Plato, Zeno, and the Object of Love

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A. W. Price

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One Greek term for a lover of boys was philomeirax .1 Out of it, Athenaeus teasily coined philosophomeirakiskos (Deipnosophistae 13.572B), roughly “pe-

dophilosopher.” Such as it was, the term might have been applied to the founders both of the Academy and of the Stoa. For Plato, the first unmar- ried man in Europe (as Jasper Griffin informally dubs him), there is recur- rent internal evidence. Gregory Vlastos was not forgetting much when he wrote, “In every passage I can recall which depicts or alludes to the power of sexual desire the context is homosexual” (1981, 25).2 For Zeno, there is the assertion by Antigonus of Carystus, not a sympathetic biographer but a contemporary one, that he was exclusively attracted to boys (Athenaeus, SVF 1.58.35–36 = Deipnosophistae 13.563E).3 Neither had any cause to be ashamed: at least in the classical period, it was perfectly possible to attach a penchant for pederasty to the pretensions of a moralist. Both could ap- peal to a long tradition, in many Greek cities, that made pederasty a mode of education (see Dover 1978, 202–3). Among dramatic poets, Euripi- des wrote that ero¯s was the chief primer of wisdom and virtue (Athenaeus Deipnosophistae 13.561A = fr. 897 N²), Alexis that no tutor was more at- tentive (fr. 290 Kassel-Austin). Outside the utopias that they invented,

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which feature educational equality between the sexes, Plato and Zeno had impartial reason to privilege the pederast as pedagogue.

What then most animates their accounts is the difficulties they faced in relating the educative to the erotic satisfactorily. Aristotle adduced the mor- als of the marketplace and expected trouble: “Recriminations are common in philiai [partnerships in friendship, pleasure, or commerce] not in the same direction, and it is not easy to see what is just; for it is hard to mea- sure different directions by this one unit. We find this in the case of lovers; for the one seeks the other as pleasant to pass his life with, while the latter seeks the other at times as useful. When the love is over, one changes as the other changes, and then they calculate the quid pro quo” (Eudemian Ethics 7.10.1243b14–20). Within the framework of Aristotle’s theory, this is a mixed philia, of pleasure on one side and of utility on the other (cf. Nico- machean Ethics 9.1.1164a7– 8). It is uncertain whether he is being cynical and empirical (denying that lovers are really friends), or abstract and sche- matizing (abstracting love from friendship). In either case, he imputes a problem of commensurability, of how to find a common metric for things that differ in kind. What makes this acute, within his picture, is that these relationships, unlike any that we classify as friendship, are self-serving on both sides (see Nicomachean Ethics 8.3): since both parties are in it for what they can get out, and not (like benefactors) for what they can put in, each insists on a fair return. Even if the incommensurabilities could be resolved, the high-minded apologist must object that the lover’s intentions are being assigned the wrong structure: educating the boy becomes a price that the lover is willing to pay, an accidental means to his end and not part of his goal. Instead of recruiting ero¯s as the handmaid of philosophy, this relegates philosophy to the service of a love worthy not of free men, but of sailors (cf. Plato Phaedrus 243c7– 8).

No doubt a more generous view could be rescued out of Aristotle’s cyni- cism or schematism. Take a more ambivalent passage: “[Lover and beloved] do not take pleasure in the same things, but the one in seeing the other and the other in receiving attentions from the lover; and when the bloom of youth passes the friendship sometimes passes too (for the one finds no pleasure in the sight of the other, and the other gets no attentions from the first). Yet many are constant, if familiarity has led them to love each other’s characters, these being alike” (Nicomachean Ethics 8.4.1157a6–12). Here is a concession to break the fetters of a context again depreciatory of the philiai of pleasure and utility. Out of enjoyment and exploitation of the bloom of youth, by lover and beloved respectively, may emerge a reciprocal

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appreciation of character that transforms the relationship, infusing it with the mutual concern (essential to what we count as friendship) that Aristotle associates only with the philia of character.4 So long as the loved one retains his physical and mental immaturity, he may offer the lover his body, as the lover offers him his mind, out of an equal generosity.5 This surely merits no moral complaint, but should it satisfy Plato and Zeno? Plausibly not, for ero¯s is thereby morally accommodated, but not itself fully moralized. Edu- cation comes in, not indeed as a mercenary quid pro quo, and yet as an ex- pression of friendship collateral to any fulfillment of ero¯s. Indeed, the struc- ture of the friendship still excludes that the exercise of ero¯s should itself be educative.

