Plato at the Googleplex
Page 31
Being now a Spartan, he ostentatiously adapted to Spartan ways, at least as Plutarch reports it: “People who saw him wearing his hair close cut, bathing in cold water, eating coarse meal, and dining on black broth, doubted, or rather could not believe, that he ever had a cook in his house, or had ever seen a perfumer, or had worn a mantle of Milesian purple.”15 (Plutarch’s account of Alcibiades is fun, but perhaps can’t be counted on for every detail. As an indication, he here gets the hair wrong. The Spartans wore it long.)16 He delivered a speech in non-democratic Sparta in which he trivialized Athenian democracy as “acknowledged lunacy.” The Spartans found his transformation convincing, especially as he had sought to renew his paternal grandfather’s role as proxenos to Sparta; the name itself is of Spartan origin; the speech he gave (albeit Thucydides’ invention) is excellent. But tucked safely within his outward changes, the willful perversity of his character survived intact. No polis was going to define and contain him, not Athens and certainly not Sparta. As might have been predicted, he went on to betray Sparta, too, and then betrayed both Athens and Sparta to Persia (perhaps).
And through all the twistings and turnings he remained Athens’ own prodigal darling. In 411 he was recalled by Athens to the Hellespont to take command of the fleet, though he avoided actually setting foot in Athens. In 407, he reentered Athens, throngs greeting him at the harbor and throwing garlands over his godlike head. He reiterated his innocence of the charges brought against him in 415, and the Athenians threw the bronze stele, which had recorded the death verdict against him, into the sea. Xenophon reports that the opposing voices in the crowd were intimidated into silence.17 But he fell under suspicion—unfairly this time, but you can’t really blame the Athenians—when one of the military expeditions he was leading failed. Plutarch remarks, “It would seem that if ever a man was ruined by his own exalted reputation, that man was Alcibiades. His continuous successes gave him such repute for unbounded daring and sagacity, that when he failed in anything, men suspected his inclination; they would not believe in his inability. Were he only inclined to do a thing, they thought, naught could escape him.”
In Aristophanes’ The Frogs, which was performed in 405 at the Athenian Lenaean Festival, where it won first prize, the god Dionysus, who has traveled to Hades in despair about the decline in tragic poetry, asks the two dead tragedians, Aeschylus and Euripides, the latter having only died the year before, what the suffering city, in the direst of straits after the decades-long war with Sparta, must do to save itself. But first another question must be settled: whether Alcibiades, now ensconced in a castle in Phrygia, should be welcomed back:
Now then, whichever of you two shall best
Advise the city, he shall come with me.
And first of Alcibiades, let each
Say what he thinks; the city travails sore.
Euripides asks the god what Athens itself thinks about Alcibiades and is given an answer that conveys the conflicted fixation that fastens Alcibiades and the Athenians together:
What?
She loves, and hates, and longs to have him back.
This line of Aristophanes’, written only a few months before both the capitulation of Athens to Sparta and Alcibiades’ violent death, shows how riveted on Alcibiades the polis remained. It was Alcibiades’ nature to try to get away with everything, and it was Athens’ nature to—more often than not—indulge him.
Time and again his brilliant intrigues had been motivated by what he alone could get out of the situation, deriving from his assessment of how his power could be augmented and his own image magnified so that it blotted out all others. He talked the polis into rejecting a peace treaty that would have been to Athens’ advantage, since he was annoyed that two rivals of his, Nicias and Laches,18 had arranged it, while he had been ignored because of his youth. When the Spartans were to appear in the ekklêsia to try to arrange a lasting peace, Alcibiades engaged in ingenious double-dealing. He presented himself as a sympathetic negotiator to the Spartans, who were at a loss about how to address the singular institution of Athenian democracy and submitted themselves to Alcibiades’ coaching. Then he worked the crowd up into a fury over what the Spartans had—at his prompting—said. An incensed Thucydides gives us the details, showing that in such a way was the fate of Athens determined by one man’s drive to make himself the focus of everyone’s attention, his name on everyone’s lips. “Meanwhile I hope that none of you will think any the worse of me,” he tells the Spartans after defecting to their side, “if, after having hitherto passed as a lover of my country, I now actively join its worst enemies in attacking it, or will suspect what I say as the fruit of an outlaw’s enthusiasm.” He ends with a rejection of participatory exceptionalism as explicit as the endorsement of it in Pericles’ Funeral Oration. It is the supremacy of the self over the city that he asserts—not just anyone’s self, but rather his: “Love of country is what I do not feel when I am wronged.”19 Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra could as easily have been named Thus Spake Alcibiades:
I teach you the superman. Man is something that is to be surpassed. What have ye done to surpass man?
