V
“Next,” I said, “here’s a situation which you can use as an analogy for the human condition—for our education or lack of it. Imagine people living in a cavernous cell down under the ground; at the far end of the cave, a long way off, there’s an entrance open to the outside world. They’ve been there since childhood, with their legs and necks tied up in a way which keeps them in one place and allows them to look only straight ahead, but not to turn their heads. There’s firelight burning a long way further up the cave behind them, and up the slope between the fire and the prisoners there’s a road, beside which you should imagine a low wall has been built—like the partition which conjurors place between themselves and their audience and above which they show their tricks.”
“All right,” he said.
“Imagine also that there are people on the other side of this wall who are carrying all sorts of artifacts. These artifacts, human statuettes, and animal models carved in stone and wood and all kinds of materials stick out over the wall; and as you’d expect, some of the people talk as they carry these objects along, while others are silent.”
“This is a strange picture you’re painting,” he said, “with strange prisoners.”
“They’re no different from us,” I said. “I mean, in the first place, do you think they’d see anything of themselves and one another except the shadows cast by the fire on to the cave wall directly opposite them?”
“Of course not,” he said. “They’re forced to spend their lives without moving their heads.”
“And what about the objects which were being carried along? Won’t they only see their shadows as well?”
“Naturally.”
“Now, suppose they were able to talk to one another: don’t you think they’d assume that their words applied to what they saw passing in front of them?”
“They couldn’t think otherwise.”
“And what if the sound echoed off the prison wall opposite them? When any of the passersby spoke, don’t you think they’d be bound to assume that the sound came from a passing shadow?”
“I’m absolutely certain of it,” he said.
“All in all, then,” I said, “the shadows of artifacts would constitute the only reality people in this situation would recognize.”
“That’s absolutely inevitable,” he agreed.
EVERY GREAT PHILOSOPHY has been … the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir,” exclaims Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil. No one can doubt the confessional dimension of Nietzsche’s seminal first book, The Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872 and so disconcerting to his fellow classicists that it ruined his reputation as a scholar. But over time its thesis came to replace what had been till then the standard Enlightenment view of classical Greece as the home of “noble simplicity and silent greatness”—all those placid white statues forever maintaining their blissful dignity. Its seldom-used full title, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, hints at its grand purpose: to elevate the music of Richard Wagner as the model for a new tragic age. Nietzsche scorned both Sophocles and Euripides for, as he saw it, degrading Greek tragedy from its original Dionysian purpose by the introduction of excessive (Apollonian) rationalism. Four years later, he turned against the composer for failing to advance sufficiently into Dionysian madness; thirteen years after that about-face, the philosopher went insane and remained so till his death in 1900. Till recently, it had been universally assumed that Nietzsche’s harrowing last years were the result of the effect on his brain of late-stage syphilis. But the neurologist Richard Schain has made a compelling case for “manic-depressive psychosis which gave way in time to signs of chronic schizophrenia.” If so, the categories Apollonian and Dionysian may be seen as Nietzsche’s attempt to name the polarity he found within himself.
But it is not necessary to buy Nietzsche’s whole thesis in order to find his categories useful. Apollo, giver of sunlight and measurement, the great archer whose arrows never miss their targets, is the god of severe justice, the god in whom the sense of order is paramount, the one who cannot rest till all wrongs have been righted and all corners have been plumbed. It is Apollo who cannot bear to allow Oedipus to continue his reign and whose holy and uncanny presence is felt throughout Sophocles’s play, sparking supernatural fear in all who sense his proximity. The divine model for the typical human hero, Apollo stands in stark contrast to Dionysus, dark lord from the East, giver of the vine, showing himself an alluringly effeminate youth with long, luxuriant hair, surrounded by the vines that entangle others and attended by his satyrs—boisterous creatures from the countryside, horned, betailed, goat-footed (the very images that would be adopted by Christian artists to portray devils), enormous penises erect, subhuman sex machines always at the ready. This was the god for whom the Dionysia was celebrated, whose primitive choruses—called tragōdiai (goat-songs)—were the origin of drama. Even in fifth-century Athens, the trilogies of the great tragedians each ended with a short satyr (or satyric) play, a coarse burlesque of mythic material connected to the preceding trilogy. It helped to set aside all that tragic seriousness and brought the day to a merry close, introducing the night of drinking that lay ahead.
That the Greeks consecrated so much time to such a god suggests they had some inkling of the dark forces that could conquer their best strivings, their quest for aretē, and they meant to pay these forces sufficient homage to keep them at bay. The lost utopias of cloud-bound Ithaca and lofty Troy had been replaced by a real-life ideal, a polis of visionary perfection, democratic Athens and its many imitators, a system in which all the inevitable political tensions were kept in balance by “agreements that profit no one to violate.” The symposium and the Dionysia were two of several characteristically Greek safety valves for blowing off the social steam that might otherwise build to an explosion. But the libations, the choruses, and the processions were also pleas to the gods to leave their ideal polis intact, not visit it with the ills that had destroyed so many others:
How often have whole cities had to pay
for choosing one who can but evil do.
On them far-seeing Zeus sends heav’nly woes—
twinned plague and famine—till the people die.
Their army or their walls he may cast down
or, wreaking vengeance, sink their ships at sea.
Anxious Hesiod spoke in these lines what all Greece knew about divine justice and single rule by self-seeking tyrants. By all means, let us bow sufficiently in Dionysus’s direction, but let us with fervent pleas especially implore Zeus and his divine minister of heavenly justice, Lord Apollo.
Another safety valve was the annual Lenaia, held each January in honor of Dionysus Lenaios, Dionysus of the Wine Vat. Unlike the springtime Dionysia, a magnet for spectators from all over Greece as well as for foreign tourists, the Lenaia, which took place in the month when travel was most difficult and sea voyage impossible, was a festival for Athenians, a citywide family party in which playwrights were encouraged to speak aloud their most outrageous thoughts. Thus, the Lenaia became the principal showcase for Greece’s comic poets, who took just as seriously as their tragic brethren the mandate to engage their political moment.
