There is no evidence that the privileging of homosexual relationships, particularly within the aristocratic classes, existed during the Archaic period when the Homeric poems were being composed, let alone during the earlier Bronze Age period, in which the poems were set, though the men of the classical period read such relationships into the Homeric tales. The all-important friendship in the Iliad between Achilles and Patroclus is a case in point. Though the love between Achilles and Patroclus is a special one, sufficient for the death of the latter to rouse the former out of his inanition and take the life-terminating action that makes him the greatest of the legendary heroes, Homer provides no hint that this love is erotic. But the Greeks of the classical age nevertheless read the erotic into love, interpreting the intensity of the love—Achilles’ stated wish that when he dies his ashes should be intermingled with the ashes of Patroclus—as leaving little question.34 The mainstay of the erotic interpretation of the central motif of the Iliad was Aeschylus’ lost trilogy Myrmidons, Nereids, and Phyrgians, of which only fragments remain. In our own day, a genre known as slash fiction, written by fans of such shows as Star Trek, fancifully eroticizes the same-sex relationship of characters such as Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. (As the voluminous academic literature on the genre helpfully explains, the term “slash” comes from the punctuation mark used in the dyads which identify the subgenres, such as Kirk/Spock and Starsky/Hutch.) The lost trilogy of Aeschylus can be regarded as the original slash fiction. Plato, too, has his character Phaedrus in the Symposium read an erotic relationship into Achilles and Patroclus (180a), differing only in making Achilles rather than Patroclus the younger erômenos.
Why did the Greeks come to have the attitudes they had toward sexuality, mingling, as Dover put it, the educational and the genital in homosexual relations that were cherished above heterosexual relations (at least by the aristocrats of Plato’s class)? The complexity of the problem, the morass of nature and nurture questions it asks us to take on and sort out, has put the question beyond the reach of all but the most daring speculations.35 But if we can’t say quite why, we do know much about how they practiced homosexuality, the norms that dictated what was good love and what was bad—unseemly and unmanly. And we know that the respective behaviors of the erastês and the erômenos were central to these norms.
Laws protected boys below the accepted age from being shown the wrong kind of attention. The erômenos must be of an age at which he can obtain some benefit from his relationship with the erastês, suitable for someone who is soon to enter, or has just entered, into the life of the polis. What he is not supposed to derive from the relationship is sexual gratification.36 The erômenos is supposed to assume a position of non-aroused passivity in erotic activity, maintaining a pose of such indifference as to seem barely aware of what is being done with his body, which tended to be, at least ideally, intercrural (between the thighs, at least according to most scholars). Penetration was considered crude. In fact, it was illegal for citizens, but practiced on catamites. There was a complex ideology at play here, including the perceptions that for a man to allow himself to be penetrated is to denature himself by assuming the woman’s role.
Given these norms, we can appreciate all the more the radical reversal that is effected in the story that Alcibiades tells about his love for Socrates in Plato’s Symposium. In this story, the roles of erômenos and erastês are toyed with. It’s Socrates who acts the part of the young and aloof erômenos, spending the night turned away from Alcibiades, while beautiful Alcibiades takes on the role of the turned-on erastês.37 One scholar remarks that the very inversion of this relationship that Plato presents in the Symposium as taking place between Socrates and Alcibiades in itself reflects the dangerous way in which Socrates reverses paiderastia.38 And since paiderastia is intimately related to politicized aretē, the reversal indicates the deeper ways in which Socrates challenged the values of his culture.
First Alcibiades lured Socrates into spending the night, then he declared that Socrates was the only man worthy of being his lover, to which Socrates had jokingly replied that “you must see in me a beauty that is extraordinary and quite different from your own good looks.” And then Alcibiades, convinced that he had “as it were let loose my arrows” (all Alcibiades’ metaphors of erōs are violent), makes a definitive move.
I stood up, and not letting him say anything further, I put my own cloak over him, since it was winter. Then I lay down, getting under his own worn garment, threw my arms around this truly daimōnic and amazing man, and lay there the entire night. (And you can’t say that I am lying about this, Socrates!) After I had done these things, he acted far better than I had; he disdainfully laughed at my youthful good looks, in a quite outrageous manner—and this was about something I thought was of real importance!…By every god and goddess, I swear I got up after having slept with Socrates in a way that had no more significance than sleeping with a father or an older brother. (219b–d)39
It’s significant that Plato has Alcibiades describe Socrates as “daimōnic.” A daimōn is, in the Greek conception of the continuum progressing from mortals to gods, an intermediate sort of creature, partaking—just as some of the legendary heroes do—of both mortal and divine properties.40 (Our word “demon” derives from the Greek.) Socrates notoriously claimed that he had his own private daimōn who whispered to him whenever he was about to do wrong.41 But here it is Socrates himself who is likened to a daimōn. In Alcibiades’ telling—or in the words that Plato gives him—it’s Socrates, not Alcibiades, who is the creature whose metaphysical placement is beyond that of normal mortals. Alcibiades is no latter-day Achilles at all, but rather one who stands in awe of the superhuman capacities of ugly old Socrates.
