Plato and Erotic Reciprocity

Author(s): David M. Halperin

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Classical Antiquity, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Apr., 1986), pp. 60-80
Published by: University of California Press
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 DAVID M. HALPERIN

Plato and Erotic Reciprocity

Friendship and love are always mutual in their fulfillment, though they may origi
nate only in one person: this Plato shows, primarily in the Lysis, the Alcibiades,
and then in the great dialogues on love. Convinced of this, could Plato transform
Socrates into an erotic character and have him teach the mutuality of all friend
ship and love if, in the passion of his own youth, he had met in him a man devoid
of love?1

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the eleventh annualmeeting of the Interna
tional Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 28May
1982. I wish to thank the sponsors of the conference and themembers of the program committee
for invitingme to address the Society. I also wish to thankGregory Vlastos for a helpful critique of
the revised version. The revised paper was subsequently presented at the American Academy in
Rome, Brown University, the University of California, Berkeley, theNational Humanities Center,
and the University of California, San Diego, where it benefited from the careful scrutiny it re
ceived; it benefited further from the criticisms of John J.Winkler, John Bussanich, W. R. Connor,
and Kenneth J. Reckford, to whom I am also grateful.
Citations from the following authors, unless otherwise noted, refer to the following works:
Robert Boyers and George Steiner, eds., Homosexuality: Sacrilege, Vision, Politics = Salmagundi
58-59 (1982-83); K. J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge,Mass. 1978). Michel Foucault,
L'Usage des plaisirs = Histoire de la sexuality 2 (Paris 1984). Paul Friedlinder, Plato, trans.Hans
Meyerhoff, Bollingen Series 59: vol. I:An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Princeton 1969); vol. II: The
Dialogues: First Period (New York 1964); vol. III: The Dialogues: Second and Third Periods
(Princeton 1969).Mark Golden, "Slavery and Homosexuality at Athens," Phoenix 38 (1984) 308
24. W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy: vol. III: The Fifth-Century Enlightenment
(Cambridge 1969); vol. IV: Plato, theMan and His Dialogues: Earlier Period (Cambridge 1975);
vol. V: The Later Plato and theAcademy (Cambridge 1978). Terence Irwin, Plato's Moral Theory:
The Early andMiddle Dialogues (Oxford 1977). Martha Nussbaum, "The Speech of Alcibiades: A
Reading of Plato's Symposium," Philosophy and Literature 3 (1979) 131-72. Gregory Vlastos,
Platonic Studies, 2nd ed. (Princeton 1981).
1. Friedlinder, I, 46.

? 1986 BY THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

 Plato and Erotic Reciprocity
HALPERIN: 61

EVER SINCEJohn Addington Symonds called to the attention of his fellow

Victorians what he delicately referred to as "A Problem in Greek Ethics,"
social historians have been accustomed to treat the Symposium and Phaedrus
of Plato as prime sources of information about the theory and practice of sex in
ancient Greece.2 An unfortunate consequence of this (perhaps unavoidable)
tendency-quite apart from whatever biases it may have imported into our
outlook on ancient varieties of sexual experience in general-has been an
inability on the part of scholars to distinguish Plato's own views from the
dominant ideology of his culture.3 Only within the last two decades has new
research intomany aspects of sexuality in the ancient world made it possible to
abandon our all but exclusive reliance on Platonic texts and, instead, to bring
to bear on the study of Plato an independent knowledge of Greek sexual
attitudes and practices. Sufficient progress had already been made by 1973 to
enable Gregory Vlastos to claim in a pioneering and controversial essay on
"The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato" that the Greek philosopher
actually discovered "a new form of pederastic love, fully sensual in its reso
nance, but denying itself consummation, transmutingphysical excitement into
imaginative and intellectual energy."4 The exact nature and extent of Plato's

2. J. A. Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of

Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially toMedical Psychologists and Jurists (London 1901) 8n., 8
10, 30-44 (esp. 31-35), 48-55, on the value of Plato as a witness to the sexual behavior of the
Greeks. (The essay was originally composed in 1873, privately circulated in an edition of ten copies
in 1883, later revised, posthumously appended to the first, subsequently withdrawn, printing of
Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion inApril 1897, and finally published in a limited edition of 100
copies in 1901.) Plato's authority continues to be invoked by writers on the subject who descend
from the same antiquarian tradition, of whom themost recent and voluminous (700 pages) isFelix
Buffiere, Eros adolescent: la pederastie dans laGrece antique (Paris 1980).
3. Thus, G. M. A. Grube, Plato's Thought (1935; Boston 1958) 87, has in effect substituted
"theGreeks" for "Plato" in the following statement: "It iswell known that homosexual love alone
was generally regarded by the Greeks as fulfilling the highest desires of men, and that the love of
men for women was little more than a means of procreation." (For a corrective, see K. J. Dover,
Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato andAristotle [Oxford 1974] 211-12; Robert F. Sutton,
Jr., "The Interaction between Men andWomen Portrayed on Attic Red-Figure Pottery" [Ph.D.
diss., UNC Chapel Hill 1981] 186-89, 224-25; James Redfield, "Notes on the Greek Wedding,"
Arethusa 15 [1982] 181-201, esp. 192-98; Mary R. Lefkowitz, "Wives and Husbands," Greece &
Rome 30 [1983] 31-47, esp. 37-40; Claude Calame, "Eros inventore e organizzatore della society
greca antica," in L'Amore in Grecia, ed. Calame, 3d ed. [Rome 1984], ix-xl, esp. xvii-xxii;
Foucault, 165-66, 222-23.) A more cautious estimate isoffered by Dover, 13: "Modern readers of
Phaedrus and Symposium ... are apt to believe thatwhat they find therein is the quintessential
doctrine of the Greeks on thewhole topic of homosexuality, expressed in definitive terms by their
acknowledged spokesman. Yet Plato's right to speak for Greek philosophy-to say nothing of a
right to speak forGreek civilisation-was not conceded by other pupils of Socrates."
4. Vlastos, 22-23, echoing Grube (supra n.3) 114: "[Platonic] lovers do desire physical inter
course but control this desire and transmute it into a passion for common study." The main points
of Vlastos's argument seem tome to have been largelyunaffected by the criticisms of Diskin Clay,
"Platonic Studies and the Study of Plato," Arion n.s. 2 (1975) 116-32, esp. 119-27; L. A. Kosman,
"Platonic Love," in Facets of Plato's Philosophy, ed. W. H. Werkmeister, Phronesis suppl. 2
(Assen 1976) 53-69; Donald Levy, "The Definition of Love in Plato's Symposium," Journal of the
History of Ideas 40 (1979) 285-91; Nussbaum; James Haden, "On Socrates, with Reference to
62 CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY Volume 5/No. 1/April 1986

contribution to Greek thinking about themoral conventions governing sexual

ity have only begun to emerge more recently, however. Inwhat follows I shall
attempt to illuminate one facet of Plato's originality.

I. HIERARCHY IN GREEK HOMOSEXUALITY AND

RECIPROCITY IN PLATONIC HOMOEROTICS

In a justly famous passage of Plato's Phaedrus (255c-e) Socrates is inspired

to analyze the dynamic of attraction between the twomembers of a conven
tional, if rather high-minded, paederastic relationship.

[When lover and beloved are together, a flood of passion] pours in

upon the lover; and part of it is absorbed within him, but when he can
contain no more the rest flows away outside him; and as a breath of
wind or an echo, rebounding from a smooth hard surface, goes back to
its place of origin, even so the stream of beauty turns back and re
enters the eyes of the fair beloved; and so by the natural channel it
reaches his soul and gives it fresh vigour, watering the roots of the
wings and quickening them to growth: whereby the soul of the be
loved, in its turn, is filled with love. So he loves, yet knows not what
he loves: he does not understand, he cannot tell what has come upon
him; like one that has caught a disease of the eye from another, he
cannot account for it, not realising that his lover is as itwere amirror
in which he beholds himself. And when the other is beside him, he
shares his respite from anguish; when he is absent, he likewise shares
his longing and being longed for; since he possesses that counter-love
which is the image of love, though he supposes it to be friendship
rather than love, and calls it by that name. He feels a desire, like the
lover's yet not so strong, to behold, to touch, to kiss him, to share his
couch: and now ere long the desire, as one might guess, leads to the
act.5

Gregory Vlastos," Review of Metaphysics 33 (1979-80) 371-89, esp. 382-87; and A. W. Price,
"Loving Persons Platonically," Phronesis 26 (1981) 25-34. See, further, the excellent earlier dis
cussions of this topic by Ivo Bruns, "Attische Liebestheorien und die zeitliche Folge des platon
ischen Phaidros sowie der beiden Symposien," Neue Jahrbiicher fir das klassische Altertum, Ge
schichte und deutsche Literatur und fir Pidagogik 5 (1900) 17-37; Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The
Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet, vol. II: In Search of theDivine Centre (Oxford
1947) 174-97; Friedlander, I, 44-58; and Irving Singer, The Nature of Love: Plato toLuther (New
York 1966) 49-90.
5. R. Hackforth, trans., Plato's Phaedrus (Cambridge 1952) 105. All quotations from the
Phaedrus are inHackforth's translation (other quotations from Plato are my own rendering); for
an argument against Hackforth's acceptance of anapetasan in place of themanuscripts' anapterosan
at 255c7, see G. J. de Vries, A Commentary on the Phaedrus of Plato (Amsterdam 1969) 174 ad
loc. This passage has recently been the subject of two psychoanalytic commentaries, both influ
enced by Lacan: Marie-Hel1ne Bohner-Cante [HannaGlyphe], Platonisme et sexuality:Genese de
lametaphysique platonicienne (Toulouse 1981) 305-11; W. Thomas MacCary, Childlike Achilles:
Ontogeny and Phylogeny in the Iliad (New York 1982) 19, confounding the roles of lover and
HALPERIN:
Plato and Erotic Reciprocity 63