Alcibiades held that what he had done to surpass man was to be Alcibiades. And there’s no denying the man was extraordinary.
It wasn’t only Athens that was undone by Alcibiades’ uncontainable assertion of self. Thucydides, who despises Alcibiades, makes him the central figure in prolonging the Peloponnesian War. Such instability provides good material for the making of an extraordinary life. And the Peloponnesian War weakened all the poleis of the Hellenes and made them vulnerable to attack by an external empire. This time, it wasn’t the Persians to the east who came to conquer Greece but rather the Macedonians to the north. In 357 B.C.E. Macedonia broke its treaty with Athens, and by 351 the famous Athenian orator Demosthenes was delivering the first of his Philippics, warning of the designs on the independent Greek city-states that the expansionist king Philip of Macedonia presented. The Macedonians, although ethnically not dissimilar, were regarded both by themselves and by the Greeks as non-Greek.20 In his third Philippic, Demosthenes described Philip as “not only no Greek, nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from any place that can be named with honors, but a pestilent knave from Macedonia, whence it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave.”
The protracted Peloponnesian War, which finally ended in 404, had depleted the city-states, most assuredly Athens, and a mere sixty-five years later, in 338 B.C.E., Greek autonomy was, at least officially, over.21 The ancient Roman and Greek historians consider the battle of Chaeronea, fought on August 2, 338, between Philip II and the amassed forces of the Greek poleis, as signaling the end to Greek liberty and Greek political history. In those sixty-five years Athens, though never again an empire, enjoyed many of its cultural successes. Plato’s philosophical life is lived out during this time. This is the period during which he founds his Academy and writes his dialogues. This is the period, too, when Aristotle comes to Athens, first to study at the Academy, eventually to found his Lyceum. It’s arguable that in the sixty-five years between Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War and its absorption into Macedonia, it enjoyed its period of fullest democracy. So one can hardly say that the Athenian experiment with the extraordinary died with its defeat by Sparta. But in terms of long-term damage, not only to Athens but to Hellas as a whole, the protracted Peloponnesian War played a pivotal role, and so then did the mischief of Alcibiades.22
But the Athenians who longed for their prodigal son’s return couldn’t know any of this. In 404, in the misery of their defeat, their democracy itself (temporarily) toppled and replaced by the brutal oligarchy of the Thirty, in cahoots with Sparta, still Athens didn’t cease in its longing for Alcibiades. He had taken himself off to Asia Minor and was living in luxurious decadence, at least according to Plutarch, in Phrygia, in cahoots now with the Persians. But the Athenians had not forgotten him nor been able to bring themselves to believe that he had forgotten them. �
��And yet in spite of their present plight,” writes Plutarch, “a vague hope still prevailed that the cause of Athens was not wholly lost so long as Alcibiades was alive. He had not, in times past, been satisfied to live his exile’s life in idleness and quiet; nor now, if his means allowed, would he tolerate the insolence of the Lacedaemonians and the madness of the Thirty.”
It was perhaps for this reason that he was killed, someone among the Thirty having convinced Sparta that the Athenians would never give up hope of regaining their hegemony so long as Alcibiades lived. (It may even have been Critias, Plato’s mother’s uncle, so powerful among the Thirty.) Secret assassins were perhaps dispatched, either from within the Thirty in Athens or from Sparta itself. Plutarch cites such a political intrigue as one possible scenario for how Alcibiades died. But Plutarch offers another scenario as well, in keeping with the operatic life of Alcibiades. In this version Alcibiades had seduced a country girl, and it was her brothers who came to avenge her stolen maidenhood. In this telling, he died a farcical death, sacrificed to no greater cause than his own inability to keep it in his chitōn. Whatever the truth of his death, Martha Nussbaum remarks: “His story is, in the end, the story of waste and loss, of the failure of practical reason to shape a life. Both the extraordinary man and the stages of his careening course were legendary at Athens; they cried out for interpretation and for healing.”23
I’ve left out many of the details of this story, including one of the most important, certainly from the point of view of Plato and philosophy. In his youth, Alcibiades had, like so many aristocratic young Athenian men, attached himself to Socrates, and their relationship had been intimate and passionate. Socrates, too, had been unable to resist the irresistible boy and had loved him in his fashion, which meant focusing his attentions on trying to stimulate not his erogenous but his philosophical zones.