A number of Plato’s dialogues, in addition to the Symposium, make allusions to Socrates as the erastês of Alcibiades, though this shouldn’t be interpreted as implying a sexual relationship between them. Plato often uses the word metaphorically, as in the Gorgias (481d), where Socrates describes himself as the erastês of two things, Alcibiades and philosophy. What he’s saying is that he has fallen in love with both of them. Both loves induce transformative longing. Plato begins the Protagoras with an unnamed friend asking Socrates where he has come from, then supplying the presumed answer: “no doubt from pursuit of the captivating Alcibiades,” which Socrates doesn’t deny. Plato seems to go out of his way to call attention to Socrates’ relationship with the controversial figure, which also calls attention to Socrates’ abject failure in impressing any semblance of his own aretē—here meaning something much closer to what we mean by “virtue”—into his erômenos. Whether or not virtue can be taught is a question that comes up repeatedly in the dialogues, centrally in the Protagoras and the Meno. It’s a question that’s intimately connected with the vexed proposition of whether virtue is knowledge or not. If it is, then it should be teachable. But if it isn’t, then what does philosophy have to do with any of it? We’re back to the sort of question Stanley Fish raised in the New York Times, a question that Plato is always alert to. If philosophy doesn’t end in knowledge of some sort, including knowledge of virtue, then perhaps it just reduces to a sort of game that “doesn’t travel.” And the question of whether virtue can be taught is one that we could well imagine the historical Socrates pondering in a rather personal way, considering his own failures with the gifted but wayward Alcibiades. Homosexual relations could be looked on as serving a higher moral value—as opposed to the mere sensuality and reproductive goals of heterosexual relations—because the Greeks regarded homosexual erōs as “a compound of an educational with a genital relationship.” Though Socrates may have chastely excised any bodily aspect from his eroticized relationships, there was no one who more embraced the educational aspects.
Did Plato regard the moral failure that Alcibiades undoubtedly was as a pedagogical failure on Socrates’ part? Does he spare no reference to the special relationship between these two extraordinary characters in order to indicate Socrates�
� limitations as a teacher of virtue? Or are the copious allusions rather there to make the point that virtue cannot be taught, that aretē can’t be transmitted from the knower to the ignorant as mere information can be? Alcibiades, smart boy that he was, had mastered the purely formal aspects of Socrates’ methodology. Xenophon relates an amusing story of a young Alcibiades, still the ward of Pericles, trying to show off the sort of dialectics that Socrates wielded. When he backs Pericles into a corner, Pericles remarks, “At your age we were clever hands at such quibbles ourselves. It was just such subtleties which we used to practice our wits upon; as you do now, if I mistake not.” To which Alcibiades cheekily replies: “Ah, Pericles, I do wish we could have met in those days when you were at your cleverest in such matters.”
Plato was nine years old in 415 when the fleet sailed to Sicily, so he would have had only one opportunity to lay mature eyes on Alcibiades. This was when Alcibiades returned to a forgiving Athens in 407 and stayed in the polis for four months. Nevertheless, though he probably never knew him intimately, Plato’s sense of the man in all his contradictions must have been unusually vivid, allowing him to create the dramatic presentation we get in the Symposium. Alcibiades had insisted on his individuality above all else, and Plato gives a sense of that individuality in the few short pages of Alcibiades’ tumultuous appearance. It seems important to Plato to do full justice to who and what Alcibiades was, his charm as well as his dangerous recklessness, and one of the reasons might have been to exonerate Socrates of any responsibility for who and what Alcibiades was. After all, one of the charges brought against Socrates in 39942 was that he had corrupted the young, and nobody’s corruption had unleashed more dire consequences for Athens than Alcibiades’ (unless of course it is the corruption of Critias, who also had once been close to Socrates and who, you’ll remember, became a leader of the notorious Thirty, who ruled Athens for eleven months after its defeat by Sparta in 404).43
Alcibiades makes his entrance late in the Symposium, when it feels as if it’s almost over, that we have reached the climax and all is winding down. The party had been an unusual one in that no wine had been drunk (only enough to disguise the taste of water), at least not until Alcibiades shows up. The party that night takes place in the middle of the Dionysia, the festival of theater, and is attended by men prominent in the polis. They are so hungover from their previous night’s celebration that they decide to make this symposium a dry one. Instead of toasting with wine, they’ll compose, each one in turn, a paean to the god Erōs. A good deal of flirtation has gone on as the men, some of them lovers, recline together on their couches and sing the god’s praises. Socrates has been the last to speak and he has just delivered an exquisite disquisition on erōs, telling us that it is the one thing that can save us, since it alone can break the spellbound fascination that our own self casts over us. Erōs alone can make us take passionate notice of something outside of ourselves, turn the vectors of our attention so that they are facing outward. Erōs is our longing to possess the beautiful, and it is this aching longing that draws our very selves out of ourselves. But the longings of erōs can’t be left in their natural state or they will wreak havoc on our lives. And besides there is so much greater beauty to be discovered than that which resides in beautiful boys. Our love for the beautiful must, by stages, be turned from our fixation on individual beautiful bodies to the more general idea of embodied beauty, and from there to ever more impersonal and disembodied forms of beauty—the beauty of Athenian laws, for example, and of the abstractions that go into genuine knowledge. And as the lover “becomes more capable and flourishes in this situation, he comes to see a knowledge of a singular sort that is of this kind of beauty … The person who has been instructed thus far about the activities of Love, who studied beautiful things correctly and in their proper order, and who then comes to the final stage of the activities of love, will suddenly see something astonishing that is beautiful in its nature. This, Socrates, is the purpose of all the earlier effort”(210e).