In this charming description (with its far-fetched analogies from physics and
medicine)6 of how the beloved, having infected his lover with erotic mania,
catches the disease himself,7 Plato is actually making a startling point about
love and counter-love. For in a conventional Athenian paederastic relation
ship, the younger partner was not held to experience sexual desire but was
expected to submit (if indeed he chose to submit at all) to the advances of his
older lover out of a feeling of mingled gratitude, esteem, and affection (or
philia)-rather like a good Victorian wife.8 As Xenophon emphasizes in his
own Symposium (8.21), "the boy9 does not share in the man's pleasure in

beloved: "the erastes finds in the eromenos a mirror for his own beauty ... so that the erotic
pattern is superficially homosexual but essentially narcissistic."Marcel Proust, A la recherche du
tempsperdu, ed. Pierre Clarac and Andre Ferre, 3 vols. (Paris 1954) I, 609, in his reformulation of
this passage, also reversed the roles of lover and beloved in order to make them conform to a
projective model of desire: "Quand on aime, l'amour est trop grand pour pouvoir etre contenu
tout entier en nous; il irradie vers la personne aimee, recontre en elle une surface qui l'arrete, le
force a revenir vers son point de depart, et c'est ce choc en retour de notre propre tendresse que
nous appelons les sentiments de l'autre et qui nous charme plus qu'a l'aller, parce que nous ne
reconnaissons pas qu'elle vient de nous." In Plato it is the beloved, not the lover,who falls in love
with his own reflection.
The mirror-passage in the Phaedrus was also elaborated, somewhat mischievously, by
Achilles Tatius 1.9: "'You do not realize how marvellous it is to behold one's beloved. This
pleasure is greater than that of consummation, for the eyes receive each others' reflections and
they form therefrom small icons as clearly as inmirrors. Such outpouring of beauty flowing down
into the soul is a kind of copulation at a distance' " (I quote, by kind permission, from the
forthcoming translation of Achilles Tatius by John J.Winkler). Cf. also pseudo-Lucian Erotes 47
48; PlutarchMoralia 765a-766b. For the earlier tradition that located the source of eros in the eyes
(of the beloved, usually) and thatmade eye-contact between lover and beloved the erotic stimulus
par excellence, see the long list of passages assembled by A. C. Pearson, "Phrixus and Demodice:
A Note on Pindar, Pyth. IV. 162 f.," CR 23 (1909) 255-57, to which addHesiod Theogony 910
11; pseudo-Hesiod Shield 7-8; Alcman fr. 3.61-62 (PMG 3, p. 12); Ibycus fr. 6 (PMG 287, p.
150); Sophocles Trachiniae 107; Euripides Hippolytus 525-6; Agathon fr. 29 (Nauck2);Gorgias
Helen 19 = fr. B11 (vol. II, p. 294.7 Diels-Kranz); Aristotle fr. 96 (Rose); Athenaeus 13.564b-f;
and a fragmentary poem ascribed toAspasia by Herodicus of Babylon and quoted by Masurius in
Athenaeus 5.219e.
6. On Plato's willingness, demonstrated by this passage, to combine mechanistic and meta
physical orders of reasoning to describe the operation of eros, see Bruns (supra n.4) 19-20;
Walther Kranz, "Diotima von Mantineia," Hermes 61 (1926) 437-47, esp. 443; E. R. Dodds, The
Greeks and the Irrational, Sather Classical Lectures 25 (Berkeley 1951) 231 n.59; Verdenius (infra
n.40) 137.
7. On the imagery of this passage, see Anne Lebeck, "The Central Myth of Plato's Phae
drus," Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies 13 (1972) 267-90, esp. 273-76, 278-80; John Van
Sickle, "Plat. Phaedr. 255d, 3-6," Museum Criticum 8/9 (1973-74) 198-99; also Maria Grazia
Bonanno, "Osservazioni sul tema della 'giusta' reciprocity amorosa da Saffo ai comici," Quaderni
urbinati di cultura classica 16 (1973) 110-20, esp. 113-16. Dorothy Tarrant, "The Touch of So
crates," CQ n.s. 8 (1958) 95-98, compares Plato's use of the verb apolaud in this passage (hoion
ap' allou ophthalmias apolelaukos) to its function in a related passage, Symposium 175c-d (par'
eme katakeiso, hina kai tou sophou haptomenos sou apolauso).
8. Dover, 90, elaborates this analogy.
9. The term boy (pais inGreek) refers by convention to the junior partner, or to the one who
plays that role, regardless of his actual age (Dover, 16, 85-87; Buffiere [supran.2] 605-14). That
male homosexual behavior among the ancient Greeks featured a hierarchical division of roles
64 CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY Volume 5/No. 1/April 1986

intercourse, as a woman does; cold sober, he looks upon the other drunkwith
sexual desire."10The accuracy of Xenophon's characterization of the conven
tionalAthenian attitude-if not of the social actuality concealed by it-is over
whelmingly confirmed by the pictorial representations of male homosexual
behavior on Attic vases11 as well as by a variety of ancient literary sources,12all
of which testify to the clear moral boundaries differentiating the roles of lover
and beloved in antiquity. As K. J. Dover concludes, theGreeks assumed that

according to age has recently been called into question by John Boswell, Christianity, Social
Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago 1980) 28-30, though in a note he admits the possibility
that such a hierarchy of roles did exist in classical Athens; against his arguments must now be
weighed the evidence amassed by Dover, 84-91, and byMark Golden, "Aspects of Childhood in
Classical Athens" (Ph.D. diss., Toronto 1981) 127-28, 142-47, 156 n.40 (Boswell, however, re
mains unconvinced: see his "Revolutions, Universals and Sexual Categories," in Boyers and
Steiner, 89-113, esp. 109 n.42). The issue has now, I believe, been definitively settled by Golden,
312, 318 n.47, 321-22.
In order to highlight the historical specificity of the social phenomenon under consideration, I
have chosen to speak of male homosexual behavior among Plato's contemporaries as "paederasty"
rather than "homosexuality" (on this point, see Cartledge [infran. 13] 17-18, and now Patzer [infra
n.13]); theword may have unwelcome associations for some modern readers, but at least it has the
advantage of being the word employed by theGreeks themselves to describe their own institutions
(other scholars prefer to speak of Greek "pseudo-homosexuality" [Devereux, infran.14] or "quasi
sexuality" [Dover, vii]: cf. Lionel Ovesey, Homosexuality and Pseudohomosexuality [New York
1969]).
10. Quoted by Dover, 52; see Foucault, 245-46. Xenophon means only that the junior
partner does not experience a specifically sexual pleasure during intercourse, and so Xenophon's
remark does not exclude the equally conventional view, voiced by Plato's Aristophanes, that a
willing boy "enjoys" and "welcomes" (khairein, aspazesthai: Symposium 191e-192b) his lover's
physical attentions; welcoming them is one thing, after all, but desiring them sexually is quite
another (for the fullest description of a beloved's affectionate response, which nonetheless stops
short of erotic desire, see Xenophon Hiero 1.35-37): the objections to Dover on this score raised
by Thomas S. W. Lewis, "The Brothers of Ganymede," inBoyers and Steiner, 147-65, esp. 160,
are therefore groundless. The real disagreement between Xenophon and Plato, as a comparison of
the two passages quoted in the text implies, hinges on the nature of the beloved's proper response
to his older partner (is it esteem or counter-love?): for a discussion of the ancient controversy, see
Bruns (supra n.4) 26.
11. See Dover, 91-103; Golden (supra n.9) 128-29, with copious references (148-54); now
Golden, esp. 312-15. Possible deviations from the normal pattern are discussed by Golden, 321
22, and by Eva C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics inAncient Athens (New York
1985) 277-85, esp. 277: "In some cases the youth is shown with what may be termed a 'puerile
erection'; evidently the vase painters wanted to show that the passive partner does derive some
pleasure from the contact, even without active participation." Of particular interest in this regard
are two vases discussed by Keuls: London W 39 (ABV 297, #16) = Keuls, 281, pls. 249 and 250,
and W. Berlin F 2279 (ARV 115, #2) = Keuls, 222, pls. 196 and 197, both illustrated also by
Dover (who, after considering the evidence, interprets it differently [95-97]) as B250 and R196.
The assertion made by Nussbaum, 156, that no er6menoi with erections can be found inGreek art
may therefore stand in need of qualification, especially in view of Dover's own willingness to admit
the possibility of counter-examples (97) and the evidence of a third vase (ARV 15, #11) = Keuls,
286, pl. 255, interpreted differently by Dover (as R18: 97) and by Keuls, 285. Such counter
examples, if that iswhat these are, nonetheless remain quite rare.
12. E.g., Aristophanes Clouds 979-80; Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 8.1157a3-14, 1159bll
19, 9.1164a3-12; Ovid Art of Love 2.682-84 (bizarrely interpreted byWilkinson [infra n.13] 30);
Martial 11.22; pseudo-Lucian Erotes 27.
 Plato and Erotic Reciprocity
HALPERIN: 65