Aristophanes, the king of Athenian comedy, in fact went further than any tragedian dared go in criticizing his city’s leading citizens and pointing out political absurdities. His comedy Ekklēsiazousai (Assembly Women), for instance, imagines the hallowedAthenian Assembly being taken over by women, who introduce economic communism—community of goods—as well as community of persons, the old and the ugly now being able to get as much sex as the young and the beautiful. A young couple are parted when three old crones assert their prior rights to the young man and leave his sweetheart in the dust. The play concludes with the chorus hurrying off to a communal dinner, where preposterously novel dishes will be served.
In Lysistrata, Aristophanes went even further, imagining a strike by the women of Athens, who refuse to have sex with their husbands till peace is made. They conspire with women of enemy city-states, who boycott their husbands as well, setting off a universal outbreak of priapism, as clumsy male choruses show up, attempting to sing and dance while sporting painful erections. The Athenian women secure the Acropolis and its treasury, bringing to a halt Athens’s ability to wage war. A very beautiful and very naked Goddess of Peace appears, sending the men into paroxysms of pain. Peace negotiations between Athens and Sparta are quickly concluded and, as the play ends, a banquet of peace begins.
Males mocked, war mocked, Athens and its sacred institutions mercilessly satirized, while the Greeks laughed delightedly. Beyond the West, there are many parts of our contemporary world where such humor could still win you torture and execution; and even the Western world would not again see such exuberant self-confidence till two millennia had passed and the spirit of the Renaissance would issue in a new Age of Discovery. The Greeks called their spirit to hellenikon, the Greek Thing, a freewheeling, argy-bargy brilliance that may be easy to fault but remains relentlessly engaging and colorful, always reaching for more. As Aristophanes himself advised other dramatists through the culinary advice of the women’s chorus in Ekklēsiazousai:
You’ll come up with something brand new
if you’re hoping to launch a real winner.
The banqueters won’t fail to boo
if you dare serve them yesterday’s dinner.
SOMETHING BRAND NEW. Beyond the social, political, and artistic innovations we have been considering, the most influential of all Greek intellectual innovations is undoubtedly the development over the course of two centuries of philosophy as a systematic study. Philo-sophia is a Greek word, meaning “love of wisdom”; and the first philosophers were relatively traditional sages who gradually (and probably painfully) created a new job description for themselves. These were men whose reputation as magi gave them at first an oracular aura, though they were actually engaged in a pursuit we might more readily call science.
They wanted to find out what made the universe work. In the Greek cities of sixth-century Ionia—the west coast of Asia from Smyrna to Miletus, which had been settled by Athenians—there rose a series of thinkers who inquired into the nature of things. Having no Book of Genesis to consult and only the sketchiest of myths about cosmic origins (in which they placed no confidence), they assumed that the world—or kosmos (their word, meaning “elegant order”)—was, in some profound sense, eternal: it had always been there, so far as they could determine, and always would be. (“World without end,” the phrase that concludes many old-fashioned Christian prayers is not a Judeo-Christian concept but a Greek one.) What faced them every day, however, was not the eternal but the mutable—all the multiplicity, diversity, motion, and change they perceived in individual beings that go from nonexistence to birth and life and, finally, to death, decay, and nonexistence. Likewise, the earth beneath their feet and even the sky above their heads presented them with panoramas of constant change. It is not possible, they reasoned, to make sense of what is mutable, what is becoming, what passes so fleetingly into existence and then is gone forever. But because there is also in our experience a quality of permanence—individuals die but humanity remains, the crops return each year, the orchards bloom once more, the zodiac comes full circle—we do not live in an arbitrary universe but a patterned one. If this is so, there must be an underlying … thing that never changes, never has changed, and never will change, the uncreated material out of which all the mutable things spring.
Thales of Miletus said this “thing”—naturally, they had trouble inventing terminology, words for elements yet to be discovered and defined—was water, a good guess, since almost everything seems to have some water in it. His Milesian successor Anaximander, the first Greek to write in prose (and, for quite some time, the only one not to avail himself of the ringing authority that meter can convey), thought this a little crude and proposed that the universal … um … substance was something unnameable, indeterminate, without specific qualities. His fellow Milesian Anaximenes decided the “substance” must be air.
Heraclitus of Ephesus, “the weeping philosopher” as he was afterwards remembered, said they had all got it wrong because their question presumed an answer: there is no ultimate “substance”; at the heart of the universe is fire, the ultimate impermanence, always in flux. “Panta rhei,” spoke Heraclitus oracularly. “All things flow.” What you see is what you get. “You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.” But because of this, “the road up and the road down is one and the same”—another gnomic way of stating that all we have is change, change that is ultimately unintelligible because there is no changeless “ultimate” to be grasped.
A little later, Parmenides of Elea (on the southwest coast of Italy), claiming Heraclitus had got it exactly backward, asserted that of course the universe had to be stable and permanent—otherwise it would make no sense at all—and that the constant changes we experience are only accidents, that is, appearances. Our faulty senses misperceive the true nature of things because we have no direct access to ultimate and unchangeable reality. For Heraclitus, change was the only true reality; for Parmenides, it was immutable permanence. Parmenides’s long-lasting teacher, the Ionian Xenophanes of Colophon, who lived to be about a hundred and ten, though he made no contribution to these philosophical dialogues about substance and accidents, attacked belief in a multiplicity of gods, as well as Homer’s presentation of the gods as having human faults and passions. God was one, said Xenophanes, eternal, effecting things by mind alone and bearing no resemblance whatsoever to flip-flopping mankind. On another front entirely, his observations of seashells in the mountains and fossil fish in the quarries of Syracuse convinced Xenophanes that the earth had once been covered in water and would be so again—since, as the Greeks assumed, reality was like a great wheel and all things return. What has been will be again.