The difficulty can be generalized. The pederast is in search of a boy with a beautiful body, the pedagogue of a boy (or girl) with a promising mind. One and the same person may happen to be both, and a pederast who is also a pedagogue may have reason (mercenary or generous) to take him as his object in both roles; but his erotic and educative projects may come together only in their object.6 Plato and Zeno had to attempt accounts that made a unity of the two projects. Plato offers no real solution, I think, in his Symposium; he shows equal insight and ingenuity in the Phaedrus; but the breakthrough— made possible only by theoretical developments— is evi- denced in the fragments of the early Stoa.7

 

 

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In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates pretends to report from a priestess Diotima an account of love that subsumes its teleology within that of desire in gen- eral. Generic ero¯s is identified with desire meant Socratically, both in its full generality and as all directed finally towards the subject’s happiness (eudai- monia), that is, towards his possession of good things (204d4–205a3). It is further argued that, desiring to possess good things always, he desires im- mortality together with the good (206a9–207a4). Specific er o¯s can then be defined as the desire to achieve that double goal through “generation in the beautiful” (206e5). One would presume that immortality demands not generation but personal survival; to which it is opposed that, even within a single human life, generation is survival. Physical survival is the piecemeal replacement of an old body by a new one, through its “hair and flesh and bones and blood”; mental survival (by which is meant the survival of a men- tality) involves the replacement of old mental states by new ones that repli- cate their content (207d7–208a7). Hence the propagation of one life into

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another, physical or mental, is equally survival of a kind. It is in pursuit of this that men hope to beget physical offspring on women, and mental off- spring on boys (208e1–209c4).

This account places pedagogy at the center of pederasty. (Indeed, it has a void to fill; for nothing whatever is said about sexual relations outside the cycle of generation.) It is true that vices may be as readily inculcated as vir- tues — indeed, more readily, if it is easier to become bad than good. Diotima gives no explicit examples of corruption; but she cites the impact of poets and lawgivers (209c7– e4), which Plato believed to be pernicious. However, Socrates holds that someone who obtains what is not really good is not obtaining what he really wants (Gorgias 468d5–7); hence, success does not bring him happiness. There follows an exposition of philosophical love in the famous ascent passage (210a4–212b7). Though it needs arguing (see Price 1997, 257– 60), I believe that the teleology of “generation in beauty” is still present, with a focus now set less upon the fact of propaga- tion than upon its content, which develops through the stages of the ascent. If this is a correct reading, personal pedagogy remains at the heart of the lover’s project.

Yet why should mental fecundity connect with physical beauty, or in- deed with ero¯s in its common acceptation? Presumably even the young Soc- rates, whom Diotima is supposed to have been instructing, was not an ob- ject of beauty; nor is she said to have been in love with him. (Her role was rather that of the shadowy mentor whose continuing presence throughout the ascent is lightly indicated.) And Homer and Lycurgus are cited to con- firm the superiority of mental to physical progeny (209c7– e4) although their procreation was not erotic. Plato recurrently touches on the problem, but he rather lulls the reader into disregarding it than resolves it himself. He has Diotima exploit the connotations of kalos (which are wider than those of “beautiful”), arguing thus: “Wisdom is actually one of the most beautiful things, and Love is love in relation to what is beautiful, so that Love is necessarily a philosopher” (204b2– 4). He has her repeatedly asso- ciate procreation with beauty (206c4– d2, 209a8–b7, c2–3)— though, as she trades on an ambiguity between begetting and bringing to birth, she risks implying that midwives need to be beautiful as wives do (an implau- sibility that will not be present when Socrates portrays himself as a mid- wife; Theaetetus 148e6–151d3). Within the lesser mysteries, the stimulus to mental propagation is a beautiful mind in a beautiful body (209b4–7). Within the greater mysteries, a modest physical requirement remains: “He must consider beauty in souls more valuable than beauty in the body, so that, if someone who is decent in his soul has even a little bloom, this

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suffices for his loving and caring for him” (210b6– c1).8 Yet why should Diotima demand even that? In order, one may suspect, to preserve the common connotations of ero¯s even after the logic of her account has dis- pensed with them.