"virtually no male both penetrates other males and submits to penetration by

other males at the same stage of his life," and therefore "the reciprocal desire
of partners belonging to the same age-category is virtually unknown inGreek
homosexuality"; rather, "in a homosexual relationship . . . the eromenos [i.e.,
"beloved"] is not expected to reciprocate the eros ["desire"] of the erastes
["lover"]: instead, the younger partner, if he behaves honorably, "does not
seek or expect sensual pleasure from contact with an erastes, begrudges any
contact until the erastes has proved himself worthy of concession, never per
mits penetration of any orifice in his body, and never assimilates himself to a
woman by playing a subordinate role in a position of contact."13With such
rules in force, the very nature of male physiology prevents each partner from
both giving and receiving pleasure in the sexual act at the same time and to the
same degree: the hierarchical disposition of roles enjoined upon homosexual

13. Dover, ln., 16, 52, 103. See also JeffreyHenderson, TheMaculate Muse: Obscene Lan
guage inAttic Comedy (New Haven 1975) 204-20; John R. Ungaretti, "Pederasty,Heroism, and
the Family in Classical Greece," Journal of Homosexuality 3 (Spring 1978) 291-300; Paul Veyne,
"La famille et l'amour sous leHaut-Empire romain,"Annales (E.S.C.) 33 (1978) 35-63, esp. 50
55; idem, "L'homosexualit6e Rome," in Sexualites occidentales, ed. Philippe Aries and Andre
Bejin = Communications 35 (1982) 26-33; L. P. Wilkinson, "ClassicalApproaches. IV: Homo
sexuality," Encounter 51.3 (Sept. 1978) 21-31, esp. 24; Richard J. Hoffman, "Some Cultural
Aspects of Greek Male Homosexuality," Journal of Homosexuality 5 (Spring 1980) 217-26; K. J.
Dover, ed., Plato: Symposium, Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics (Cambridge 1980) 4; Lewis
(supra n.10) and Foucault, esp. 55-57, 207-48. (For a different approach to this topic, emphasizing
the significance of homosexuality as an initiation rite in ancient Greece, see Jan Bremmer, "An
Enigmatic Indo-European Rite: Paederasty," Arethusa 13 [1980] 279-98; Paul Cartledge, "The
Politics of Spartan Pederasty," Proceedings of theCambridge Philological Society n.s. 27 [1981] 17
36; Harald Patzer, Die griechische Knabenliebe, Sitzungsberichte der wissenschaftlichen Gesell
schaft an der J. W. Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt am Main, 19.1 [Wiesbaden 1982]; Bernard
Sergent, L'homosexualite dans lamythologie grecque [Paris 1982]; Jean-Louis Durand and Alain
Schnapp, "Boucherie sacrificielle et chasses initiatiques," in La cite des images, ed. anon [Paris
1984] 48-66, esp. 57-66; Alain Schnapp, "Eros en chasse," in La cite des images, 67-83; Calame
[supra n.3] xi-xvi; Keuls [supra n.11 276-85; and cf. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality:
vol. I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley [New York 1978] 61.) The Greek tendency to
polarize into active and passive the sexual roles assumed by males in homosexual contacts and to
associate those roles, respectively, with distinct age-categories belongs to a much larger cultural
pattern into which the Greek evidence fitswith serene inevitability: for a survey of the anthropo
logical literature on this topic, see Bremmer, Cartledge, and Randolph Trumbach, "London's
Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior andWestern Culture in the 18th Century," Journal of Social
History 11 (1977) 1-33, esp. 2-9, with notes.
In a highly critical review of Dover (AJP 101 [1980] 121-24), Nancy Demand doubts that the
er6menos failed to experience sexual pleasure during intercourse (on this point, see supra n.10)
and judges Dover's picture of Athenian sexual behavior generally implausible; her skepticism is
countered by Jeffrey Henderson who, in his own review (Classical World 72 [1978-79] 434),
accepts Dover's reconstruction of theAthenian normative ideal, rightly emphasizing "the palpable
gulf between what is prescribed by convention and what actually goes on." Note, also, Dover's
own skepticism (96), remarked by Nussbaum, 156, and his own awareness of "the gulf between
reality and the convention that the er6menos is not aroused" (125n.); see, further,Dover's discus
sion of the evidence for the prevalence of anal intercourse in paederastic relations among the
Greeks (99, 100n.; on this issue, see now Golden, 314 n.34). I believe Dover's thoroughgoing
distinction between social norms and sexual practices has tended to escape the notice of his critics.
66 CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY Volume 5/No. 1/April 1986

lovers by Athenian moral convention gives rise in practice to a socially and

psychologically asymmetrical relationship. According to the customary Greek
idiom, the senior partner in a paederastic love-affair has a monopoly of eros;
the junior partner, if he is responsive to his lover, expresses philia: he is
philerastes, "fond of his erastes," and ismoved to antiphilein, "to feel affection
for him in return" (only women are said to anteran, to return their lovers'
sexual desire).14
Plato's departure from conventional norms of thought and speech is

14. Dover, 52-53. Cf. George Devereux, "Greek Pseudo-Homosexuality and the 'Greek
Miracle,' " SymbOslo 42 (1968) 69-92, esp. 74. Michel Foucault, "On the Genealogy of Ethics:
An Overview of Work in Progress," in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York 1984)
340-72, esp. 344-46. Further evidence for the lack of reciprocity in paederastic relations among
the ancient Greeks has been assembled by Anne Giacomelli, "The Justice of Aphrodite in Sappho
Fr. 1," TAPA 110 (1980) 135-42. For philia as the proper response of a male beloved, see (e.g.)
Plato Symposium 191e7; Phaedrus 231e2, 237c8; Xenophon Hiero 1.32-38, 7.6; Symposium 8.16;
PlutarchMoralia 750d-e, 761a. For anteros as the feminine equivalent, compare Xenophon Sym
posium 8.3 (most of these passages are cited by Dover). The difference between feminine anteros
and masculine philia, as the only socially validated forms of loving response to the eras of amale
erastes, furnishes the point of Phaedrus' contrasting treatment of Alcestis and Achilles in Plato's
Symposium (179b-180b): the self-sacrifice of amale beloved who ismotivated solely by philia for a
lover, not by such eros aswomen normally feel, is adjudged eo ipsomore heroic. Later in the same
dialogue, Pausanias distinguishes between the eros of Aristogeiton and the philia of his beloved,
Harmodius (182c), pointing out that the lover's role is to eran and the beloved's is to philous
genesthai tois erastais (183c); Socrates similarly distinguishes his eros for Alcibiades from the
latter'sphilerastia (213c-d). Plato's Aristophanes differentiates the roles of lover and beloved by
referring to the one as paiderastes and the other as philerastes (Symposium 192b4). Plato's earliest
hint, in the Lysis, at the importance of reciprocity conforms, in keeping with the traditional subject
of that dialogue, to the conventional formulation: Socrates brings the conversation to a halt by
declaring, "It is necessary, then, for a genuine and not a pretended lover [erastes] to be loved/liked
[phileisthai] by his boy" (222a). On Plato's manipulation of traditional views in the Lysis, see
David K. Glidden, "The Lysis on Loving One's Own," CQ 31 (1981) 39-59; on reciprocity in the
Lysis, see Friedlander, I, 50-51, II, 95-102; Robert G. Hoerber, "Plato's Lysis," Phronesis 4
(1959) 15-28, esp. 21; Laszlo Versenyi, "Plato's Lysis," Phronesis 20 (1975): 185-98, esp. 197;
Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Logos and Ergon in Plato's Lysis," Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Herme
neutical Studies on Plato, trans. P. Chrisopher Smith (New Haven 1980) 1-20, esp. 10-11.
The only counter-example to all this is at best a dubious one: Pausanias 1.30.1 records an
altar to Anteros inAthens, dedicated by resident aliens to commemorate the suicide of an Athe
nian youth who belatedly appreciated the nobility of his foreign loverwhen the latter threw himself
off the Acropolis in obedience to the youth's contemptuous command (see, also, the Suda, s.v.
Meletus). The boy's suicide was motivated, however, not by anteros but by metanoia, a change of
heart, in Pausanias' telling of the story; anteros is the vindictive interpretation placed upon the
boy's impetuous act by the resident aliens, who construe Anteros to be an avenging deity (alastor).
In any case, it isworth noting that the boy mimics his lover's anteros only after the latter is dead.
The altars and figures of Eros and Anteros which Pausanias observed in the gymnasia at Elis
(6.23.3, 5) seem to have celebrated the spirit of rivalry (the usual meaning of anterts), rather than
reciprocity, to judge from Pausanias's description of the frieze (so Calame [supran.3] xii-xiii): an
example of the type appears to have survived on a Roman relief (see Roscher's Lexikon, I, 1368,
cited by J. G. Frazer, Pausanias's Description of Greece [repr.New York 1965], vol. IV, 103, ad
loc.); but cf. Plato Symposium 182b. On the cult of eros, see 0. Broneer, "Eros andAphrodite on
the North Slope of theAcropolis," Hesperia 1 (1932) 31-55, 2 (1933) 329-429; S. Fasce, Eros: la
figura e il culto (Genoa 1977).
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striking.14aSocrates claims that the beloved youth comes to participate in his

lover's passionate desire for him. The younger partner no longer feels mere
honor or esteem for his lover but is said to return his desire-though more
weakly, Socrates hastily adds in an effort to square his account with contem
porary moral standards and unwritten rules of social behavior. What the
beloved experiences, according to Socrates in the passage from the Phaedrus
quoted above, is not philia but eros, specifically an anteros ("counter-love"
in Hackforth's translation)-that is, an eros in return for eris, which is an
image or replica (eidolon) of his lover's er6s. Understandably, an inexperi
enced youngster is bewildered by this sensation: nothing in his breeding or
in his social training has prepared him for it. He can neither give a clear
account of it nor identify the source and object of his desire (the object of
his er6s is, unbeknownst to him, his own beauty); instead, he professes to
feel philia ("friendship" or affection) for his lover, as propriety requires and
his own social instincts encourage him to believe. Nonetheless, he actually
shares the erotic passion that has overcome his lover, or so Socrates insists.
The motive for Socrates' emphasis in this passage, and for his somewhat
over-ingenious special pleading, springs at least in part from the novelty of
his analysis.
Because eros, as Diotima argues in the Symposium (206e-207a), does not
aim at the physical possession of a beautiful object but at the lover's perpetual
possession of the good--or, in her conceptual shorthand, at immortality-and
because the possession of a discrete object, however enticing or adorable,
necessarily diverts the lover from the ultimate goal of his longing, no erotic
desire, no matter how intense, should (or, indeed, can) be sexually gratified.15
The Platonic doctrine thereby escapes the scandalous charge of applauding
sexual passivity. For should the beloved's anteros express itself sexually (i.e., as
a desire to be subjected to a passive role in intercourse), the unfortunate young
man is liable to incur the censure of his fellow citizens for shamelessness and
perversion 6-together with the ridiculewhich Alcibiades fears (or pretends to
fear: Symposium 217e-218b) will greet the recital of his own efforts to be

14a. Pace Calame (supra n.3), xxix-xxx.