A group of fifth-century philosophers, headed by Empedocles of Acragas in Sicily, returned to the pursuit of the eternal substance and proposed that there were actually four basic elements out of which everything is composed in varying proportions. These elements are earth, air, fire, and water—a system of categories that science, medicine, and psychology would continue to rely on right into the early modern period. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, another Ionian, refining Empedocles’s solution, proposed that everything is composed of different kinds of “seeds” and that the beings we perceive as separate and distinct from one another are simply different kinds of composites, all made up in differing proportions of these same seeds. “Everything has a share in everything,” proclaimed Anaxagoras. In order to explain how this seemingly random mixture of seeds was apportioned into the patterned universe we behold, he reasoned that there must be a nous (mind), a principle powerful enough to direct the patterning. But unlikeXenophanes, Anaxagoras did not bother to personalize nous or call it God. Like Xenophanes, Anaxagoras was also a close observer of natural phenomena—in his case of the stars and planets—and came to realize that the celestial bodies rotated and that the moon received its light from the sun, which gave firm foundation to a theory of eclipses that weakened one of the premises of polytheism (in which each planet, star, and satellite was taken to be the manifestation of a different god).
Leucippus and his student Democritus, another long-lived philosopher, took up the idea of cosmic seeds and pushed it further. What is at the heart of the universe is indeed single and unchanging: a-toma (uncuttables), indivisible particles too small to be seen. These “atoms,” differentiated from each other only by shape and size, are combined in different arrangements and densities to form the variety of compounds in the universe, which we misperceive as different beings. Our world or kosmos, they also speculated, is not unique but one of many, all of which came to be by accident and then developed by necessity. We do not need to posit the existence of gods to explain the workings of the world. Even human consciousness, thought Democritus, is an entirely physical process, as perishable as the body. He urged that men should aim at cheerfulness and wrote a treatise on the subject, Peri euthymiēs (On Cheerfulness). Cheerfulness is to be achieved by avoiding violence and disturbances of all kinds and by understanding that life is not full of impenetrable mystery, just full of atoms. He was remembered as “the laughing philosopher.”
Generations before the great blossoming of Athenian philosophy under Socrates and his student Plato, these Presocratics were already sketching out the program that all Greek philosophy would subsequently follow. It was built on three assumptions: the phenomena we experience immediately possess no ultimate importance; there must be an ultimate, eternal, and (despite Heraclitus) unchanging reality; it is the task of the philosopher to … well … attain that reality and then direct others to the correct path. This was the strictly philosophical strand of their enterprise, which also lent the philosopher the mantle of a religious sage.
But there was also the scientific strand, which they pursued without telescopes, microscopes, or lab experiments. Such paraphernalia would never have occurred to the Ionian philosophers and their successors. Though some of them did find it useful to make simple observations of the visible world, they all believed they could think their way to the truth by way of what Albert Einstein would call das Gedankenexperiment, the thought experiment—that is, just sitting there and thinking about things. Einstein, indeed, would approach the tasks of science with a methodology strikingly similar to that of the laboratory-less Greeks. “The whole of science,” he would declare in Physics and Reality, “is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.”
There are even more startling parallels between Einstein and many of the Presocratics. Like his ancient colleagues, Einstein believed in a patterned universe that made sense. “I shall never believe,” he once remarked, “that God plays dice with the world.” Even the way Einstein talked about the universe has a Presocratic ring to it: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.… To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in the most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the ranks of the devoutly religious men.” “Something deeply hidden,” he left in a handwritten note, “had to be behind things.”
Like many of the Presocratics, whose theories questioned and weakened conventional Greek religion, Einstein’s sense of mystery had little in common with the orthodox beliefs and practices of the surrounding society. But his confidence that the world made sense—even if its sense eludes us (“The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not”)—put him at odds with his younger colleague Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg’s famous “uncertainty principle”—that all our observations are unreliable because we cannot “observe nature in itself but [only] nature exposed to our method of questioning”—bears more than a little resemblance to Heraclitus’s insistence on the ultimate unintelligibility of reality.
Despite these parallels, much of what the Presocratics had to say is likely to strike contemporary readers as distant from our concerns. With effort we may be able to see why they assumed that ultimate reality, in order to be intelligible, must be One and that multiplicity implies unintelligibility—this is not so far removed, after all, from Einstein’s futile attempts to uncover a “grand unified theory” that would explain the universe—but our profoundest anxieties and obsessions tend to run in very different channels. So it is important to bracket the various answers of these groundbreaking philosophers and to recall that the underlying question for all of them—“What is the nature of reality?”—remains to this day a fundamental question that each of us must attempt to answer in our lives. When we recall this—and acknowledge how little progress we have made in formulating a satisfactory answer—we gain a measure of sympathy for them and the single-minded spunk with which they approached their daunting task. Because they had no guidelines to follow, they poked their noses into everything in the hopes of finding an adequate answer; and in the process they helped to invent the disciplines of philosophy, theology, the physical sciences, medicine, psychology, political science, and ethics.
Thales, for instance, is credited not only with being the first philosopher but with bringing back from a trip to North Africa the essentials of Egyptian land measurement; then, by considering this practical craft more deeply than the Egyptians had and abstracting the principles implicit in it, Thales invented geō-metria, geometry (literally land measurement, but actually a branch of abstract mathematics). He is also credited with predicting the exact time and place for an eclipse of the sun in the year 585 B.C. This story must have been embellished subsequently since it is scarcely possible that a sixth-century Greek had the means of predicting an eclipse at a precise geographical latitude. But Thales’s ability to make some such prediction was afterwards remembered as bolstering his contention that the general workings of the kosmos are predictable and that therefore a principle of immutability lies at the heart of the universe. Beyond philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy, Thales certainly touched on theology. If there is a single eternal substance, reasoned Thales, it must be—of its very nature—divine, so that, concluded he, “all things are full of gods.”