No doubt there are things to be said in extenuation. Oddly, physical beauty may be more apropos through the ascent than it is to the mental fe- cundity of the lesser mysteries. As the complacent educators of 209, whether lovers, poets, or lawgivers, are already pregnant in what they wish to propa- gate, one would suppose that they require mental receptacles but not physi- cal stimuli. The emerging philosopher of 210 is only one step ahead of the boy to whom he communicates his progress (consider the recurrent logoi; 210a8, c1, d5); so he continues to be in need of inspiration. To him beauty is one, even if beauties are various and of varying value; thus it is fitting for him (harmotton, 206d2), although he is to focus upon mental beauty, to re- main perceptive of physical beauty also. And if the boy looks beautiful, his appearance can be a continuing reminder of that ideal Beauty which the lover can only, according to Platonic teaching elsewhere, be rediscovering through recollection. And yet, if an impression of physical beauty is mar- ginally helpful to philosophy, but really irrelevant to the practices and mo- tivations of erotic pedagogy (understood as an attempt to survive through propagating one’s own mentality), the unity of philosophical ero¯s remains elusive.

 

 

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The phenomenology of ero¯s is more richly explored within Socrates’ second speech in the Phaedrus. Socrates offers this to Phaedrus in order “to wash out the bitter taste” (243d4–5) of two speeches critical of ero¯s, one written by Ly- sias and read out by Phaedrus, and another that he has improvised to better it. He approaches his conclusion with a word of depreciation: “This, dear god of love, is offered and paid to you as the finest and best palinode of which I am capable, especially given that it was forced to use somewhat po- etical language because of Phaedrus” (257a3– 6). The reader has to use his own judgment about what to take seriously, and how seriously to take it (cf. Price 1989, 72 n. 24.). He will certainly take absolutely straight the best proof of the immortality of the soul that Plato ever devised, presented here by Socrates with a concision more Aristotelian than poetic (245c5–246a2). Elsewhere, he will be uncertain, hesitant to take fantasy literally, but reluc- tant either to dismiss the theses it clothes or to try to discard their clothing.

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About the relation of pederasty to philosophy, Socrates rather teases than instructs us. The man who is at once an eraste¯s of boys and a philos of wisdom (paideraste¯santos meta philosophias, 249a2) is promised a rapid return to the Platonic heaven; and Socrates ends with a prayer that Phaedrus may hence- forth  devote  his  life  at  once  to  ero¯s  and  to  philosophy  (pros  ero¯ta  meta philosopho¯n logo¯n, 257b6). Quite how the “pedophilosopher” is of a piece is never made explicit. Indeed, despite the programmatic demands that pref- aced Socrates’ first speech (237b7– d3), and a later claim that his second speech has met them (265d5–7), that “right-hand” ero¯s which is both mad and god-sent (266a2–b1) is never actually defined, nor its intentionality determined. Nothing is said that contradicts the characterization of ero¯s in the Symposium as directed towards “generation in the beautiful” (Symposium 206e5), and a later passage conceives the goal of rhetoric in closely related terms (Phaedrus 276e4–277a4). Yet there is at least a shift of attention, away from the prolongation of a family tree, physical or mental, to the mutual loy- alty of the nuclear couple. Without a definition, we cannot expect to identify the relation between pedagogy and pederasty with any rigor; yet Plato must intend to present it as internal and not accidental.

Socrates starts his palinode by distinguishing ero¯s as a species of god- sent madness, and by describing the nature of the soul, and its way of life before incarnation. All souls, human and divine, are essentially immortal, and naturally winged and feathered; for a soul to become incarnate is for it to break its wings and lose its feathers, so that it falls to earth and into a body. The proper study of souls is Forms, “his closeness to which gives a god his divinity” (249c6). Each god is pictured as leading a procession of souls its own way to the summit of heaven, from whence the Forms come into view: “Many and blessed are the paths to be seen along which the happy race of gods turns within the heavens, each of them performing what belongs to him; and after them follows anyone who wishes and is able to do so, for jealousy is excluded from the divine chorus” (247a4–7). Abstract- ing from the imagery, we may draw two striking implications: first, that investigation of the Forms is naturally a concerted activity; secondly, that Forms may properly be investigated in different ways by different mentali- ties. (However, it is not conceived that different mentalities may cooperate; this will turn out to be decisive for erotic object choice.)