Socrates pretends in this passage that he is only reciting what he had heard, long ago, from a priestess named Diotima, of the city of Mantinea, from whom he learned everything he knows about erōs.44 Socrates introduces Diotima by telling us that she had delayed the plague from arriving in Athens by ten years; the suggestion is that erotic love has pestilential possibilities, capable of killing off men’s bodies, as well as their souls, as the sudden appearance of Alcibiades will make clear. Alcibiades embodies the dangers of erōs, of letting our helpless adoration of unworthy love objects, as extraordinary as they might be, destroy not just our loving self, not just the love object, but even—given the role of erōs in teaching the duties of a citizen—the polis.
In the famous Socratic speech in the Symposium, erōs is not to be denied, but is rather to undergo a process of education. That is what philosophy is: the education of erotic desire. The purpose of our erotic longings turns out to be the same as the purpose of our cognitive longings—to get us outside of ourselves, to allow us hard-earned contact with what is, to on. This longing of ours to possess the beautiful can only be slaked in our knowledge of the astonishing beauty immanent in the structure of the world, the source of all instantiations of lesser beauty. Knowledge effects a possession that nothing else can achieve. Those unquenchable longings associated with erotic love, accompanied always by a touch of sadness, of disappointment, of the mournful sense of unfulfillment as we try to merge ourselves with the beloved, are so wrenching and frustrating and also absurd—an aspect of the erotic that Aristophanes’ speech plays up—because erotic longing is meant to carry us on to merge with something far larger and more constant and more worthy than a mere person.
Here is the life, Socrates, my friend, said the Manitinean visitor, that a human being should live—studying the beautiful itself. Should you ever see it, it will not seem to you to be on the level of gold, clothing, and beautiful boys and youths, who so astound you now when you look at them that you and many others are eager to gaze upon your darlings and be together with them all the time.… What do we think it would be like, she said, if someone should happen to see the beautiful itself, pure, clear, unmixed, and not contaminated with human flesh and color and a lot of other mortal silliness, but rather if he were able to look upon the divine, uniform beautiful itself? Do you think, she continued, it would be a worthless life for a human being to look at that, to study it in the required way, and to be together with it? Aren’t you aware, she said, that only there with it, when a person sees the beautiful in the only way it can be seen, will he ever be able to give birth, not to imitations of beauty, since he would not be reaching out toward an imitation, but to true virtue, because he would be taking hold of what is true? By giving birth to true virtue and nourishing it, he would be able to become a friend of the gods, and if any human being could become immortal, he would. (211d–212a)
A running joke throughout the Platonic dialogues is Socrates’ erotic alertness. In the Lysis he remarks that “though in most matters I am a poor useless creature, yet by some means or other I have received from heaven the gift of being able to detect at a glance both a lover and a beloved” (204b–c). In the Charmides, having just returned from the battle of Potidaea—one of the forerunners of the Peloponnesian War, fought in 432—the first thing he wants to know is who are the new boys on the scene, and if any of them are remarkable “for their wisdom or beauty or both.” When Charmides sits down right next to Socrates and he gets a peek of the “inwards of his garment,” he “takes flame and is overcome” (155d–e). Xenophon’s Symposium, which is far more ribald than any of Plato’s Socratic dialogues, exaggerates Socrates’ libidinous fascinations even more, with Xenophon having Socrates announce that the personal virtue of his own that he values the most is his pimping. Plato, albeit more decorously, makes much the same point: “The only thing I say I know,” Socrates says in the Symposium, “is the art of love (ta erôtika)” (177d).
Plato goes on to convert Socrate
s’ wry statement into as ardent a statement of the ecstatic nature of knowledge as has ever been put forth. (Xenophon doesn’t leave Socrates’ scandalous announcement as it stands, either.) Socrates’ Diotimaic speech merges the erotic ascent with the cognitive ascent, and merges both with the achievement of the extraordinary that makes a life worth living. “Do you think it would be a worthless life for a human being to look at that, to study it in the required way, and to be together with it?” Socrates has Diotima rhetorically asking about the vision of true beauty—inseparable from the True-the Beautiful-the Good—to which we will be led by our longing for beauty, when these erotic desires are properly educated by philosophy. Diotima had spoken “like a sophist,” when she endorsed the fame and acclaim, the kleos, that people desperately pursue in their desire to defeat death; but now, in her own ascent, she is speaking like a philosopher. Our achieving the extraordinary in our lives may be the only solace we have in the face of death, but the only worthy way to achieve this extraordinary life is to reason our way to it.
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