15. I have argued this point at length in "Platonic Eros andWhat Men Call Love," Ancient
Philosophy 5 (forthcoming). I do not, of course, wish to imply that the erotic doctrines of the
Phaedrus and Symposium are identical in every respect (they differ strikingly, for example, in the
value they place on human beings as objects of er6s); I do regard them as fundamentally compati
ble, however: see Irwin, 323 n.62, for further arguments, and cf., generally, JohnD. Moore, "The
Relation between Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus," in Patterns in Plato's Thought, ed. J.M. E.
Moravcsik (Dordrecht 1973) 52-71.
16. See, e.g., Plutarch Moralia 768e; Dover, 52-53; 91: "That the eromenos should initiate
a homosexual act for its own sake is not a possibility admitted by [Plato's] Pausanias or by any
other Greek enthusiast or apologist for homosexual eros." See, further, Dover, 168-70, on
"perversion."
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ANTIQUITY Volume 5/No. 1/April 1986

seduced by Socrates-and even risks losing his civil rights.17Rather, the Pla
tonic approach all but erases the distinction between lover and beloved, be
tween the active and the passive partner-or, to put it better, the genius of
Plato's analysis is that it eliminates passivity altogether: according to Socrates,
both members of the relationship become active, desiring lovers; neither re
mains solely a passive object of desire. Thus, the way is cleared for a greater
degree of reciprocity in the expression of desire and in the exchange of affec
tion. Because his (ant)er6s, if guided properly, does not seek sexual consum
mation, the younger man is now free to return his older lover's passion without
shame or impropriety.

II. EROTIC RECIPROCITY IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL COMMUNITY

Relations among the members of Socrates' circle, as Plato portrays them,

illustrate the theory of erotic reciprocity sketched out by Socrates in the Phae
drus. For Socrates arouses in the beautiful youths whom he pursues ameasure
of desire equal to his own; as Alcibiades ruefully testifies (Symposium 217c,
222b), Socrates awakens in them an erotic response so powerful that they
pursue him as if he were a boy.18 For some of his followers, such as Aristode
mus, this erotic inspiration isproductive and congenial;l9 for others (Alcibiades
numbers Charmides and a certain Euthydemus,20 in addition to himself, among
the victims)-namely, those who hope to barter their physical beauty for wis
dom and so evade the claims of their own desire, or those who translate their
desire wholly into physical terms-the Socratic community is a theater of frus
tration and torment. Indeed, Socrates maintains what from a conventional
point of view is a highly paradoxical position: he is a lover himself, yet he
contrives to be surrounded by other lovers to whom he represents, in turn, an
object of love, even as they are objects of love for him.21

17. Dover, 103-9, 145-48; Keuls (supra n.11) 291-98. Loss of civil rights is the penalty for
prostitution, not for anteros or sexual passivity per se, but because the junior partner is not
conventionally supposed to derive sexual pleasure from playing his assigned role, any "boy"who
seeks out or otherwise evinces enthusiasm for such a role necessarily exposes himself to unpleasant
speculation about the nature of his motives-and so risks courting the general assumption that he
has engaged himself for pay (similarly, anyone who performs for hire the sort of job usually
assigned to slaves is liable to be accused of being of servile status: see Golden, 310 n.9). That the
Athenians appear to have found greed a more plausible explanation for the willingness of an
eromenos than sexual desire is a telling indication of what they considered sexually pleasurable and
what they did not.
18. Cf. Athenaeus 5.219d. For a vivid description of Socrates' effect on Alcibiades, see
Nussbaum, 156-57; cf. also Jaeger (supra n.4), 196.
19. Nussbaum, 150.
20. Symposium 222b; Euthydemus also appears inXenophon Memorabilia 4.2 and 1.2.29-30.
On the analogy between Alcibiades and Charmides, see infra n.23.
21. On Socrates' dual identity as a lover and a beloved, see David F. Krell, "Socrates'
Body," Southern Journal of Philosophy 10.4 (1972) 443-51; Michael Gagarin, "Socrates'Hybris
and Alcibiades' Failure," Phoenix 31 (1977) 22-37, esp. 28-30, 32-33; Plass (infra n. 38) 49-50;
HALPERIN:
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The reciprocal erotic dynamic distinctive to the Socratic community finds

its clearest exemplification in the Greater Alcibiades,22 where it is expressed
once again by the image of themirror. IfApollo, in his Delphic injunction, had
commanded man to see himself instead of to know himself, Socrates and Al
cibiades agree, man would have to use a mirror-preferably, the pupil of
another person's eye, because therein inheres the power of sight itself: "For,
thus, an eye gazing into another eye, and looking at that thingwith which it
sees and is best, would see itself" (132d-133b). In order to see ourselves truly,
we have to see ourselves seeing (since movement is a property of the rational
soul); otherwise, we glimpse only a static image of ourselves and do not know
ourselves as active, desiring, sentient beings. "Come then,my dear Alcibiades!
If the soul is to know herself, must she not in the same way look at another
soul, and specifically at that place in it in which occurs the excellence of a
soul-namely, wisdom [sophia]?" (133b). Alcibiades is persuaded by these
and other arguments; like Charmides before him,23 he offers to exchange his
role of being pursued for that of his pursuer and vows to attend on Socrates as
if he were a paedagogue. Socrates replies, "Noble fellow!Will my er6s [sc. for

John Brenkman, "TheOther and theOne: Psychoanalysis, Reading, the Symposium," inLiterature
and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading-Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore 1982)
396-456, esp. 428-34; Foucault, 264-65. Gagarin is properly sympathetic to the emotional difficul
tieswhich Socrates' ambivalent status creates for his youthful admirers, but he iswrong to suppose
with Alcibiades that Socrates' er6s is therefore nothing but an ironicpretense: for a corrective, see
Friedlander, I, 138-43, esp. 140: "It isnot his Eros that is amask; if anything is amask, it is the form
he adopts, his adaptation to the social forms of his age" (see also Singer [supra n.4] 51-52, on
Socrates' "ambivalence," and compare Walter Hamilton, trans., Plato: Symposium [Harmond
sworth 1951] 25-26). Gregory Vlastos, "The Paradox of Socrates," in The Philosophy of Socrates,
ed. Vlastos, Modem Studies in Philosophy (New York 1971) 16, convicts Socrates of a "failure of
love" on somewhat different grounds; see also Stanley Rosen, Plato's Symposium (NewHaven 1968)
279-80; Krell; and Nussbaum, 150-52, who argue that the Platonic ideal instantiated by Socrates in
the Symposium is incomplete. Cf. Robert Eisner, "Socrates as Hero," Philosophy and Literature 6
(1982): 106-18, esp. 114 and 116; Charles Altieri, "Plato's Performative Sublime and the Ends of
Reading," New Literary History 16 (1985) 251-73 for a general critique of Socrates' erotic paedag
ogy. On the peculiar erotic habits of Greek philosophers in general, see Bernard Frischer, The
SculptedWord: Epicureanism and Philosophical Recruitment inAncient Greece (Berkeley 1982) 56
57; and cf. Friedrich Schlegel, "Uber dieDiotima," Studien des klassischenAltertums, ed. E. Behler,
Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe 1.1 (Paderborn 1979; essay first publ. 1795) 70-115, esp. 77;
Michel Foucault, Le souci de soi = Histoire de la sexuality 3 (Paris 1984) 183-86.
22. A detailed commentary on this passage is provided by A. Soulez-Luccioni, "Le Para
digme de la vision de soi-meme dans 1' 'Alcibiademajeur,' "Revue deMetaphysique et deMorale
79 (1974) 196-222; see also Bohner-Cante (supra n.5) 306-10; MacCary (supra n.5) 149-51;
Foucault (supra n.14) 367-68. For an introduction to the dialogue as a whole, together with a
discussion of the questions surrounding its authenticity, see Friedlander, II, 231-38; Guthrie, III,
470 n.2. The passages examined below are considered Platonic bymany who doubt the authenticity
of the surrounding text.
23. The final paragraphs of the Charmides (176b ff.) contain a similar reversal of roles: there is
much badinage about Charmides' intention to pursue and to "force"Socrates, which obviously casts
the younger man in the role of the aggressor and the olderman in the role of his (helpless) victim; cf.
Lewis (supran.10) 161. This isperhaps part of a largerpattern, towhich many of the earlier dialogues
conform, involving the interlocutors' conversion at the climax of a Socratic conversation.
70 CLASSICAL
ANTIQUITY Volume 5/No. 1/April 1986