Once a soul has fallen to earth, its task is to return to heaven through the aid of recollection. Only souls that have seen something of the Forms can be incarnated as men; for men are linguistic animals, and grasping gen- eral terms involves recollecting Forms (249b5– c2). That is an early exercise of recollection, in which only a Platonist will detect anything transcendent.

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A more disorienting experience is open only to a few: when a soul recently initiated and still uncorrupted sees “a godlike face or some form of body which imitates beauty well” (251a2–3), the Form of Beauty somehow be- comes apparent to it. Socrates is uncertain how to capture this. Of Wisdom, which is not so apparent, he says both that it is not seen by sight, and that it does not allow any “such clear image of itself to reach our sight” (250d3– 6). The first contrast might suggest that Beauty is seen directly, the second that is seen indirectly but clearly. He concludes, somewhat indefinitely, that Beauty is “most manifest and most lovely” (d7– e1). Presumably what he wishes to capture is that the Form only becomes apparent in dependence upon a physical image, but that this opens, and does not obstruct, experien- tial access to the Form. Socrates’ uncertainty mirrors the lover’s own confu- sion: he reverences the boy “as a god,” and, if he did not fear to seem crazy, would sacrifice to him “as to a statue and a god”— though the boy is neither, and nothing could be both. Somehow, the Form appears as both immanent and transcendent. Other Forms are not thus apparent to experience: Wis- dom offers no image to sight (250d4– 6), and, like Justice and Temperance, can only be apprehended through “dulled organs” (b1–5), that is, presum- ably, not in perceptual experience but in rational abstraction. We may speak of “quasi-perceiving” Beauty, or (see Price 1989, 76–78) of perceiving it “in” or “through” the boy.

What is the effect of this paradoxical experience? Here we meet some apparent vacillation. Socrates first speaks as if a sight of Beauty is love at first sight: “Few souls are left who have sufficient memory [that is, of the Forms]; and these, when they see some likeness of the things there, are driven out of their wits with amazement and lose control of themselves” (250a5–7). Yet later he speaks of a search and selection according to mental conge- niality. Of the original followers of Zeus, “each selects his love from the ranks of the beautiful according to his disposition” (252d5– 6); more fully, they “seek” for a natural leader and philosopher (ze¯tousi), “scrutinize” him (skopousi), and “fall in love” with him if they “find” him to be suitable (heu- rontes erastho¯si; e1– 4). Similarly, followers of Hera “seek” to “find” some- one regal (253b1–2). In short, followers of any god “seek” that their boy should be naturally like him (b3– 4). If so, succumbing to ero¯s presupposes an act of selection.

What are the effects of falling in love? Here there are two sources of variety: different gods, who inspire different ideals, and different parts of the soul. In the famous allegory of soul as chariot, reason is the charioteer, and spirit and appetite the two horses, good and bad. Too little is said to

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give independent life to spirit (though cf. Price 1995, 78–9), but the pas- sage fully and vividly describes how reason’s perception provokes appetite’s desire (253e5–254a7). What concerns us here is how pederasty becomes pedagogy. In its own manner, even appetite operates through persuasion, conscripting reason to act as a go-between: it “compels” the charioteer to “remind” the boy of the pleasures of making love (254a5–7). When it is being true to its own nature, reason has its own passivities and activities, of which the reader has somehow to make a unity. Passively, the lover finds that seeing the boy (though not remembering him) stimulates the re- growth of his soul’s feathers (251b1–252a1); reciprocally, the boy experi- ences the same as he sees his own reflection in his lover’s eyes (255b7– d6). Actively, the lover tries to fashion the boy on the model of their god (252e4–5, 253a6– c2), thereby, in Aristotelian terms, developing his po- tentiality into actuality; at the same time, perhaps with the help of a guide (indicated as lightly as in the Symposium; 252e6), but certainly through the inspiration of the boy, he is developing his own mentality (252e5– 253a6). How all this comes together is not made plain. The soul’s wings re- mind us of Cupid’s, but roughly symbolize its cognitive capacities (which Plato takes, of course, to be morally motivating as well as intellectually en- abling). It cannot be that the lovers regain the use of their wings just through gazing on each other: the stream of beauty that is pictured as entering the lover’s eyes may open the outlets of his feathers (251d1–3), but broken wings (248b3) require not just relaxants but physiotherapy. We can anyway presume that the égoisme of Platonic dialectic is à deux: for Plato (see Price 1989, 91), Lernen (learning) is Lehren (teaching). If either lover is to reas- cend to the Platonic heaven, each must regain his mental powers through exercising them with the other (and so sharing the same plumage; 256e1).9 Quite how we relate imagery to reality is crucial to how we take Socra-