In company with Solon, Thales headed the list of the Seven Sages of antiquity, whose crucial sayings were inscribed on the facade of Apollo’s temple at the great oracular1 sanctuary of Delphi. “Gnōthi sauton,” went one saying: “Know thyself.” “Mēden agan,” went the other: “Nothing in excess.” The first, which has echoed down the ages, is certainly a step in the direction of psychology, but it is also meant as humbling spiritual advice: know how low your human hamartia places you in contrast to the powers of heaven. The second is a similar reminder to the ever-striving Greeks that excess—political, social, sexual—is the constant temptation and that Solonian balance is what we must strive for. It is certainly political advice, but medical, psychological, and ethical, too. The third and last inscription is the strangest of all, the single letter “E.” According to the prolific Plutarch (writing in the late first and early second centuries of our era), this was meant as the second person singular, present tense, of the verb to be, meaning “Thou art”—a gnostic assertion attributed to the philosopher Pythagoras.
Pythagoras was a thinker of a very different stripe from all the others, more guru than philosopher. Admired for his long, lustrous hair and masculine beauty, he wrote nothing down, was reputed to possess magical powers, and was rumored to have—please lower your voice and whisper this one—a golden thigh. Born probably at Samos early in the sixth century, he immigrated to Croton in Southern Italy, where, attracting a multitude of followers, he formed a community of men and women who lived apart from other human beings according to his rule. He taught, among many other things, a doctrine of metempsychōsis (transmigration of souls, or reincarnation). He claimed to remember his own previous incarnations: as a son of the god Mercury, then as a Trojan hero, then as a prophet, and, more recently, as a fisherman. Another doctrine was the immortality of the human soul, which Pythagoras imagined to be an immortal and unchanging divinity fallen from heaven and imprisoned in the corruption of the fleshly body as in a tomb. (“Sōma sēma” [Body-tomb] was an aphorism of the Pythagoreans, who detected profound significance in similarities of sounds.) The choices for good or ill that a soul makes in one life determine what kind of body it will find itself inhabiting in its next incarnation. “The most momentous thing in life,” taught the sententious guru, “is the art of winning the soul to good or to evil”—just what Pythagoras was confident he could do for you.
Creeky old Xenophanes found this business too much altogether and sent around the anecdote—hilarious to Xenophanes—that Pythagoras had recognized the voice of a dead friend in the howling of a whipped puppy. Fiery Heraclitus, who had no patience for airy mystification, curtly dismissed Pythagoras as a fraud. Parmenides, however, who believed that our senses were deceived by accidental appearances and that deep reality was unchanging, was proud to associate himself with the theories of Pythagoras. AndEmpedocles, who was much under Pythagorean influence, went so far as to recall that in a former life he had been a bush.
The Pythagoreans ate no flesh, fish, or fowl and only certain kinds of vegetables (apparently the ones that didn’t contain imprisoned souls). They utterly eschewed beans—whether out of respect for souls or for the quality of their communal air we don’t know—and must have been subject to all the wasting afflictions of a protein-poor diet. They scorned public sacrifices and other rituals of Greek religion and, burning only incense, spent their days in silence, examining their consciences and disciplining themselves in self-control. “Troubles are good,” went a Pythagorean saying, “but pleasures are always evil; for whoever has merited punishment must be punished.” “Pathei mathos” (Through suffering, understanding), went another of their sayings, entranced as they were by similarities of sounds. Sex was permitted but only to married couples under specially designated circumstances. Each initiate renounced all private possessions; and in the event that he or she returned to the extra-Pythagorean world, the departure was considered death and a gravestone was erected in commemoration of the apostasy.
None of these things—neither the core doctrines nor the extreme discipline—had any precedents in Greek society. Though we no longer have the evidence to trace the route of transmission, we must assume that Pythagoras had come in contact with ideas and practices from the East, absorbing elements of Babylonian numerology, Persian dualism, and especially classical Indian culture with its central tenet of metempsychosis and its monastic practices. Out of this culture, after all, rose the reforms of Siddhartha Gautama, better known to history as the Buddha; and Pythagoras and the Buddha were almost exact contemporaries. Even the mysterious Pythagorean saying carved at Delphi—“E” (“Thou art”)—probably owes its origin to the key mantra of the Upanishads, “Tat tvam asi” (“Thou art the One”). The sense of both sayings lies in the affirmation of the eternal union of the soul with That-Which-Truly-IS, with divinity, with the eternal substance from which all mutable things spring—oneness with Oneness.
Pythagoras found deep meaning in numbers. He is credited with discovering that the chief musical intervals produced on the vibrating strings of a lyre can be expressed as ratios: an octave as 2:1, a fifth as 3:2, a fourth as 4:3. Though these relationships still form the basis of Western musicology, Pythagoras went further. Everything, he thought, could be explained by numbers and their relationships to one another. Since the ratios between the basic musical intervals employ only the first four whole numbers, these numbers must be expressive of the deep harmony of the universe, in which the “spheres” or heavenly bodies sing while whirling through space and their music combines in harmonic chords to create the Music of the Spheres, which we are unable to hear only because the sounds are with us from birth and, there being no contrasting silence, we do not hear the harmonies. Pythagoras could hear them.
Pythagoras played with these numbers till he hit on a particularly seductive arrangement:
This pattern, an equilateral triangle using only the first four whole numbers (one dot at the head, followed by lines of two, three, and four dots) and composed nonetheless of a decade, took on mystical significance, somehow enunciating not only the nature of number but the nature of the universe itself. Nevertheless, Pythagoras’s playing with numbers and triangles also bequeathed us an exceedingly useful discovery, the Pythagorean theorem, which assures us that, no matter whose body we may be inhabiting for the moment, the square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is always equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.
