Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea

by Thomas Cahill

  Besides the Socratic method and the Greek attraction to essences, another striking feature of Socrates’s discourses—especially evident in the preceding excerpt—is what the translator Robin Waterfield2 calls Socrates’s “startling anticipation of Christian ethics.” In the New Testament, Jesus makes use not of Greek logic but of scriptural citation, rabbinical precedent, and a Hebrew mode of argument that proceeds by assertion and contrast rather than step-by-step reasoning, but he certainly comes out the same door as Socrates:

  You have heard that it was said: “Love your neighbor” and hate your enemy. But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in Heaven—for “he makes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends his rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” For if you love those who love you, what reward can you expect? Don’t even the tax collectors do as much? And if you save your greeting for your brother, what are you doing that’s so wonderful? Don’t even the gentiles do as much? You must, therefore, include everyone, just as your heavenly Father includes everyone.

  There are, most surely, significant differences between the Socratic and the Christian presentations. But the fathers of the early church were blown away by the similarities, especially given what they knew (all too well) of the fucker-fuckee aspect of Greek life. How unlikely it was that the competitive Athenians, striving for excellence and always pushing one another out of the way, should have—on their own and without the assistance of revelation—adduced such a “doctrine.” The fathers, therefore, came up with an odd formulation to explain how this could have happened: homo naturaliter Christianus, the naturally Christian man, who in his attraction to goodness is given sufficient grace to lead a moral life without the support of biblical revelation. Not only did this explanation make Socrates the first Greco-Roman secular saint of the Judeo-Christian tradition; it opened up even to simple believers of the early Christian centuries the possibility that there was goodness and morality to be found among those who had never come in contact with the authority of sacred scripture or the divine grace that flooded from the sacraments. Even though Socrates was an unusual specimen, the undeniable existence of someone who had thought such thoughts showed that grace and wisdom could sometimes be found even in pagan literature. This line of reasoning enabled Christians, who later came to monopolize power in Europe, to cherish pagan texts, some more than others and none more than Plato—which is why we still possess his entire oeuvre.3

  If there was one text of Plato’s that the church fathers, meaning to remain faithful to the Judaic repugnance toward homosexuality, might have been tempted to toss to the Mediterranean winds, it was the Symposium, Plato’s account of an unusually sober drinking party at which the main subject was homosexual love. The guests gather in the andron of Agathon’s house, where they arrange themselves comfortably on his banqueting couches and prepare to tackle their dinner, which they finish off in grumpy semi-silence, Socrates, who cares little for food, arriving late. After they have performed the necessary libations and hymns, they are supposedly ready for the serious drinking to commence, but it soon turns out that, except for Socrates, they are all terribly hung over from last night’s festivities—in celebration of Agathon, who has just taken first prize at the Lenaia for his very first tragic trilogy. “In no state to carry on,” they agree to a proposal that no president be elected and that each one be allowed to drink as little as he pleases. Normally, the president would determine the exact mixture of wine and water and how often the guests’ goblets would be refilled. In such a regimen, each drinker was expected to hold up his end and keep pace—an impossible goal for this group.

  Next, they decide to dismiss the naked flute girl, who was enlisted as Act I in the evening’s entertainment and who would usually end up sharing a couch or two before the night was through. So they are too wasted even for sex—though Agathon’s provision of only one flute girl suggests either that he is a cheap so-and-so (unlikely, given his theatrical triumph) or that he assumes that heterosexual coupling is not what most of his guests would be in the mood for, anyway. The physician Eryximachus then proposes that for their evening’s entertainment each imbiber “make the best speech in praise of Love he can, moving around the couches from left to right and starting with Phaedrus.” So, no riddles or games, no dancing or flutes, no songs or sex, just speeches—ooee, an intellectuals’ drinking party (which will need just one more step, the total elimination of booze, in order to achieve its final form, the academic “symposium” of our age). The proposal is “carried unanimously,” and Phaedrus begins.