But what is even stranger is that Alcibiades, from all accounts, had been unable to resist Socrates, at least for a while, when he was of that age when many young aristocratic men fell under Socrates’ spell. Baffled by his inability to have his way with Socrates—he who could have his way with one and all—Alcibiades had felt, perhaps for the only time in his life, the force of a personality more powerful than his own. Socrates alone had been able to flip the vectors of Alcibiades’ attention so that they weren’t pointing exclusively at Alcibiades himself, and the disorientation could bring the young man to tears by making him see his own mediocrity when measured by the entirely separate and self-contained standards that Socrates embodied. Plutarch writes:
Alcibiades was certainly prone to be led away into pleasure. That lawless self-indulgence of his, of which Thucydides speaks, leads one to suspect this. However, it was rather his love of distinction and love of fame to which his corrupters appealed, and thereby plunged him all too soon into ways of presumptuous scheming, persuading him that he had only to enter public life, and he would straightway cast into total eclipse the ordinary generals and public leaders, and not only that, he would even surpass Pericles in power and reputation among the Hellenes. Accordingly, just as iron, which has been softened in the fire, is hardened again by cold water, and has its particles compacted together, so Alcibiades, whenever Socrates found him filled with vanity and wantonness, was reduced to shape by the master’s discourse, and rendered humble and cautious. He learned how great were his deficiencies and how incomplete his excellence.24
For a brief period, Alcibiades had been susceptible to the kind of beauty that Socrates, that ugly little man who looked like a prancing, lubricious satyr, was able to make men see. Alcibiades tells us, at least in the dramatically and philosophically rich account which Plato has given us in the Symposium, of his humiliating attempts to seduce Socrates in the more conventional fashion, a failed seduction all the more humiliating since it required Alcibiades, though younger, to assume the role of the importunate lover.
This reversal constituted a violation of paiderastia, “a general pattern of feeling and conduct which is unique in the history of Western society: a code of male homosexual love openly practiced and socially acceptable.”25 Paiderastia not only was socially acceptable but was considered by many Greeks, most especially the more aristocratic among them, as essential to the cohesion of the polis, and therefore something that went into the making of a citizen’s aretē. And the fact that our word for perhaps our most despised form of criminality is derived from practices that went into the Greek idea of aretē ought to heighten attention to a point the classicist Robin Osborne makes, that “in the comfortable analysis of a culture so like our own, we come face to face with the way the glory that was Greece was part of a world in which many of our own core values find themselves challenged rather than reinforced.”26 Changing views on sexual morality have, in many ways, brought us closer to the sexual attitudes of the ancient Greeks, who never thought that the gods cared a fig leaf about what we did with one another sexually, especially if no harm came to any participant. (Actually, Greek gods were far less sensitive than mortals on the matter of sexual predation.) We have been brought closer to the Greek acceptance of homosexuality and bisexuality as completely natural ways for people to relate to one another. But it has perhaps carried us away from their relaxed attitude toward sexual relations between the powerful and the powerless, especially as this imbalance of power is reflected in age. Even this is not entirely clear, however, due to our continuing uncertainty as to what was meant by a pais—a boy.
The age at which a boy was initiated into sexual relationships remains, for us, undefined. Various scholars have estimated the youngest suitable age, and their answers range between twelve and eighteen. That is, from our point of view, a significantly wide gap (though it was not so many years ago that, even in the West, girls as young as twelve were married off, and often to men far older than they). There are many allusions in Greek literature to the first facial hairs sprouting. Peach fuzz was desirable, but a beard was not.27 Sexual mores varied from polis to polis.28 In Athens, seventeen may have been the operative age of consent for boys, which was the age of citizenship, but since the Greeks didn’t have a zero, that actually translates to sixteen (except that it was the year of birth, not the day, that was used in the calculation). What is clear was that there was far greater care expended on protecting boys than girls. Well-to-do Athenian families hired a special slave—a paidagōgos—to accompany an underage boy and see that nobody approached him with indecent intent, but these special precautions are an indication that, whatever the age considered appropriate for a boy, younger boys were eroticized. In Plato’s Charmides, Socrates, eager to engage in conversation with the exceptionally beautiful Charmides (Plato’s uncle), self-consciously says that “there could be no impropriety” in talking to him, since Critias, Charmides’ uncle and guardian, is present. Still a subterfuge is required, so highly eroticized is the mere sight of Charmides. Critias says that Charmides has been suffering from headaches, and Socrates should make the boy believe he knows a cure. One might think that Plato was subtly indicating the character deficiencies in Critias, future leader of the Thirty, if he didn’t also make Socrates eagerly respond, “Why not, if only he will come” (155b).