The superior air that emanated from the Pythagoreans earned them enemies. In the mid-fifth century, their main foundations in southern Italy were set afire and many of their number were massacred. “Civil war was no rarity in Greek cities; yet here for the first time,” concludes the renowned German classicist Walter Burkert, “it seems to have led to a kind of pogrom, the persecution of those who were different from others in their way of life and disposition.” We know nothing more about the oppressors of the Pythagoreans, but we do know that southern Italy was also a stronghold of the most fanatical devotees of pleasure-inducing Dionysus—of whom, except for his philosophy, the beautiful, long-haired Pythagoras might have seemed the incarnation. But Dionysus was no friend to moderation, let alone discipline; and his disciples, the torchbearing bacchai and bacchoi, were not averse to a little dismemberment now and then, and their secret rites were always conducted in darkness.
IT IS A REMARKABLE IRONY in the history of philosophy that, though Pythagoras was the least mainstream of the Presocratic philosophers—the least Greek, really—he exerted the greatest influence of all on Plato, who would in the fourth century B.C. become the philosopher of philosophers not only for the Greeks but for the entire Western tradition. As the philosopher-mathematician Alfred North Whitehead would say definitively in the twentieth century, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” Another safe generalization may be stated thus: Though all great figures rise from their culture, they must, in some radical way, contradict that culture—and this Plato certainly set out to do.
One of the first Greeks to write extensively in prose, Plato hit upon a lively format that puts him at a far remove from the vast majority of his sleep-inducing philosophical successors. Rather than lecturing at us about his ideas, he offers what he calls “dialogues,” theater-pieces that can be read aloud at a gathering of friends, with actors taking different parts. (That Plato could write so extensively in prose rather than in poetry is evidence that books were now circulating widely in the Greek world. An extended work of prose, unlike sung poetry, is necessarily based on a reading rather than a listening public.) Though each dialogue is intended to explore a particular philosophical theme, Plato’s interlocutors behave as human beings do: one character may be too dim to follow the argument, a second may become incensed over the intellectual position of a third or over what he takes to be the disparagement of his own ideas, a latecomer may arrive argumentative and inebriated. As the dialogue approaches its crux—the resolution of the theme, the main point of the whole discussion—one must pay close attention, but along the way to that moment Plato inserts many of the inconsequential (and entertaining) digressions that constitute normal human conversation. This witty format Plato modeled on short theater-pieces of his day called “mimes,” which were not silent, Chaplinesque affairs but noisy vaudeville sketches based on the comedy of daily life (“The Quack Doctor,” “The Unreliable Servant”). That he was quick to imagine such an unlikely use for this vulgar genre while singlehandedly launching the lofty tradition of Greek prose is suggestive of his keen originality.
It is somewhat difficult to separate Plato from his teacher Socrates, since Socrates never wrote anything down but appears as the central character in almost all of Plato’s voluminous writings. While it is clear that Plato, especially in the later dialogues, has advanced into philosophical territory far beyond what the oral teachings of his revered Socrates could have contained, he continues to employ the character “Socrates” as his mouthpiece. Luckily, we have fairly extensive news of Socrates from other sources—especially from another student of his, Xenophon—and so may venture a portrait that does not rely exclusively on Plato’s highly literary (and therefore somewhat suspect) presentations.
In Greek eyes, Socrates was a squat, ugly, barefoot man who did not bathe too often and was easy to spot shuffling through the agora or passing the time in his favorite hangout, the shop of Simon the Cobbler. Looking nothing like a god or hero, he had bulging eyes, a flat, pug nose, prominent lips, and a pot belly. Though a stonemason and the son of a stonemason—and therefore an artisan from the lower reaches of the middle class—he wasn’t big on exercise and, when he could, declined involvement even in civic and political affairs. He wasn’t big on much of anything except his favorite pursuit: asking questions. While doing this, he maintained his famously unattractive posture, keeping his head down and squinting at people sideways or from under his brow. His series of questions, ever after known as “the Socratic method,” irked a great many citizens, since the abysmal ignorance of the person being questioned would be gradually, painfully, inexorably exposed to public view.
Socrates seemed to take special delight in puncturing the pomposity of Athens’s leading citizens—which made him popular with young people, who enjoyed the spectacle of their elders’ discomfort. So Socrates became recognizable not only by his ugliness but by the crowd of admiring youths who clustered about him hoping to hear a zinger. Like an aging rock star whose unsavory lifestyle and consummate cool make him a favorite target of parents, Socrates was in danger of becoming the victim of his own success as “the Socratic method” turned into a byword for smart-assed, if inscrutable, backtalk. The loathing of the older generation only increased the chorus of adolescent admirers who flocked to his side; and there were times when he could barely open his mouth without hearing rowdy cheers of confirmation.
All the same, except when he was dealing with the most insufferable blowhards, Socrates was respectful of those he questioned. But the questioning was relentless. Socrates thought of himself as serving his fellow Athenians in the role of “a gadfly,” impatient with imprecision, goading them to adequate formulations, stinging them out of their complacency. Even to friends, however, a gadfly can be intolerably irritating; to passing acquaintances, Socrates could be, as one of his young admirers put it, more like “a stingray,” reducing his interlocutors to a state of numb helplessness.
In Book I of Plato’s masterwork, the Republic—which probably dates to an earlier phase than the subsequent dialogues that make up the bulk of the work—Socrates finds himself in conversation with his friend Polemarchus at the latter’s house in seaside Piraeus, while others listen in. Polemarchus, citing a line from the lyric poet Simonides, has opined that “morality lies in helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies.” “When you say ‘friends,’ ” queries Socrates meekly,
“do you mean those who appear to a person to be good, or those who genuinely are good (even if they don’t appear to be)? And likewise for enemies.”
“It seems plausible to suggest,” [Polemarchus] said, “that one treats as friends those one regards as good, and as enemies those one regards as bad.”
“Isn’t it common to make mistakes about this, and think that people are good when they aren’t, and vice versa?”
“Yes.”
“When this happens, then, doesn’t one regard good people as enemies and bad people as friends?”
“Yes.”
“But all the same, in these circumstances it’s right for one to help bad people and harm good people, is it?”
“Apparently.”
“But good people are moral and not the kind to do wrong.”
“True.”