  Phaedrus’s account of Love owes its origin to the military usefulness of banding men together inseparably, which engenders “shame at disgraceful behavior and pride at good behavior.” “My claim,” intones Phaedrus, “is that being found out by his boyfriend would cause [a man] more distress than being found out by his father, his friends, or anyone else. And the same evidently goes for the boyfriend: he feels particularly ashamed at being caught behaving badly by his lovers. The best conceivable organization (supposing it were somehow possible) for a community or a battalion would be for it to consist of lovers and their boyfriends, since they’d compete with one another in avoiding any kind of shameful act. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that a handful of such men, fighting side by side, could conquer the whole world.”

  Phaedrus’s world—a femaleless world of military conquest based on male-male loyalty—is very unlike ours. We’d have to go to a contemporary prison to find anything comparable. But it is just this aggressive male bonding that will bring Greece its most spectacular international success when in the following century the armies of Alexander the Great will conquer nearly the whole of the known world in the name of Greek culture. Plato, however, places Phaedrus first not because he agrees with him but because he represents the most obvious and least interesting point of view.

  The next reported speech is by Agathon’s lover, Pausanias, who praises the lifelong fidelity of homosexual couples who “are motivated by a pure form of Celestial Love” and disparages those who specialize in one-night stands or “have affairs with boys who are younger than the age at which intelligence begins to form”—that is, the prepubescent. “There even ought to be a law against having affairs with young boys, to prevent all that time and effort [that goes into wooing] being spent” on boys who may turn out callous and common in the end. Well, Pausanias, nowadays there is such a law—and not just to prevent your wasting your time. Pausanias and the much younger Agathon were revered in Athens as a model homosexual couple, but Pausanias’s world, though closer to ours than Phaedrus’s, remains alien in important respects, especially in his grudging tolerance for sex with children (as well as for forced sex with women who are not “freeborn”). He comes a bit closer to our attitudes, however, in casting aspersions on those who use sex as an excuse for every kind of bad behavior: “Society sanctions approval of the most extraordinary actions on a lover’s part—actions which … well, if anyone else were to dare to behave in these ways in pursuit of any other object, with any other goal in mind, he would earn unmitigated disapproval.” A little prissy, our Pausanias, but more interesting than his predecessor, especially for the light he throws on the deep need for society’s good opinion as the driving mechanism of Greek behavior.

  Before we get to Socrates’s speech—for whom, in Plato’s construction, all the other speeches are but foils—we must hear three more. Eryximachus tells us that as a doctor he knows that “the body of every creature on earth is pervaded by Love, as every plant is too”; then with medical sagacity he urges moderation. His is the voice of the Presocratics. Aristophanes, the great comic playwright, then offers the idea that human beings were once rounded wholes containing “two faces (which were on opposite sides), four ears, two sets of genitals, and every other part of their bodies was how you’d imagine it on the basis of what I’ve said … and when it came to running, they supported themselves on a
ll eight of their limbs and moved rapidly round and round.” However we might imagine it, Aristophanes is not trying for comedy; his is a serious metaphor. Because these proto-humans were too powerful, Zeus cut them in half and, with a little remodeling by Apollo, created the human race as we have it today. “It was their very essence that had been split in two,” Aristophanes goes on, “so each half missed the other half and tried to be with it.” To this day, those who had once been hermaphrodite wholes—that is, half male and half female—are heterosexuals; those who had been male-male wholes are homosexual males; those who had been female-female wholes are lesbians. And all of us are desperate to reunite with our lost halves: “We human beings will never attain happiness unless we find perfect love, unless we each come across the love of our lives and thereby recover our original nature.”

  This, it seems to me, is an imaginative contribution—symbolic, poetic, but real and consonant with the historical Aristophanes’s quirky genius. The last speech before Socrates gets under way, however, is the silliest of all, Agathon’s. Though Agathon gained his reputation as a tragic dramatist, it is hard to imagine what kind of tragedies he might have written. All of them have been lost, and only a few scattered lines remain. On the evidence of Plato’s parody of his speechifying, however, I’m willing to wager that if a drama of Agathon’s ever surfaces it will read something like The Sound of Music. When in his peroration he tells the company, “I am moved to express myself in verse,” he seems about to break into “Climb Ev’ry Mountain”:

  “O Love without equal in good looks and grace,

  You love to unite us all over the place.