you] differ at all from a stork's if, having hatched in you a winged er6s [sc. for
me and philosophy], it [i.e., my eros] is to be in its turn served by it [i.e., your
er6s]?" (135e). On this note of perfect reciprocity the dialogue closes.24 In
order to comply with the Delphic injunction, then, we must seek to know
ourselves in our lover's intellect; when love is Platonic, each lover grows wise
by contemplating himself in the soul of his partner, discovering in thisway the
nature of the divinity within himself (Phaedrus 252e-253a).25 Indeed, one's
lover becomes in all literalness another self, an alter ego. The union achieved
by such lovers ismore complete and perfect, yet allows for a greater sense of
individual identity, thanmere sexual union (cf. Symposium 209c).
Plotinus alone seems to have understood something of what was at stake in
the reciprocal dynamic of Platonic eros: "One must give himself to what is
within," he wrote in his commentary on the Phaedrus myth, "and thus, instead
of a beholder, become object of vision for somebody else" (5.8.11).26 Plato's
immediate followers, by contrast, resisted the implications of his theory: his
model of mutual erotic inspiration was apparently too alien to them. It is
interesting to observe how quickly and consistently Plato's disciples tended to
displace the operation of reciprocity from the erotic sphere into which Plato
had, against all precedents, obtruded it; in so doing they did not act, I think,
upon a conscious and deliberate impulse to correct Platonic doctrine but, far
from being aware of any disloyalty to Plato in this one instance, they instinc
tively reinterpreted his thought in order tomake it conformable to the widely
shared cultural assumptions from which Plato himself had so firmly deviated.
Both Aristotle and Cicero, for example, emphasize the importance of recipro
city in human relations, but they invoke Plato's analysis in their discussions of
non-romantic love, or "friendship" (philia, amicitia), a bond which they define
in such a way as to include the force that holds all human communities together
in a system of reciprocal exchange.27Xenophon similarly transferredSocrates'
24. For a discussion of Socrates' ability to cause his passion for beautiful youths to be
reciprocated, see Friedlander, I, 49, 139-42.
25. Cf. Eric Voegelin, Plato (Baton Rouge, La. 1966) 18-19; Lebeck (supra n.7) 278, 282;
Kosman (supra n.4) 59-67; Price (supra n.4) 32-34; M. Dyson, "Zeus and Philosophy in theMyth
of Plato's Phaedrus," CQ 32 (1982) 307-11; Martha Craven Nussbaum, " 'ThisStory Isn'tTrue':
Poetry, Goodness, and Understanding in Plato's Phaedrus," in Plato on Beauty, Wisdom, and the
Arts, ed. JuliusMoravcsik and Philip Temko (Totowa, N.J. 1982) 79-124, esp. 101-5.
26. Quoted by Friedlander, I, 81.
27. Cf. Wilkinson (supra n. 13) 27. For Aristotle's stipulation about reciprocity in friendship, see
esp. Nicomachean Ethics 8.1155b32-1156a5 and cf. Prior Analytics 2.68a39-68b7; note, however,
that reciprocitymay have figured inAristotle's treatment of eros as well, ifFriedlander ("Socrates
Enters Rome," AJP 66 [1945] 337-51, esp. 348-51) is correct in supposing thatAristotle borrowed
Plato's image of one eye looking into another in his own (now lost) dialogue, the Eroticus. For the
notion that eros, when reciprocated, becomes philia, see PlutarchMoralia fr. 135 (Sandbach);Fou
cault (supra n.14) 344-46. The tradition thatheldphilia to be the universal bond innature and inhu
man society is very old and is firmly rooted inPlato, esp. in theRepublic: seeVlastos, 11-19; forother
examples, cf. Gorgias 507e-508a, Timaeus 32c (on the friendship of the created universe with itself),
Sophist 242e-243a, andAlcibiades Major 126c-127d. See, generally, Jean-PierreVernant, The Ori
gins of Greek Thought (Ithaca 1982) 60-61; Jaeger (supran.4) II, 57-59, 174-75, who discusses the im
portance ofphilia as a social force inPlato but underplays Plato's distinction between philia and eros.
 Plato and Erotic Reciprocity
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emphasis on reciprocity to the context of friendship: in theMemorabilia or

"Recollections" of Socrates, Xenophon quotes his admired preceptor as say
ing, "Forwhen I desire [epithymes6] someone, I give thewhole strength of my
being to be loved [antiphileisthai] by him in return for my love [philon], to
arouse longing [antipotheisthai] in return for my longing [pothon], and to see
my desire [epithym6n] for companionship reciprocated by his desire [antepithy
meisthai]" (2.6.28).28 Notably missing from Xenophon's account is the key
term anterasthai, "to be desired erotically in return," which Xenophon must
have found intolerable in such a context. Aristotle even goes so far as to
consider the myth of Plato's Aristophanes (Symposium 189d-193d) to be an
illustration of the power of philia: what specifically gives rise to binding unions,
such as the union between two lovers, is inAristotle's view the intense philia
generated by the erotic relationship, rather than the er6s that generates it
(Politics 2.1262b8-17). But Plato, in certain passages at least, insists on using
er6s, not philia, as the basis for an ideal intellectual fellowship.
Plato's peculiar insistence on the importance of being a lover, of playing a
passionately active part in the philosophical community, is reflected in his
faintly idiosyncratic use of language. Plato borrows from conventional Athe
nian usage the hierarchical terminology employed to differentiate the active
and passive roles in a paederastic relationship and converts it to the purpose of
articulating the erotic, and aggressive, nature of the philosophical enterprise.
In the Gorgias (481d) Socrates claims to be the lover [eron] of both Alcibiades
and philosophy; in virtually the firstmention of eros in the Symposium (173b),
Apollodorus refers to Socrates' disciple Aristodemus as the greatest erastes, or
active lover,29of Socrates among themen of that time, thereby establishing an
enlarged meaning of erotic desire from the very outset of the dialogue.3 In the
Republic (501d) philosophers are said to be erastai of being and truth, inas
much as it is the philosopher's nature to love [eran] the kind of learning that
reveals something of eternal being (485a-b); earlier in the same work, the
philosopher's eros is expected to beget understanding [nous] and truth (490a
b).31 In the Timaeus (46d) the physicist is similarly described as an erastes of
understanding [nous] and knowledge [episteme]. In the Phaedo (68a) death
brings the philosopher to a place where he may expect to findwhat he has
loved [er6n] all his life-namely, wisdom [phronesis]-and therefore the lover
28. Quoted by Friedlander, I, 45; cf. Xenophon Symposium 8.16-18. See, generally, Bruns
(supra n.4) 26-30, on Xenophon's reception of Plato's erotic doctrine; also, Foucault, 256-57.
29. Cf. Phaedrus 249e: kai hoti tautesmetekhon tesmanias ho er6n ton kalon erastes kaleitai.
30. Cf. Gagarin (supra n.21) 23n., and Dover, 157, on this passage (for a list of other mature
men "stung" by Socrates, see Plato Symposium 218a-b). Similarly, Aristippus is called an erastes
of Socrates and theAleuadae erastai of Gorgias in theMeno (70b), while Socrates refers to himself
and his friends as erastai of Protagoras in the Protagoras (317c). For other examples in Plato of
erastes used in the sense of "admirer" or "fan," see Protagoras 343a; Euthydemus 276d, 303b;
Philebus 23a. The meaning of theword erastes had already been extended in the period when Plato
was growing up: see esp. Thucydides 2.43.1; Sophocles Oedipus Rex 601 (all' out' erastes tesde tes
gnomes ephyn); and Euripides Heracleidae 377-78 (6 polemon erasta).
31. See Vlastos, 19 n.53; Dover, 156-57.
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ANTIQUITY Volume 5/No. 1/April 1986

[eron] of wisdom is more eager to die than those who have merely desired
[epethymoun] to meet their loved ones in the beyond; furthermore, Socrates
confesses that he and his friends desire and claim to be erastai of wisdom
[phronesis] (66e). In the Phaedrus (266b) Socrates declares himself an erastes
of divisions and collections (the methods of dialectic)-although earlier he
acknowledges that he is also an erastes of speeches (228c).32Socrates repeats
his self-characterization in the Philebus when he says he is always an erastes of
the proper method (16b), and at the end he speaks eloquently of the natural
power of our soul to love [eran] truth (58d); in the Theaetetus (169c) he fully
avows his terrible eros of intellectual gymnastics. In the first book of the Laws
(643e) true education is defined as thatwhich makes one an erastes of becom
ing a perfect citizen, while in the fourth book (711d) the possibility of political
amelioration is made to depend on the rulers' eros of temperate and just
institutions; hence, it was reasonable for Plato to hope that Dionysius, the
tyrant of Syracuse, would attain to a love [eros] of the best life (Epistle 7.339e).
Even Xenophon records Socrates' claim to be a synerastes (or joint-erastes)
with Athens of those who are good by nature and zealous in their pursuit of
excellence (Symposium 8.41). Only the transcendent objects of knowledge are
passive insofar as theymove us by eliciting our desire: asAristotle puts it in the
twelfth book of theMetaphysics (1072b3), the final cause produces motion in
the same way as an eromenos.33This kind of language, far frommerely reflect
ing the jocular, if philosophically tendentious, faqon de parler in vogue among
the intimates of Socrates' circle (asDover is tempted to believe)34expresses the
profound conviction thatwe must all of us be active, desiring lovers. Both the
colloquial and philosophical dimensions of Plato's usage often make themselves
felt in an individual passage: at Symposium 203c3-4, for example, when Dio
tima calls the god Eros an erastes, she means not only that he is, because of the
peculiar circumstances surrounding his birth (hama physei), an enthusiast on
the suBject of beauty (erastes ... peri to kalon), but also that desire, by its
very nature (hama physei), is active and aggressive in the pursuit of its object.