“On your line of reasoning, then, it’s right to harm people who do no wrong.”
“Not at all, Socrates,” he said. “My reasoning must be flawed, I suppose.”
“It’s right to harm wrongdoers, then,” I [that is, Socrates, who is giving the account of what transpired] said, “and to help those who do right?”
“That sounds better.”
“But since there are lots of people who are completely mistaken, Polemarchus, then it will commonly turn out to be right for people to harm friends (whom they regard as bad) and to help enemies (whom they regard as good). And in affirming this, we’ll be contradicting what we said Simonides meant.”
“Yes,” he said, “that is a consequence of what we’re saying. Let’s change tack, however: we’re probably making a wrong assumption about friends and enemies.”
“What assumption, Polemarchus?”
“That someone who appears good is a friend.”
“What shall we change that to instead?” I asked.
“That someone who doesn’t just appear good, but actually is good, is a friend; and that someone who seems good, but actually isn’t, is an apparent friend, not a genuine one. And the same goes for enemies.”
“So on this line of reasoning, it’s a good man who is a friend, and a bad man who is an enemy.”
“Yes.”
“You’re telling us, then, that our original description of morality, when we said that it was right to do good to a friend and harm to an enemy, was incomplete. Now you want us to add that it is right to do good to a friend, provided he is good, and to harm an enemy, provided he is bad. Is that right?”
“Yes,” he said, “I think that’s a good way to put it.”
“Can a moral person harm anyone?” I asked.
“Yes, he can,” he replied. “He has to harm bad men, people who are his enemies.”
“When horses are harmed, do they improve or deteriorate?”
“Deteriorate.”
“In respect of a state of goodness for dogs or of a state of goodness for horses?”
“In respect of a state of goodness for horses.”
“So the same goes for dogs too: when they are harmed, they deteriorate in respect of what it is to be a good dog, not in respect of what it is to be a good horse. Is that right?”
“No doubt about it.”
“And where people are concerned, my friend, shouldn’t we say that when they’re harmed they deteriorate in respect of what it is to be a good human?”
“Yes.”
“And isn’t a moral person a good human?”
“There’s no doubt about that either.”
“It necessarily follows, Polemarchus, that people who are harmed become less moral.”
“So it seems.”
“Now, can musicians use music to make people unmusical?”
“Impossible.”
“Can skilled horsemen use their skill to make people bad horsemen?”
“No.”
“So can moral people use morality to make people immoral? Or in general can good people use their goodness to make people bad?”
“No, that’s impossible.”
“I imagine this is because cooling things down, for instance, is not the function of warmth but of its opposite.”
“Yes.”
“And moistening things is not the function of dryness but of its opposite.”
“Yes.”
“So harming people is not the function of a good person, but of his opposite.”
“I suppose so.”
“And a moral person is a good person?”
“Of course.”
“It is not the job of a moral person, then, Polemarchus, to harm a friend or anyone else; it is the job of his opposite, an immoral person.”
“I think you’re absolutely correct, Socrates,” he said.
“So the claim that it’s right and moral to give back to people what they are owed—if this is taken to mean that a moral person owes harm to his enemies and help to his friends—turns out to be a claim no clever person would make. I mean, it’s false: we’ve found that it is never right to harm anyone.”
“I agree,” he said.
The reader may find the Socratic method—the small-step-by-small-step analysis that is Socrates’s stock-in-trade—alluring or annoying, depending on temperament. Logical, philosophical types are fascinated, whereas the artistic and intuitive may find the process excruciating, especially when extended to book length—in the case of the Republic, nearly 150 times the length of the preceding excerpt—even though the discussions are punctuated by comical interludes. Immediately after the exchange between Socrates and Polemarchus, for instance, Thrasymachus comes on “like a wild animal,” “hurl[ing] himself at us,” relates Socrates, “as if to tear us apart.” “What a lot of drivel, Socrates!” bellows Thrasymachus, who belittles Socrates for “feigning ignorance” and goes on to enunciate what was probably a common, if cynical, view—“that morality is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger party.” Socrates, who claims to have been “terrified and panic-stricken” by Thrasymachus’s aggression, goes on—ever so meekly, ever so reasonably—to make mincemeat of his antagonist, much to the satisfaction of his audience (whether ancient or modern). Though the operation takes up the balance of Book I (and runs about ten times as long as the excerpt), by the time Socrates has defanged Thrasymachus he also has the man eating out of his hand.
Besides taking account of the general Socratic procedure of question and response, the reader cannot fail to notice the characteristically Greek turn of mind evident in Socrates’s approach: the essence of wetness is to moisten things, the essence of the musician is to make people more musical, the essence of the moral man is to make others more moral. The predilection for articulating the essence—and, therefore, the function or purpose—of something or someone, for defining its necessary qualities, builds on the original search of the Presocratics for the ultimate substance that lies beyond accidental appearances. We, suspicious of detached philosophical pronouncements on essences and far more comfortable with wisdom wrested from lived experience, must bear in mind how novel and fascinating this pursuit of essences—this insistence on precision rather than impressions—was in its time and how truly … essential it has proved to Western traditions of science and thought.
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 entireoeuvre.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, anintellectuals’ 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 'margin-bottom:0cm;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align: justify;text-indent:12.0pt;line-height:14.4pt'>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 all 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 goingafter 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.
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 toimmortality 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 ofbeauty, 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.”
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 andHesiod 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-contemporaryPlatonists 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 wordsacademyand 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 excellent 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 gymnasiumbuilt 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.
