the novelists Carson McCullers and Iris Murdoch and the philosopher Luce Irigaray. These contemporary and near-contemporary Platonists have been receptive not so much to Plato’s dictatorship by the enlightened as to his eloquent descriptions of the psyche (soul), the immortal principle within each of us, that openness to immortality that yearns for absolute Goodness, the Goodness that is our ultimate goal but that we find finally wanting in every earthly being we turn to. “Too late have I loved thee, O Beauty ever ancient and ever new!” was the famous prayer of the great Christian Platonist Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century A.D. “Too late have I loved thee! And, behold, thou wast within me, and I out of myself, and there I searched for thee.” There are resonances in Plato so profound and humane that even the most convinced anti-Platonist cannot ignore him entirely.

  PLATO SPENT HIS LIFE educating his followers—procreating, as Diotima would put it, in the “attractive medium” of their minds. He taught in a shrine of olive groves, sacred to the Greek hero Academos and called, therefore, Academia (whence our words academy and academic), and shared the grounds with a public gymnasium (place of nude exercise), a physical training facility where Athenian citizens, especially adolescents, kept themselves in shape for the rigors of hoplite service. The naked gymnasts were stalked by older men, hoping to attract the boy of their dreams to “procreative” activities in a less cerebral medium. But this was also an exc
ellent site for luring young men to Plato’s educational activities. He opened his Academy in the 380s; and it would continue to thrive for nine centuries—into the early sixth century A.D., when it would be shut down for good by the Byzantine emperor Justinian, who thought that stamping out the last vestiges of paganism was the best way to curry the Christian god’s favor and so win back the lost Western provinces of the Roman empire. In the twentieth century, archaeologists have found, buried on the Academy grounds, the slates of ancient schoolboys, some with lessons scratched on them.

  One of these schoolboys was Aristotle, Plato’s greatest student, who, like all great students, took exception to his master’s teachings. He taught first at the Academy, later in direct competition to the Platonists at his own Athenian establishment, a gymnasium built in a grove sacred to Apollo Lykeios and called the Lyceum. In the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican, Raphael painted his famous Renaissance fresco The School of Athens. At its center stand two men, the broad-browed Plato, hoary with age, pointing upward, the young, dark-haired Aristotle pointing down—a brilliant iconic summation of the radical difference between the two philosophers.