tes to be connecting pederasty and pedagogy. I interpret him as follows. A man’s first susceptible sight of a beautiful face alerts him consciously to his future as a lover of beautiful boys, unconsciously to his past as a beholder of Beauty itself. On a Platonist reading of his implicit purposes, he then looks out for a boy through whom he can quasi-perceive Beauty, and with whom he can share his style of conceiving it and other Forms. When he finds one, he opens his eyes to the stream of beauty and so enters freely upon a vita nuova in which love inspires him to acquire and transmit new habits and practices (252e7–253b1). Since his seeing the boy is his quasi-perceiving the Form, which not only yields delight, but inspires discourse in some mode characteristic of him, and the boy has been selected (in effect) as

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someone who is able to apprehend the Forms in just that mode, erotic ex- perience and educational activity are two aspects, passive and active, re- spectively, of a single project.10

What has prompted me to set out more fully than before both a prob- lem and a solution is, however, a different solution. In an eloquent and illuminating essay, Martha Nussbaum has found in the Phaedrus a tighter tie between visible beauty and mental congeniality. Let me quote a few sen- tences (1995: 248– 49): “Central in Socrates’ solution to the cultural prob- lem [of how a state of madness can be beneficent] is an account of how ero¯s can take as its object both bodily beauty and excellence of soul—how, in fact, excellence of soul can manifest itself in the features and shape of the body. . . . Sight is absolutely central in his account of falling in love. . . . However, the ‘godlike face that represents beauty well and the form of the body’ (251a2–3) can itself contain traces or signs of the character, or the god within” (252d1ff.). As a solution to the cultural problem, this may be welcomed. As an interpretation of Plato, it has to be scrutinized. Let me first concede some details that become felicitous on Nussbaum’s reading (with doubts in parentheses).

Slight vacuity becomes acuity if the “godlike face that represents beauty well” is indeed a face that reflects the beautiful mentality of a god. (Yet there is no suggestion of that within the immediate context.) Instead of a double focus within Socrates’ imagery, whereby the lover is at once compelled “to gaze intensely on the god . . . grasping him through memory” (253a1–3), and to look at Beauty through the boy’s face, we can take him instead to be seeing both Form and god through the face.11 (Yet if gazing on this god reduces to attending to the Forms in the manner that he symbolizes, the double focus belongs rather to Socrates’ imagery than to his meaning.) If he is perceiving the god through the boy, it is still clearer why he would sacrifice to the boy “as to a statue and a god” (251a6) and ascribes to the boy what he derives from the god (253a3– 6). (Yet the lover as described in 251a would seem to have in mind no god in particular.)

In a way, it also suits Nussbaum well that it should be the charioteer (that is, reason or cognition) who sees “the erotic vision” (to ero¯tikon omma; 253e5), for it can only be reason that discriminates qualities of character.12 Indeed, it suits her nicely if omma here specifically means the eyes (see de Vries 1969, ad loc.); for, as Athenaeus quotes from some lost Aristotle, it is there that “modesty dwells” (Deipnosophistae 13.564B = fr. 96 R3). It may suit her less well that the charioteer’s perception is said to excite the horses, good and bad, appetite as well as spirit; for this surely suggests that its ob- ject (like that of the sexually stimulating perceptions of 250e) is physical