III. EROTIC RECIPROCITY AND THE METAPHYSICS OF DESIRE

There is indeed no role for passivity in the pursuit of truth. No one who is

already wise "loves wisdom" (that is, philosophizes) anymore than one who is
32. Socrates goes on to pray that Phaedrus (whom he also calls an erastes of Lysias) may,
with the aid of philosophical speeches, live simply forEros-if only Lysias himself can be converted
to philosophy (257b); in themeantime, Lysias remains thepaidika of Phaedrus (236b, 279b), while
Socrates claims Isocrates for his own paidika (279b): see de Vries (supra n.5) 181, ad 257b4-5.
33. Insofar as the Forms are the ultimate objects of desire, and insofar as our relationship
with them is not reciprocal, "the reciprocity between human beings," as Irving Singer observed in
a private letter to me, "must be interpreted as a joint pursuit for an ultimate oneness that is not
itself reciprocal." For a similar argument, see Enrique Rivera de Ventosa, "ElAmor personal en
lametafisica de Plat6n," Helmantica 26 (1975) 495-521.
34. Dover, 156-57. See, further, supra n.30.
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totally ignorant and self-satisfied; only those individuals are philosophical who
desire and strive for wisdom (Symposium 203d-204a). Plato's language is de
signed to emphasize the active, restless character of the desire that is common
to the passionate paederast and the aspiring philosopher. Sexual desire, insofar
as it is aroused by thatmeasure of transcendent beauty instantiated in a beauti
ful body, is a low-order form of philosophical activity: every sexual impulse to
possess another person physically-ultimately an impossible and therefore a
limitless longing35-represents (to the extent that it is stimulated by beauty) an
inchoate expression of our metaphysical desire to make the good our own
forever, to become immortal.36Mortal as we are, we can achieve immortality
only by procreation (or creativity), by striving to make what is best in us a
perpetually living force.37 "All men are pregnant,"38Diotima declares, "but
our nature cannot give birth in ugliness, only in beauty" (206c). We need
beauty in order to procreate, and only desire can bring us into the presence of
beauty:39 it is an utter sophistry to maintain that we can seek beauty without
desiring it, led purely by a doxa epi to ariston log6i agousa, a "judgement
guiding us rationally towards what is best," as Socrates fleetingly pretends in
the Phaedrus (237e).40Rather, as we learn in Book IX of the Republic, the

35. Cf. Proust (supra n.5) I, 234: "l'acte de la possession physique-of d'ailleurs l'on ne
possede rien"; I, 364: desirerr la possession, toujours impossible, d'un autre etre."
36. Cf. Herman L. Sinaiko, Love, Knowledge, and Discourse in Plato (Chicago 1965) 90:
"Thus, to see beauty in another human being and tomake him or her one's beloved remains the
mark of the true philosopher, but to the degree that any man finds beauty in another person he is
partaking of the 'blessed' life of the philosopher"; Samuel Scolnicov, "Reason and Passion in the
Platonic Soul," Dionysius 2 (1978) 35-49, esp. 45-46: "the knowledge of the good is not mere
knowledge but it is a unified activity of the soul, which includes cognition, desire and creation. At
the lowest level, it presents itself as sexual attraction, inwhich too there is aminimum of cognition,
and physical procreation; at the higher level it appears as philosophical knowledge, whose neces
sary consequence is political and educational activity"; see, generally, JonMoline, "Plato on the
Complexity of the Psyche," Archiv fir Geschichte der Philosophie 60 (1978) 1-26, esp. 10-13. See
also Nussbaum, 158, who argues thatAlcibiades experiences his sexual desire for Socrates "as a
kind of epistemic aim."
37. Voegelin (supra n.25) 13; cf. Irwin, 167: "Like other people, [the pregnant lover]wants
to create whatever will preserve for ever what he values most."
38. For a defense of this translation, see Vlastos, 21n., 424; M. F. Burnyeat, "Socratic
Midwifery, Platonic Inspiration," Bulletin of the Instituteof Classical Studies (London University)
24 (1977) 7-16, esp. 14n.5; cf. Clay (supra n.4) 124-25; J. S. Morrison, "FourNotes on Plato's
Symposium," CQ 14 (1964) 42-55, esp. 51-55; Harry Neumann, "Diotima's Concept of Love,"
AJP 86 (1965) 33-59, esp. 39; Paul C. Plass, "Plato's 'Pregnant'Lover," SymbOslo 53 (1978) 47
55; James M. Edie, "Expression andMetaphor," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 23
(1963) 538-61, esp. 553-57.
39. Bruns (supra n.4) 22.
40. On this passage, see Hackforth (supra n.5) 41-42; Thomas Gould, Platonic Love (New
York 1963) 113-16; Drew A. Hyland, "Eros, Epithymia, and Philia inPlato," Phronesis 13 (1968)
32-46, esp. 42; Friedlander, III, 224-25; Kenneth Dorter, "Imagery and Philosophy in Plato's
Phaedrus," Journal of theHistory of Philosophy 9 (1971) 279-88, esp. 282-86; Irwin, 238-39; the
most forceful arguments in support of the interpretation followed here are advanced by Malcolm
Brown and James Coulter, "The Middle Speech of Plato's Phaedrus," Journal of theHistory of
Philosophy 9 (1971) 405-23. On the place of the irrational in Plato's thought, and in the Phaedrus
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rational faculty in the soul has its own kind of appetite41and its own brand of
pleasure (580d-585e; cf. Timaeus 88a-b); according to the Laws, the virtues
themselves must be accompanied by eros and epithymia (688b). Our erotic
impulse is successful, however, not when it is temporarily gratified through
sexual release but when it brings us into contact with the sort of individualwho
is able by virtue of his own beauty to call forth our deepest insights.42Pace
Socrates at Theaetetus 155d, philosophy begins not in wonder but in desire.
Diotima concludes (Symposium 204c) that the nature of erosmore closely
resembles the nature of the eron (the lover) than that of the eromenos (the
beloved). Eros is not static: unlike what we sometimes mean today by "love,"
it is not a stable condition but a movement of the soul driven by need and
deprivation toward productivity and self-realization;43 it is the name we give to
the desire and pursuit of the whole (Symposium 192e). To be an erastes, an
aggressor in love, is to begin to make progress in the quest for immortality
or, as Socrates puts it in a moment of greater earnestness in the Phaedrus, to
begin to grow the wings of the soul. Just as one cannot desire another person
without desiring that portion of transcendent beauty embodied by him (and
available in purer form in the objects of intellectual beauty), so also one cannot
seek wisdom without first being possessed by the mania of erotic desire. Wis
dom will not come to us of its own accord: we have to desire it in order to
pursue it. Beauty evokes our desire; of all the objects of intellection, beauty
alone is immediately accessible to our senses, whereas "in the earthly like
nesses of justice and temperance and all other prized possessions of the soul
there dwells no lustre" (Phaedrus 250a-d; cf. Statesman 285e).44 It is the lover

in particular, see the excellent discussion by Hermann Gundert, "Enthusiasmos und Logos bei
Platon," Lexis 2 (1949) 25-46; alsoW. J. Verdenius, "Der Begriff derMania inPlatons Phaidros,"
Archiv fiir Geschichte der Philosophie 44 (1962) 132-50; Josef Pieper, Enthusiasm and Divine
Madness: On the Platonic Dialogue Phaedrus, trans.Richard and ClaraWinston (NewYork 1964);
generally, E. R. Dodds, "Plato and the Irrational," JHS 65 (1945) 16-25; Dodds (supra n.6) 207
35, esp. 230 n.51, for references to earlier work on this question. Cf. Irwin, 164-67, 170-74, 233
41;Moline (supra n.36) 15-22.
41. Grube (supra n.3) 135-36; Scolnicov (supra n.36) 42-43; Irwin, 191-95, 233-41, 244
46; Richard Patterson, "Plato on Philosophic Character," Journal of theHistory of Philosophy
(forthcoming).
42. See Friedlander, I, 50-55; Sinaiko (supra n.36) 79-98.
43. Cf. Singer (supra n.4) 55-56, 89; Nussbaum, 145-52. Hence Lebeck (supra n.7) 269,
commenting on Plato's imagery in the Phaedrus, observes: "The lover,moved by mania, is some
how more closely in touch with the natural motion of the soul than the nonlover"; cf. Roger
Hornsby, "SignificantAction in the Symposium," CJ 52 (1956-57) 37-40, on the unity of erotic
and psychic motion. See also Gould (supra n.40) 116-19; Sinaiko (supra n.36) 65-68; and cf. Levy
(supra n.4) 289-90. I have not been able to consult B. J. Bardsley, "The Soul as Self-Moving
Motion: The Synthesis of Madness and Sobriety in Plato's Phaedrus" (Ph.D. diss., University of
Texas 1975).
44. Bruns (supra n.4) 20: "Deshalb ist der von der korperlichen Schonheit Ergriffene, ohne
es zu wissen, der hoheren Welt naher gebracht"; Sinaiko (supra n.36) 68: "Physiologically this
[sight of the beloved] ismerely an act of visual sensation, but humanly it is farmore than that; for
in some degree it reminds man of the transcendent beauty, 'beauty itself,' which he once beheld
HALPERIN:
Plato and Erotic Reciprocity 75