  Gracious and gentle, adored by the wise,

  Beloved of the gods, only you do we prize.

  With you we will feel ev’ry zap of delight;

  You guide all our moves, tuck us in for the night.

  Follow him, people, sing him your hymn,

  His song will bewitch us, both gods and men!”4

  This one has mistaken tickles for thoughts. The Greeks didn’t always have a word for it; they could sometimes be as soppy as a Liza Minnelli concert, though “Agathon’s speech was greeted with cries of admiration from everyone in the room.” We love ya, Liza. Socrates remarks drily, “I was so naive that I thought the point of any eulogy was to tell the truth about the subject!… But it now looks as though this isn’t the way to deliver a proper eulogy after all.… Nevertheless,” insists Socrates, “I am prepared to tell the truth.”

  Socrates goes on in his customary question-and-answer mode to elicit agreements from the drinkers that, all balderdash aside, “first, love is of something; second, that something is something a person currently lacks.” But readers familiar with earlier dialogues must wonder how Socrates, who claims ignorance of all things but his own ignorance, can ever bring himself to articulate a positive theory of Love, which the rule for participation in this symposium requires of him. Socrates’s—or, more likely, Plato’s—solution is to introduce a mysterious figure, Diotima, priestess of Mantinea in Arcadia, whom Socrates calls “an expert in love” and his teacher on the subject. Priestess she may be, even an “itinerant charismatic who provides for various needs,” the category no less a scholar than Burkert places her in. To me, she seems very like a high-class courtesan—a figure well known in ancient Greece (as in Renaissance Italy), the sort of woman who was allowed more freedom and power than her enslaved or properly married sisters, the only type of female allowed to move more or less as she pleased through society and to say whatever she liked. After all, she enters (at least in imagination) even this exclusively male precinct and becomes the center of its attention, the priestess of Love, revealing her solution to the riddle of Love.

  Love, explains Diotima (in Plato’s recounting of Socrates’s recounting), is not beautiful in himself, since Love, at its most basic level, is an attraction to what is beautiful. We are not attracted to what we already possess, only to what we lack—and, therefore, Love is not a god (as all the other speakers have assumed), by definition deathless and beautiful, but a spirit existing somewhere “between mortality and immortality.” “Divinity and humanity,” Diotima patiently instructs Socrates, “cannot meet directly; the gods only ever communicate and converse with men (in their sleep or when conscious) by means of spirits. Skill in this area makes a person spiritual, whereas skill in any other art or craft ties a person to the material world. There are many different kinds of spirits, then, and one of them is Love.”

  Socrates asks the naive question “Who are his parents?,” to which Diotima, like Aristophanes, offers a mythological explanation, a common Greek device for illuminating difficult matters:

  “Because his parents are [his father] Plenty and [his mother] Poverty, Love’s situation is as follows. In the first place, he never has any money, and the usual notion that he’s sensitive and attractive is quite wrong: he’s a vagrant, with tough, dry skin and no shoes on his feet. He never has a bed to sleep on, but stretches out on the ground and sleeps in the open in doorways and by the roadside. He takes after his mother in having need as a constant companion. From his father, however, he gets his ingenuity in going after things of beauty and value, his courage, impetuosity, and energy, his skill at hunting (he’s constantly thinking up captivating stratagems), his desire for knowledge, his resourcefulness, his lifelong pursuit of education, and his skills with magic, herbs, and words.