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beauty. No doubt it is possible, if rather Victorian, to be sexually stimulated by moral merits (rather as Genet’s characters are by moral defects); but it is implausible that that is what Socrates has in mind. However, there is an al- ternative: perhaps the bad horse both selects and distorts what it receives from the charioteer, so that it registers the vision of a “godlike face” (251a2) impelling a gaze as the impression of an attractive one inviting an ogle.13 Indeed, we need to suppose this even if we hold that “godlike” in- dicates only a transcendent mode of visual beauty; for (as is clear from the contrast, albeit between persons and not parts of a person, that is drawn within 250e1–251a7) it is the materiality and not the ideality of beauty that enkindles copulatory desire.14

Elsewhere, Plato shows an implicit awareness that a state of mind may become visually manifest. A phenomenon that almost becomes a topos is the blush. Hippothales blushes when asked about the younger boy Lysis (Lysis 204b5, c3– 4, d4), and again, from pleasure, when Socrates has pre- tended to prove that love must be reciprocated (222b2)— a phenomenon that makes it easy for Socrates to detect who is in love (204b8– c2). Hip- pocrates blushes as he talks to Socrates, as day is dawning, about his youth- ful aspirations (Protagoras 312a2). Charmides blushes, and so looks by a befitting bashfulness all the more beautiful, when Socrates asks him a flat- tering question (Charmides 158c5). Less congruously, the grown-up Thra- symachus blushes when he senses that he is losing the argument (Republic 1.350d3). If we can read Plato as accommodating such phenomena theo- retically, so much the better for his fidelity to his own experience.

And yet, though I have no singly decisive objection, I am not persuaded to read the Phaedrus along these lines. Nussbaum is free to read Socrates’ talk of the lover’s “selection” (252d6) less literally, and awkwardly, than I have. But I think that the awkwardness is motivated. I take it to arise be- cause Socrates wishes both to acknowledge the relevance of the beloved’s character to the lover’s object choice at 252c3ff. and to retain his earlier explanation of the unique power of physical beauty at 250b1– e1. There, as I noted, he emphasized a distinction: Justice and the rest we apprehend dimly, grasping their images with “dulled” organs (b1–5), presumably not perceptual ones; Beauty alone we perceive vividly, somehow seeing it by means of images in or through which it becomes apparent to experience. If it were implicit in the later passage, what is certainly not explicit, that the boy’s character is perceptually apparent to the man, that would surely cloud the contrast.15

A less local obstacle is constituted by Plato’s general views about the limits of perception. In the Theaetetus, he has Socrates insist— to reexpress

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the point in Aristotle’s jargon— that only the “proper” objects of some par- ticular sense or other are objects of perception (184d7–185a3); hence, color can be seen, as sound can be heard, but “being and nonbeing, like- ness and unlikeness, same and different” (185c9–10) cannot be perceived, and can only be apprehended through the “calculations” (analogismata; 186c3) of “the soul itself” (b7– 8). The same is said not only of “being,” but of “utility” (c3), which is a value (if not a moral one).16 Now it is already true on my reading that the Phaedrus is extending the limits of perception (how seriously on Plato’s part is an open question), for the Beauty that is seen in or through a complexion is of a different category from color. Yet we can read this as a tipsy epicycle upon the sobrieties of the Theaetetus. Even if the Form of Beauty is not exclusively a Form of physical beauty, physical beauty of the kind that Socrates has in mind has to be seen to be believed (unless with the aid of the visual imagination), and his claim in 250d is pre- cisely that quasi-perceiving Beauty is a mode of perceiving physical beauty. So long as he is not raising any sophisticated questions about the relation of perception to cognition, he may well allow himself to entertain the thought that Beauty is a transcendent object of sight.

I have acknowledged that Plato was implicitly familiar with the physi- cal as expressive of the mental in the phenomenon of the blush; the ques- tion is whether he accommodates it theoretically. Perhaps he might have done so, despite his dualism of mind and body.17 (After all, we have seen that he allows one Form, if only that of Beauty, to be quasi-perceived de- spite his usual dichotomy between an intelligible world of Forms and a vis- ible world of material things.) And yet it seems that, within his way of thinking, mental and physical beauty are contrasted or juxtaposed, never blended as they become in the experience of someone who sees a mind in a body. In the Charmides, Charmides is said to have a beautiful face, also body, also mind (154d1– e7). Each is to be detected in turn: the face at once, the body if it is stripped of its clothes, the mind if it is stripped, metaphorically, in discussion. In the Symposium, as we saw, the lover begins by appreciating physical beauty; he then ascends to mental beauty, and values it more highly, so that now just a little beauty of body will suffice for him (210a4– c1). There is no suggestion that a mind can lend beauty to an otherwise mediocre body— just as there is no suggestion, later on, that it detracts from Alcibiades’ beauty of form (eumorphia) that he lacks the “altogether different” beauty which he ascribes to Socrates (218e2–3). The closest relations that Plato, when theorizing, allows between body and mind are agreement and harmony (Republic 3.402d1– 4; cf. Timaeus 87d4– 8); those are still relations that hold between different and separate things.