seeking beauty, not the beloved incarnating a share of it, who is the more
divine (Symposium 180b). Socrates' unconventional analysis of the dynamic of
attraction in a paederastic relationship reveals, beyond all its psychological
acuity, an underlying philosophical purpose: it is designed to equip both
partners with the requisite erotic response to the stimulus of beauty-with the
capacity to become more divine. We cannot all be (physically) beautiful, but
we all can and do desire beauty. By granting the beloved access to a direct, if
reflected, erotic stimulus and thereby including him in the community of
lovers, Plato in effect elaborates the Socratic precept that philosophy is the
business of everyone inasmuch as all men are responsible for cultivating their
souls.45 If Plato's erotic theory escapes-as I believe it does-the charge of
promoting the exploitation of desired persons and objects,46 it does so not
because er6s aims, in Plato's view, at themoral improvement of the eromenos47
(although such improvement is bound to be an incidental result of the Platonic
lover's manic activity) but because both lover and beloved, aroused alike by
their visions of an identical beauty emanating (apparently) from each other and
driven by the intensity of their separate desires to new labors of visionary
creativity, make simultaneous and reciprocal, though independent, progress to
ward the contemplation of the Forms.48
It is now permissible to speak of the lover and beloved as two lovers

although Plato himself is never so explicit-for they experience alike the pas
sion of er6s. Moreover, the interests of both lovers fully converge and so, in
theory at least, neither is significantly subordinate to the other.49As Socrates

directly in the 'place beyond the heavens.' When this reminiscence occurs, then in a quite concrete
sense theman who experiences it, 'beholds . . . and feasts' on the 'Beingwhich truly is' in the very
act of ordinary visual perception. Thus, according to the myth, the transcendent character of the
contemplative act means that any ordinary sensory experience of a soul within the physical uni
verse may also be transcendent." Cf. 81-82; Pieper (supra n.40) 76.
45. See Vlastos (supra n.21) 19-21. Cf. Sinaiko (supra n.36) 82-83 (divinely inspired love is
"the single, all-inclusive motive in the lives of all men": 83) and 90-91 ("To understand why a
human being is different in kind from all other possible earthly objects of love and is also the
particularly appropriate object for the philosopher," it is necessary to appreciate the importance of
"the mutuality and reciprocity possible between two friends [sic]" enabling each to be "moved by
that desire for transcendent reality which lies at the heart of the individualhuman condition": 90);
also, Versenyi (supra n.14) 197.
46. Dover, 161-62, andVlastos, 30-33, make substantially this accusation. Cf. also Neumann
(supra n.38) 40-41, who observes, "one can only conclude that this passive role is not natural, if all
yearn to engender the beauties of moderation and justice in others" (40).
47. As Irwin, 167, 169, claims, following the interpretation of Richard Kraut, "Egoism,
Love, and Political Office in Plato," Philosophical Review 82 (1973) 330-44. Their view was
anticipated by R. Hackforth, "Immortality in Plato's Symposium," CR 64.2 (1950) 43-45 cf. also
Plass (supra n.38).
48. Cf. Foucault, 262-64, on the connection inPlato's thought between erotic reciprocity and
the democratization of philosophical activity within the community of lovers. I hope to argue in
greater detail against theKraut-Irwin view of the erotic aim in a separate paper.
49. Cf. R. H. S. Crossman, Plato To-day, rev. ed. (New York 1959) 133; Sinaiko (supra
n.36) 100-101: "finally, even this distinction between the lover and the beloved breaks down
76 CLASSICAL
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5/No. 1986
1/April
sets out to demonstrate in his celebrated palinode in the Phaedrus, eros affords
an equal and identical benefit to both lover and beloved (245b): through the
madness of eros each is dear to the other (253c), and thanks to eros each will
have wings like the other's (256d-e).5 The reciprocal erotic stimulus, then, not
only provides the lovers with an objective assurance of mutual advantages, it
also mobilizes the transcendental force that is needed, apparently, to shatter
the binding habits of personal self-interest and to motivate each lover to in
clude another human being within the charmed circle of his own self-regard.
Erotic reciprocity thereby solves an important and pressing problem inGreek
ethics. It bridges the gap between individuals, harmonizing the claims of self
and other and integrating the traditional "competitive" virtues of heroic self
sufficiency with the "co-operative" virtues of civic obligation; it reconciles, if
only within the narrow boundaries of the erotic union, these two rival stan
dards of moral value whose clash is a typical feature of scarcity societies,
ancient and modern alike.51 "To create existential community throughdevelop
ing the other man's true humanity in the image of his own-that is thework of
the Socratic Eros," according to Eric Voegelin. "The Idea of the Good,
evoked in the communion of the dialogue, fills the souls of those who partici
pate in the evocative act. And thus it becomes the sacramental bond between
them and creates the nucleus of the new society."52

IV. EROTIC AND DIALOGIC RECIPROCITY

Voegelin's emphasis on the communion of the dialogue reminds us that it

is in conversations, such as the conversation between Socrates andAlcibiades,

when, in a successful love affair, each becomes the lover of and the beloved for the other." We
should not, however, exaggerate the significance of erotic reciprocity for Plato's model of philo
sophical inquiry. It does not introduce rival sources of authority into the Socratic community-at
least, not in practice-nor does it inject an element of genuine pluralism or relativity into Plato's
epistemology. On the contrary: because the content of the beloved's vision of beauty-whatever its
actual origin-is identical to that of the lover's, erotic reciprocity in Plato's formulation does not
threaten the unity of knowledge or the determinacy of the goal of philosophy. But it does set
Plato's outlook apart from other, more traditionally hierarchical methods of handing down
knowledge and, in principle, it anchors a mode of access to truth in the existential situation of
every human being, of every lover. By promoting an ideal of reciprocity in eros, in other words,
Plato implicitly locates the source of his authoritarianism in the metaphysical structure of his
philosophy rather than in its system of practice.
50. Cf. Hackforth (supra n.5) 94; Versenyi (supra n.14) 197.
51. For the distinction between competitive and cooperative virtues as it applies to ancient
Greece, see Arthur W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility (Oxford 1960) 6-7 and passim. For the
modern analogue, cf. Ernestine Friedl, Vasilika:A Village inModern Greece, Case Studies inCultural
Anthropology (New York 1962) esp. 75-91; John K. Campbell, Honour, Family and Patronage:A
Study of Institutions andMoral Values in a Greek Mountain Community (New York 1963).
52. Voegelin (supra n.25) 13; see also Friedlander I, 54-55, 90; Singer, 73-75. Conventional
eros, by contrast, can be socially divisive: see the subtle discussion of Pantheia's role in the
Cyropaedia by W. R. Newell, "Tyranny and the Science of Ruling inXenophon's 'Education of
Cyrus,' " Journal of Politics 45 (1983) 889-906, esp. 900-05.
HALPERIN:
Plato and Erotic Reciprocity 77

that the reciprocal bond of er6s is forged. The Platonic lover, obedient to
Diotima's instructions, not only refrains from physically possessing his desired
object (even when that object is a beautiful body), but strives to beget logoi
kaloi, "beautiful speeches," in its presence (Symposium 210a). As Dover has
pointed out, Plato "regards philosophy not as an activity to be pursued in
solitary meditation and communicated in ex cathedra pronouncements by a
master to his disciples, but as a dialectical progresswhich may well begin in the
response of an older male to the stimulus afforded by a younger male who
combines bodily beauty with 'beauty of the soul.' "53 We must not forget that
dialectic, Plato's name for the philosophical method, originallymeant "conver
sation" in Greek;54 the word implies that philosophical inquiry proceeds by a
reciprocal exchange of questions and answers.55Books can neither answer
questions nor ask them, Socrates says in the Protagoras (329a); the written
word is inert (Phaedrus 275d-e). Wisdom cannot be communicated in discur
sive, propositional form-it cannot flow from one person to another likewater
through a string (Symposium 175d; cf. Republic 518b-d).56 Each person must
discover it for himself or herself, must give birth to it and make it his or her
own child. But human contact can help (cf. Protagoras 348c-d), for in the
dialectical process of intimate conversation an erotic sparkmay leap from one
person to another as the soul discovers a beautiful and desirable place inwhich
to give birth to the logoi quickening within her.57As Plato writes in the Seventh
58
Letter,

53. Dover, 12, and cf. 164. See also Friedlander, I, 51-52, 68-69, 79, 91, 141, 168;Verdenius
(supra n.40) 139-41; Guthrie, III, 442-49; and cf. Georges Lapassade andRene Scherer, Le Corps
interdit:Essais sur l'education negative (Paris 1976).
54. See Terrence Irwin, trans., Plato: Gorgias, Clarendon Plato Series (Oxford 1979) 110-11
ad 447c. Xenophon's Socrates proposes a different, rather fanciful etymology, however (Memora
bilia 4.5.12): see Guthrie, III, 440; Plato toys at times with another (equally implausible) one,
according to Verdenius (supra n.40) 147 n.68. On the obscene meaning of dialegesthai, see Hen
derson (supra n.13) 155 (cited by Nussbaum, 172); cf. Page duBois, "The Homoerotics of the
Phaedrus," Pacific Coast Philology 17.1-2 (1982) 9-15, who sees in dialectical diairesis and
synagoge "a model of erotic contact and separation" (10)-a view subsequently elaborated by
duBois (infra n.62) 95-96.
55. Gould (supra n.40) 58-67; Sinaiko (supra n.36) 18-21; for themost recent restatements
of this familiar point, see Arthur A. Krentz, "Dramatic Form and Philosophical Content in Plato's
Dialogues," Philosophy and Literature 7 (1983) 32-47, esp. 40-42; Kenneth Seeskin, "Socratic
Philosophy and the Dialogue Form," Philosophy and Literature 8 (1984) 181-94. On eros as a
dialectical force, see Jaeger (supra n.4) 193; Friedlander, I, 31, 51-54; Gundert (supra n.40) 44;
Sinaiko (supra n.36) 117-18; and the excellent discussion by Jerry Stannard, "SocraticEros and
Platonic Dialectic," Phronesis 4 (1959) 120-34.
56. See, generally, Friedlander, I, 156, 166; Tarrant (supra n.7); Guthrie, III, 488.
57. Cf. Bruns (supra n.4) 22: "Aber das Individuumbedarf zu der Vollendung dieses Triebes
einer Erganzung, eines Mediums, welche es nur in einem zweiten Individuum findet, wofern dieses
schon ist"; Jaeger (supra n.4) 184.
58. For a survey of the ongoing scholarly controversy over the meaning and authenticity of
the Seventh Letter, see Guthrie, V, 399-417.
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I do not, however, consider the attempt to speak of thismatter a good