  “He isn’t essentially either immortal or mortal. Sometimes within a single day he starts by being full of life in abundance, when things are going his way, but then he dies away … only to take after his father and come back to life again. He has an income, but it is constantly trickling away, and consequently Love isn’t ever destitute, but isn’t ever well off either. He also falls between knowledge and ignorance, and the reason for this is as follows. No god loves knowledge or desires wisdom, because gods are already wise; by the same token, no one else who is wise loves knowledge. On the other hand, ignorant people don’t love knowledge or desire wisdom either, because the trouble with ignorance is precisely that if a person lacks virtue and knowledge, he is perfectly satisfied with the way he is. If a person isn’t aware of a lack, he can’t desire the thing which he isn’t aware of lacking.”

  “But Diotima,” I [Socrates] said, “if it isn’t either wise people or ignorant people who love wisdom, then who is it?”

  “Even a child would have realized by now that it is those who fall between wisdom and ignorance,” Diotima said, “a category which includes Love, because knowledge is one of the most attractive things there is, and attractive things are Love’s province. Love is bound, therefore, to love knowledge, and anyone who loves knowledge is bound to fall between knowledge and ignorance.”

  In unveiling this compelling myth, even more graceful than Aristophanes’s contribution, Diotima handily surpasses all the other speakers and gives us confidence that she can lead us to arcane truths. Diotima’s Magical Mystery Tour is accomplished with much recircling over the same territory, as Socrates asks his seemingly simple-minded questions and Diotima leads him gradually upward into new realms of insight, as if she were leading a child by the hand. It is self-evident that all human beings seek eudaimonia (good fortune, happiness); and it is the possession of good things that makes for eudaimonia. Love—the word that has been used all along is Eros (Sexual Desire, viewed as a god or spirit)5—is, therefore, larger than any “particular kind of love.” Once it is conceded that we must make allowance for all sorts of loves (“business, sport, or philosophy” are the examples Diotima gives), it can be seen that “the sole object of people’s love is goodness”—“the permanent possession of goodness for oneself.”

  Diotima then goes off on a kind of detour in which she equates male sexual tumescence with pregnancy. “Love’s purpose,” announces Diotima, “is physical and mental procreation in an attractive medium.” Her model here is seed (procreation) into vagina (an attractive medium), but because this won’t serve literally for every �
�particular kind of love,” she takes refuge in analogy. “The point is, Socrates, that every human being is both physically and mentally pregnant,” and “the reason why, when pregnant and swollen, ready to burst, we get so excited in the presence of beauty is that the bearer of beauty releases us from our agony.” This forced linking of a man about to spurt semen with a woman about to give birth to a child is probably our best evidence that Diotima, unlike the symposiasts, is merely a creature of Plato’s imagination. While it is possible to claim that a man—especially Plato the celibate bachelor, who lived his spare life in the monastic mode of Pythagoras—might judge this an apt linkage, it is impossible to think that a woman (and certainly not one who had ever given birth) would invent such a spurious analogy.

  The aim of procreation, whether actual or analogous, is immortality. “Everything”—humans, as well as all “mortal nature”—“instinctively values its own offspring: it is immortality which makes this devotion, which is love, a universal feature.” Diotima points out that “undying virtue and fame … motivates people to do anything, and … the better they are, the more this is their motivation. The point is, they’re in love with immortality.” Furthermore,

  there are people whose minds are far more pregnant than their bodies; they’re filled with the offspring you might expect a mind to bear and produce. What offspring? Virtue, and especially wisdom. For instance, there are the creations brought into the world by the poets and any craftsmen who count as having done original work, and then there’s the most important and attractive kind of wisdom by far, the kind which enables people to manage political and domestic affairs—in other words, self-discipline and justice. And here’s another case: when someone’s mind has been pregnant with virtue from an early age and he’s never had a partner, then once he reaches adulthood, he longs to procreate and give birth, and so he’s another one, in my opinion, who goes around searching for beauty, so that he can give birth there, since he’ll never do it in an unattractive medium. Since he’s pregnant, he prefers physical beauty to ugliness, and he’s particularly pleased if he comes across a mind which is attractive, upright, and gifted at the same time. This is a person he immediately finds he can talk fluently to about virtue and about what qualities and practices it takes for a man to be good. In short, he takes on this person’s education.