For Plato, ultimate reality is the World of the Forms, the dwelling place of the One—the Good, the True, the Beautiful, the Just. Plato never makes quite clear whether these essences are simply qualities of the One or separate entities (or, most likely, occupy some middle ground). Rather, he reasons, if there are examples of good men in the world (and there are), this can only be because they have a share in Goodness itself, which must therefore exist somewhere beyond all mortal instances of goodness. So it goes with all the other abstractions—as we saw, for instance, in Diotima’s explanation of how beautiful boys participate in some aspect of Beauty itself, as well as in Socrates’s hope of encountering after his death the Justice that exists beyond all our faulty attempts to establish just procedures in this world. For that matter, all the things we know in this world are but feeble examples of their ultimate Forms, which exist beyond all physical instances. Thus, in the World of the Forms, there must be the Form of Tableness and Chairness, the exemplars for all the tables and chairs we find in our world. It is to this World of the Forms, the ultimate reality beyond the top of Diotima’s ladder, that Plato points in Raphael’s circular fresco.
Pointing downward, Aristotle says that no such world exists and that even broad-browed Plato has never glimpsed such a “reality,” except in fantasy. The World of the Forms is the result of a mistake in logic. Forms do not exist apart from the beings they inform. Every table does indeed have a form, that is, a principle of organization by which the carpenter constructs a wooden platform supported by four legs or by three legs or by whatever he has in mind. This form, which exists in the carpenter’s mind, is the formal cause of the table—but it can have no existence except in the carpenter’s mind and at length in his work. To speak otherwise—to say that there is an absolute Tableness floating somewhere that gives form to all particular tables—is “to speak abstractly and idly,” said Aristotle. Plato was an idealist, that is, someone who believes that ideas constitute a higher reality, separate from material things. Aristotle was a materialist—a qualified materialist, however, since he believed with Plato that the rational part of a human being, thepsyche, is immortal.
But more than being a philosopher—it must be confessed, of lesser creativity and inherent interest than his master—Aristotle was a categorizer, in fact the greatest categorizer who ever lived. It was he who divided different forms of knowledge from one another—especially, philosophy from the physical sciences—and gave us the academic categories we still use today. He is responsible for the filing cabinet of the Western world—all those -ologies, -ses, and -ics—every term from analysis to biology (which science he invented outright), from metaphysics (the term is his alone) to meteorology, from politics (that is, the theory and practice of the polis) to zoology.
He was especially drawn to the study of logic—he was, indeed, its formal inventor—and he laid out all the basic rules for rational thinking and enumerated all the fallacies by which we may fall into logical error. He divided causes into four kinds: the efficient cause (which produces the effect; say, the carpenter), the material cause (the “matter” to be worked; say, the wood), the formal cause (the essence or “form” introduced by the efficient cause; say, the idea in the carpenter’s mind), and the final cause (the purpose for which the thing exists; say, to serve food). God, thought Aristotle, was the ultimate final cause, though his god, the Unmoved Mover, was quite unlike ours, a being with no interest in the universe that depended on him. Aristotle invented the syllogism and pointed out the difference between a priori and a posteriori reasoning.6
In the words of the great British classicist Paul Harvey, “Aristotelian logic more than any other single influence formed the European mind.” Many of Aristotle’s observations—especially the scientific ones about, for instance, the movements of celestial bodies and about procreation as the sole purpose of human sexuality—have not weathered the test of time. (Galileo’s trouble with the Catholic hierarchy was caused by his unraveling the Aristotelian cosmology to which the hierarchs had wedded themselves. Everyone’s trouble with the Catholic hierarchy in our day is caused by its continued adherence to Aristotelian observations on human sexuality that everyone else knows are inadequate.) But the principal problem in reading Aristotle today is that, unlike the far more eloquent Plato, he is so very dull.
One could make a good case that Aristotle’s real intellectual father—not of his tiresome prose but of the universality of his interests—was not so much Plato as Herodotus of Halicarnassus. Born early in the fifth century B.C. in an Ionian-influenced city on the southwest coast of Asia, Herodotus, in common with the Presocratics, was a figure of insatiable curiosity. He wrote a nine-book account of the Persian Wars—the Greek term for the long struggle between the feisty little Greek city-states and the endlessly powerful empire that lay to their east, the supposedly unbeatable Persians, who occupied most of the known world. This epic struggle, which began on the plain of Marathon and encompassed the tragic defeat of the Spartan Legion at Thermopylae,7 ended eleven years later in 479 B.C. with decisive victory for the Greek forces and solidified their consciousness of themselves as a nation, a nation superior even to the most powerful empire of all time. Herodotus called his accounts historiai (investigations), a word that soon took on the connotation it retains to this day. Herodotus indeed was called by subsequent generations “the father of history.” But his nine books range far and wide, Book 2, for instance, being devoted almost solely to a description of exotic Egypt, which the Persians had invaded. Within his historical narrative Herodotus pursued matters scientific, archaeological, anthropological, ethnographic; and in this way—in his astonishing diversity of interests—he was the predecessor of Aristotle.
Thucydides, the masterful Athenian historian of the generation after Herodotus, took Herodotus’s techniques—his endless strings of gossipy inquiries—and raised them to a new level of seriousness. His subject was the Peloponnesian War, the war between Athens and Sparta. Seafaring Athens, perfectly positioned to maintain ties throughout the Aegean and into the Black Sea, over to the Mediterranean, into the Adriatic, and as far as the Tyrrhenian Sea, had turned out to be the principal beneficiary of the Persian defeat, coming to control the alliance of diverse city-states that had coalesced to save Greece. But as Athens gained more and more power, the sheer threat of its seemingly global influence made war with threatened, landlocked Sparta inevitable; after many skirmishes and attempts at peace, war was joined decisively in 431 and lasted nearly thirty years. Thucydides in his high seriousness wished his work to become a “possession for all time,” not a clever bauble “written for display, to make an immediate impression.” In his tightly compressed prose, he eschewed altogether the impressionistic effects of the storyteller; he saw himself, rather, as a scientist or physician who searches below surface phenomena to determine exact underlying causes. He distinguished sharply between the immediate pretexts for the war—quarrels about Athens’s alliances with lesser cities—and the principal cause, which Thucydides saw clearly as Sparta’s fear of Athens’s never-ending expansion. Men go to war, he concluded, out of “honor, fear, and interest”—a conclusion that has never been improved on. Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides had no truck with oracles and omens; gods are entirely absent from his narrative.