But though boys who were too young—whatever that means—were, if desired, still off limits, when they did come of age then a relationship with an older male was expected. The lover might be only a few years older, but still he would be at a different stage of political engagement. The difference in their political stages—their age-appropriate duties to the polis—was important, since it was by way of the intense relationship between the older lover and the younger that the latter came to learn the politicized aretē that was to govern his life. There is, as Kenneth Dover memorably puts it, “a consistent Greek tendency to regard homosexual erōs as a compound of an educational with a genital relationship.”29 And this was true not just in Athens but throughout the Greek poleis. “Such relationships were taken to play such an important role in fostering cohesion where it mattered—among
the male population—that Lycurgus even gave them official recognition in the constitution for Sparta.”30 Since the publication of Dover’s groundbreaking book, the standard term adopted among scholars for the older lover is erastês, the lover, and for the younger, erômenos, the beloved, both words deriving from erōs.
The earliest scenes of homosexual courtship on Attic black-figure vases are contemporary with the Solon fragment: “When in the delicious flower of youth he falls in love with a boy (paidophilein), yearning for thighs and sweet mouth.”31 Artistic renditions of homoerotic couplings are most prolific around the time that the Greeks defeated the Persians, at the height of Hellenic self-confidence teetering on self-exaltation. Homosexual relationships are often praised as more desirable, more manly, than heterosexual relationships, which are mired in mere carnality or reproductive goals, with little to contribute to the cultivation of aretē, since females didn’t participate in the political life of the city. All the partygoers in Plato’s Symposium, except for the comic poet Aristophanes, don’t deign to extoll any erōs but the homoerotic.32 And Aristophanes’ speech isn’t in an extolling vein at all. Rather it details the more undignified and embarrassing aspects of erōs, although the speech keeps itself clean, with no gratuitous vulgarities. Considering that this is Aristophanes, whose plays revel in obscenities, this daintiness is out of character. But it’s Plato who is writing Aristophanes here, and he is permitting himself to go as far in the direction of vulgarity as his sense of dignity allows. So, for example, Plato has Aristophanes first miss his turn at giving his speech in praise of the god Erōs because he is temporarily overcome by, of all things, the hiccoughs, indicating the absurd indignities to which our bodies subject us when they overcome us. A famous writer can’t even get the words out, and the godlike gift of speech is rendered ridiculous by animal-like eruptions. When the poet finally recovers, he tells the myth, to which the moderator Zachary Burns of chapter δ briefly alludes: of how humans were once physically coupled in pairs, spherically rolling around, so that each sphere was a complete entity. There were some spheres that paired a man with a man, some a man with a woman, and some a woman with a woman. Complete in themselves, mortals were too godlike for the immortals’ tastes. “They had terrible strength, and power, as well as grand ambitions” (190b). The gods powwowed and instead of ending the race—always a live option for the Olympians—Zeus hit on the plan of slicing the self-contained mortals down the middle, like a hard-boiled egg sliced by a wire, so that each half was separated from its other half. (Dover attributes the origins of this erotogenic tale not to Plato, nor to Aristophanes, but rather to an Orphic myth.) Thus in this gathering, Aristophanes alone acknowledges the common sources of homosexual and heterosexual love, implying that they are of the same nature: erōs is, in all of us, a matter of our running around in desperation, trying to find our one and only lost half, and so complete ourselves.33 His is the tale that emphasizes the contingency of erotic satisfaction, placing erōs outside the domain of our own choice and making it a matter of pure chance whether you’ll ever find the one for whom you were, so to speak, destined from the moment of your birth. You leave that bar five minutes too soon, and instead of endless bliss it’s endless frustration. The gods knew exactly what they were doing, too, according to the Aristophanes of the Symposium, since it’s our erotic desperation that prompts our piety. “If we are friends with the gods and on good terms, we will find and establish relationship with those darlings meant for us, which few do now” (193b).