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His personal paradigm remains Socrates, precisely because he had an un- usually ugly body to contrast with an unusually beautiful mind; Alcibiades likens him to little statues containing figures of the gods inside (Symposium 215a6–b3). Socrates’ relation to his body vividly exemplifies the general predicament of the incarnate soul, trapped like an oyster in its shell (Phae- drus 250c6). A shell, like a mask, obscures, and does not express, what lies within.

I conclude that Socrates’ second speech in Plato’s Phaedrus is sensitive to questions about the relations of pederasty to pedagogy, and of beauty to ed- ucability. We may well feel that its inventions are elaborate but not ideal, and that Nussbaum is alert to a phenomenon that philosophy should rec- ognize. But for a solution along her lines, and a theoretical framework to accommodate it, we must proceed to the Stoics.

 

 

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If we move directly from Plato’s Phaedrus to the Stoicorum Veterum Frag- menta (as Johannes von Arnim was invaluably to collect them), we enter a new world.18 In place of a living organism, as it were, with head and feet (cf. Phaedrus 264c2–5), we have the scattered bones of a fragmentary skele- ton. In a way, the accidents of transmission may have been apt: Stoic dog- mas may lend themselves better to doxographic compilation than Platonic fantasy and irony. And what little we retain includes what Socrates’ second speech failed to supply: a definition. Yet we have a delicate task to perform: making the most of fragments, while bearing in mind that it is fragments that we are making the most of.

I have suggested that a restrictive idea of perception made Plato theoreti- cally blind, however personally sensitive, to the visible presence of minds in bodies. If all that can strictly be perceived are the “proper” objects of each sense, there must be a gulf set between perception and thought. Aris- totle was to insist (De Anima 2.6) that we perceive not only proper objects, but “common” objects (such as shape and movement), plainly apparent to more than one sense, and also “incidental” objects (such as man, and even son of Diares), not plainly apparent to sense at all. He has good arguments against assigning incidental objects not to perception but to inference: for instance, the sun appears one foot across, but is not believed (nor, therefore, inferred) to be so (3.3.428b3– 4). About the workings of incidental percep- tion he is less explicit. Plausibly it involves the cooperation of phantasia in its role as imagination. In interesting cases where perception is evaluative,

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it must also involve pleasure or pain: “To feel pleasure or pain is to act with the perceptive mean towards what is good or bad as such” (3.7.431a10– 11). Such perception becomes crucial in the Nicomachean Ethics: it is by per- ception, not reason, that we detect not only whether bread has been baked as it should (3.3.1113a1), but whether a deviation from the mean is blame- worthy (2.9.1109b20–23). Even the lower animals can perceive incidental objects: the lion perceives that the ox is near by its lowing (3.10.1118a20– 21). Yet rational subjects must have a richer repertory which exploits the possession of concepts. Aristotle makes room for this when he tells us that both parts of the human soul, rational and irrational, are peculiar to human beings (EE 2.1.1219b37–38). However, it is only implicitly that he allows concepts to affect perceptions. A conception to do justice to this central part of our perceptual experience (vivid to us in the example, made famous by Wittgenstein, of the image that really looks different according as we see it as a duck or as a rabbit) had still to become explicit.