His determination to look reality in the face was unswerving, even to the point of showing how war—this war and all wars—causes the degeneration of society:
Practically the whole of the Hellenic world was convulsed, with rival parties in every state—democratic leaders trying to bring in the Athenians, and oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans.… To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense. Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect.… As a result … there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The plain way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society became divided into camps in which no man trusted his fellow.
Thucydides, always looking for the skull beneath the skin, employs abstractions—aggression, courage, moderation, fanatical enthusiasm—as if they were actors in his drama. Though he attempts complete impartiality (and largely succeeds), his admiration forPericles, Athens’s embattled, larger-than-life leader, shines through, as does his love for his ancestral city.
In 404 B.C., Athens lost the war, from which it would never entirely recover. For a short time, it even lost its democracy and had to bow to Spartan tyranny. But its brilliant son Thucydides, following the path blazed by Herodotus, had succeeded in creating an entirely new mode of knowledge, independent of philosophical inquiry. No longer would knowledge be the sole province of scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers, those who observed natural phemomena or tried to discover the essences of things or contemplated a world beyond the world. Close attention to human action—society and politics, war and peace—could yield another kind of knowledge. And this knowledge, the result of meditation on the past and close consideration of human affairs, could yield new principles, quite unlike anything established by philosophy or the sciences, to guide humanity in the future.
1 The priestess of Apollo at Delphi was famed for her oracles. Recently, archaeologists have uncovered, under the sanctuary where she made her ambiguous pronouncements, a chasm that was known in the ancient world and from which intoxicating fumes escaped. There is every likelihood that the priestess was high.
2 Most translations of Plato make him sound like your old philosophy prof, the one whose sere notes flaked like the last leaves of autumn as he drew them delicately from his battered portfolio. But in Greek, Plato still sounds fresh, piquant, and provocative. He is even a sly mimic, able to reproduce the characteristic speech of each of his players—the earnest hesitations of Polymarchus, for instance, the bull-in-a-china-shop huffings of Thrasymachus, the foxy subtleties of Socrates. Robin Waterfield is, so far as I know, the first English-language translator to give each of Plato’s players a characteristic voice with a contemporary ring, while at the same time capturing many of the ambiguities and allusions of Plato’s argument (if, necessarily, abandoning an attempt to reproduce the knotted eloquence of Plato’s Greek). I use his translations throughout this section.
3 Plato published about twenty-five dialogues of widely differing lengths over a period of fifty years, as well as the Apology, the speech given by Socrates in his own defense. Though the authenticity of a few of these dialogues is disputed, there is no reason to doubt that we have them all. There are also extant thirteen letters, though whether these should be attributed to Plato or to his circle is still hotly debated. The vagaries of history by which we came to possess some but not all the books of the Greco-Roman library are the subject of How the Irish Saved Civilization, the introductory volume in this series. Despite the depredations of time and barbarians, however, all (or nearly all) the works of certain authors—especially Plato, Virgil, and Cicero—were saved because their texts came to be thought of as quasi-sacred scriptures, penned by specimen homines naturaliter Christiani. The complete works of Homer, who certainly didn’t fit this category, were saved because he was the inventor of literary Greek (and innumerable passages in subsequent Greek texts would be almost impenetrable without reference to the Iliad and the Odyssey). The saving or loss of works by most other authors, however, must be chalked up to such circumstances as which collections of books were torched by barbarians. Surely no copyist in any age would have chosen to save, say, the mounds of Pindar’s athletic odes that we still possess in preference to the few sad scraps of Sappho that are her only legacy.
4 These verses are my condensed version of Agathon’s peroration. The actual text in Plato goes on and on. Agathon’s cheap use of rhyme is intended by Plato as evidence of airheadedness.
5 In the common Greek view, the passions that move us are instances of divine possession, even if, like anger or eros, they can lead to destruction. Other Greek words are also translated into English as “love”: philia, which implies filial respect (as in philosophia), and agapē, which indicates an affectionate kindness (as between siblings) but lacks erotic coloring. Agapē was the word Jews chose to translate the Hebrew ahava (in earliest times, pronounced “ahaba”) into Greek (as in the commandment “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself”); and Christians would employ it with similar force. When God is called “love” in the New Testament, the word used is not eros but agapē. Ahavaandagapē are so close phonetically as to lead one to suspect that the Greeks may have borrowed the word from the Jews and then altered it slightly to suit their sense of sound.
6 Many of Greece’s historical events have entered our language as symbolic milestones. Before the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C., the Athenian runner Phidippides was sent to ask Sparta’s help. He ran the first “marathon” by covering the distance between Athens and Sparta, about 125 miles, in one day and then by running back to Athens. According to legend, he then ran on (26 miles farther) to join the battle at Marathon, then ran back to Athens to announce the Greek victory and then dropped dead. The valor of the Greek soldiers who fought at Marathon—the Marathonomachoi, as they were called—so inspired Greece that Aeschylus, for one, asked that his epitaph not speak of his plays but state that his only glory was that he fought at Marathon.
A decade later, a small force of Spartans perished at Thermopylae, a supposedly indefensible pass between steep cliffs and sea, but their deaths proved the decisive turning point of the war, preventing the Persian army from descending on Greece—which would have spelled the end of everything that came later. It would, in a real sense, have spelled the end of Western history. The touching epitaph for the Spartans, who called themselves Lacedaemonians, was written by the lyric poet Simonides and carved in stone on the walls of the pass:
Tell them in Lacedaemon, passer-by,
That here obedient to their words we lie.
John Ruskin thought these the noblest words ever uttered by man.
7 In a priori (“from what went before”) reasoning, we deduce an effect from a cause or a result from a principle—as we always do, for instance, in mathematical proofs. In a posteriori (“from what came after”) reasoning, we argue from the effect to the cause—which is how court cases are argued, inferring, for instance, the interior disposition of malice from the act of murder.