thing for men, except for some few who are capable of discovering it
themselves with little indication; of the rest, itwould fill some with an
unjustified contempt in a highly unbecoming fashion, others with a
lofty and vain presumption, as if they had learned some sacred mys
tery .... For thematter itself does not at all admit of verbal expres
sion like other subjects of study; rather, as a result of a long period of
intercourse devoted to it and a common life,59 suddenly-like light
kindled by a leaping flame-it is born in the soul and thereafter nour
ishes itself.... When each of these things-names and definitions,
visual and other sense-perceptions-are laboriously brought together
in the friction of comparison, closely examined in an atmosphere of
good will and by an ungrudging6 exchange of questions and answers,
wisdom [phronesis] about each flashes out, and understanding [nous],
as one strains61 to the limit of human capacity (341e-342a, 341c-d,
344b-c).
The Platonic dialogue is true to thismodel of philosophical inquiry. Plato,
of course, did not invent the dialogue-form, nor was he the only disciple of
Socrates who composed Socratic dialogues. But he was perhaps the only one
who fully understood the reciprocal erotic dynamic of a Socratic conversation
and he employed the dialogue-form to illustrate its workings. For in Plato's
hands the dialogue-form itself represents an attempt to recapture the original
and authentic erotic context of philosophy-the exchange of questions and
answers from which emerges, dialectically, an image of excellence: the lover's
beautiful speeches. By its very form, then, the Platonic dialogue aspires to

59. This phrase (all' ek polls synousias gignomenes peri topragma auto kai tou syzen) has been
variously understood and rendered: "rather after a long period of attendance on instruction in the
subject itself and of close companionship" (Post); "as a result of continued application to the subject
itself and communion therewith" (Bury); "long-continued intercoursebetween pupil and teacher in
joint pursuit of the object they are seeking to apprehend" (Morrow); "only after longpartnership in
a common life devoted to this very thing" (Hamilton); "only out of much converse about the subject,
and a life lived together" (Guthrie). I do not doubt that synousia refers to communion with other
human beings rather thanwith topragma auto, but inmy translation I have triednot to prejudice the
issue. For other examples of Plato's use of synousia in this sense, see F. Novotn', ed., Platonis
Epistulae commentariis illustratae,Opera facultatis philosophicae Universitatis Masarykianae Bru
nensis 30 (Brno 1930) ad loc., who adduces Gorgias 461b and Laws 12.968c as the closest parallels,
though see also Phaedrus 239b (cited by Verdenius [supran.40] 139) and the opening of the Sympo
sium, especially 172a-173b, where theword occurs five times in connection with Agathon's dinner
party. Obviously, the subject of such synousiai remains topragma auto.
60. Plato's strictures against phthonos deserve a separate treatment; suffice it to say that
phthonos is no less out of place in an erotic relationship (ou phthonoi oud' aneleutheroi dysmeneiai
khromenoi pros ta paidika: Phaedrus 253b; cf. 239a) than it is in the heavenly choir (Phaedrus
247a; Timaeus 29e) or in the life of the mind (en philosophiai aphthon6i: Symposium 210d). See
Sinaiko (supra n.36) 71-72; de Vries (supra n.5) 164 ad 253b7-8. Cf. Patterson (supra n.41).
61. Whether one accepts, with Wilamowitz and Bury, the emendation of Eva Sachs (syntei
nonti), or the attractive suggestion of Novotn' and Franz Egermann (synteinont6n), the sense of
the passage is not greatly affected. If one were to retain the reading of themanuscripts (synteinon),
one would have to translate, with Guthrie, "and nous stretching human powers to their limit."
HALPERIN:
Plato and Erotic Reciprocity 79

engage the reader-by inviting his sympathetic identification with the char
acters and his intellectual participation in their discourse-in a give-and-take, a
mutual exchange of ideas, an open-ended discussion.62It seeks, in other words,
to awaken er6s in the reader-to arouse, in particular, his hermeneutic er6s,
"the desire of the text." Or rather, since literary interpretation is but a means
to understanding, and no piece of writing in itself is a very serious matter,63 it
would be more accurate to speak of hermeneutic eros in Plato's conception as
"the desire of the idea implicit in a text"-a striving toward something objec
tive.Without such desire or striving or "(counter-)love," without participating
in such a reciprocal exchange, the readerwill not be able to interpret a Platonic
dialogue and will find it baffling, pointless, incomprehensible. It is the function
of the Socratic aporia,64 and it is characteristic of Plato's writings in general, to
promote in the reader an inner dialogue that extends and continues the dia
logue in the text.65For thinking itself, or dianoia, is, according to the Eleatic
Stranger in Plato's Sophist (263e), an interior dialogue without sound carried
on by the soul; in the Theaetetus (189e-190a), Socrates defines dianoia as
speech (logos) which the soul carries on with itself, adding, "The soul, when it
is thinking, seems tome to be doing nothing else but conversing (dialegesthai),
asking itself questions and answering them, and saying yes or no."66 Erotic
reciprocity, then, mirrors the dynamic process of thought: it reflects and ex
presses the distinctive, self-generated motion of the rational soul.

V. CONCLUSION

Itmay now be possible to understand why Socrates, as Plato portrays him,

chooses to spend so much of his time among the young. As Paul Friedlander
argues,

62. Friedlander, I, 165-66; Sinaiko (supra n.36) 15-16; de Vries (supra n.5) 20; Lebeck
(supra n.7) 288-89; most recently, Morriss Henry Partee, Plato's Poetics: The Authority of Beauty
(Salt Lake City 1981) 176-85. An important cautionary note, however, is sounded by Harry
Berger, Jr., "Facing Sophists: Socrates' Charismatic Bondage in Protagoras," Representations 5
(1984) 66-91, who emphasizes the difference between reading a Platonic dialogue "grammatologi
cally as a text, and reading it logocentrically as a discussion to be overheard" (68); cf. duBois
(supra n.54). See, generally, Ronald Hathaway, "Explaining the Unity of the Platonic Dialogue,"
Philosophy and Literature 8 (1984) 195-208 who also surveys earlier scholarship on Plato's use of
the dialogue-form.
Page duBois, "Phallocentrism and its Subversion in Plato's Phaedrus, "Arethusa 18 (1985)
91-103, echoing duBois (supra n.54) 10, pushes to an extreme the line of interpretation taken here
when she calls the Phaedrus "a drama of sexual encounter . . . between the reader and the text"
(95). For all the celebrated seductiveness of great literature, I do not believe that anyone can
plausibly claim to have had a specifically sexual encounter with the textof a literarywork.
63. Some recent overviews of this complex issue can be found in Friedlander, I, 113-24; de
Vries (supra n.5) 18-22; Guthrie, IV, 1-3; Partee (supra n.62) 184-85.
64. See Versenyi (supra n.14) 197-98.
65. See Gould (supra n.40) 66-67; Pieper (supra n.40) 101-02.
66. See Moline (supra n.36) 14-15.
80 CLASSICAL
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Socrates can, indeed, seek only in the process of a common conversa

tion; and this search is a perennial task, never completed for anybody,
including himself. Yet does not Charmides, still in the process of devel
oping, look to Socrates as to a man who has already attained perfec
tion? Does not Socrates, though never standing still in his quest for
knowledge, indeed represent perfection in every moment of his exis
tence? And does not Socrates need Charmides? Indeed, is not even
Charmides, as a youth, perfect in his own natural growth? Thus the
peculiar seduction lies precisely in this gentle and concealed dialectical
tension: irony is the net of the great educator.67
Plato refuses to separate-he actually identifies and fuses-the erotics of sexu
ality, the erotics of conversation, and the erotics of philosophical inquiry.
Reciprocity provides a crucial link between these different, but equally authen
tic, species of desire; it guarantees their essential unity and it furnishes an
infallible clue to their common nature.When Alcibiades declares, "We shall in
all likelihood reverse the usual pattern [metabalein to schema], Socrates, I
taking your role and you mine" (Alcibiades Major 135d), he proclaims his
allegiance to a law higher and proportionately mightier than the conventional
etiquette of Athenian society. For there is indeed something transcendental
about mutual desire: it overleaps the barriers that fence in our separate selves
and releases us from the isolation of our individual identities. Plato's philo
sophical treatment of erotic reciprocity therefore lends itself to themetaphysi
cal conceits devised around it by the poets-by Donne in "The Exstasie" and
"The good-morrow," for example, and by the Romantics, especially Shelley.
But the poet whose native transcendentalismmay have brought him closest to
an independent appreciation of the Platonic outlook isRobert Frost, as these
familiar lines so memorably testify:

Eyes seeking the response of eyes

Bring out the stars, bring out the flowers,
Thus concentrating earth and skies
So none need be afraid of size.
All revelation has been ours.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

67. Friedlander, I, 141. See Alcibiades Major 124c.