With Aristotle, we have full evidence of a fragmentary view; with the Stoics, we have what looks like fragmentary evidence of a full view. Aris- totle marks a crucial transition between Plato and the Stoics, but these took a decisive further step when they proposed that all the impressions of ra- tional animals are rational (Diogenes Laertius, SVF 2.24.21–22 = LS 39A6

= Vitae Philosophorum 7.51). Every operation of the adult human mind is distinctively human, and different from those of the lower animals. In their relation  to  the  commanding  faculty  or  control  center  (he¯gemonikon),  the senses are likened to the tentacles of an octopus (Aëtius, SVF 2.227.25–27

= LS 53H2–3); the image conveys that even our perceptions are applica-

tions of concepts. It is not implied that our perceptions are beliefs, for these additionally involve the element of consent (sunkatathesis). Cicero reports an illustration by Zeno: he “would spread out the fingers of one hand and display its open palm, saying ‘An impression is like this.’ Next he clenched his fingers a little and said, ‘Assent is like this’” (Cicero, SVF 1.19.34–36 = LS 41A2–3 = Academica 2.145). Further, beliefs are verbal, while percep- tual impressions are verbalizable.19 In thought, we articulate the concepts that are already active within our perceptions.

This new (or newly explicit) conception had the corollary that there is no clear a priori limit to the concepts that may infuse perception. Cicero (LS 39C1–2 = Academica 2.21) lists first “white,” “sweet,” “fragrant,” and “bitter” (which Aristotle would take to label proper objects of perception), but also “melodious” (which is surely more complex), and then “horse” and “dog” (which label incidental objects). Plutarch tells us that Chrysippus (who became head of the Stoa thirty years after Zeno’s death) went further

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in his book On the End (Peri Telous): we can even perceive good and bad (SVF 3.85 = De Stoicorum Repugnantiis 1042E –F, 1062C). More precisely, Plutarch has Chrysippus claim that we can perceive goods and evils (in- cluding theft and adultery, courage and cowardice), and “the good,” but his meaning was presumably that we can perceive things as good or evil, either generically or specifically. And Cicero is explicit: our eyes “recognize” (cog- noscunt) virtues and vices (De Natura Deorum 2.145).

No doubt Chrysippus introduced refinements.20 Yet we can be sure that both the conception and the corollary go back to the founder, Zeno, for we read that Cleanthes said that Zeno claimed that character was cognizable (katale¯ptos) from appearance (SVF 1.204 = D.L. 7.173).21 This conveys that he admitted not only impressions of moral character, but cognitively re- liable ones.22 Doubtless it was by such an impression that Cleanthes once detected a pathic by his sneeze (SVF 1.618 = D.L. 7.173).23 Clement of Al- exandria preserves from Zeno, probably verbatim, a sketch of “a beautiful and properly loveable image of a young man” (SVF 1.246; see Schofield 1991, 115–18): “Let his countenance be pure; his brow not relaxed; his eye not wide open nor half-closed; his neck not thrown back, nor the limbs of his body relaxed, but keyed up like strings under tension; his ear cocked for the logos; and his bearing and movement giving no hope to the licentious. Let modesty and a manly look flower upon him.” Despite Malcolm Scho- field’s suggestion (“Zeno is urging young men to aim for a particular sort of physical bearing”; 1991, 117), I take this not to be a lesson in deport- ment addressed to a would-be Stoic ero¯menos (not that Zeno was unwill- ing to give one, cf. SVF 1.245 = D.L. 7.22), but a lesson in erotic object choice addressed to a potential eraste¯s supposed to be making an inspection and selection (somewhat like a horse trader). Once the lesson is learned, much time should be saved: external scrutiny can take the place of intimate acquaintance.

The corrupt lover might misapply the lesson for his own purposes. The Stoics  no  more  define  a  neutral  genus  of  ero¯s  than  they  do  of  good  and bad emotions (eupatheiai and pathe¯); but, in the manner of moralists, they make certain broad contrasts. Ero¯s is spoken of in two senses (Stobaeus, SVF 3.180.23–24; cf. scholium, SVF 3.181.24). Bad ero¯s is desire (epithu- mia; Stobaeus, SVF 3.180.33–34); its object is the body (scholium, SVF 3.181.24); its goal is sexual intercourse (SVF 3.180.19 = D.L. 7.130). Good ero¯s is for the soul (scholium, SVF 3.181.24); its goal is friendship (philia; SVF 3.718 = D.L. 7.130). More precisely, we have several citations, with some abbreviation, of what seems to have become the school definition of, I take it, good ero¯s (the ero¯s that deserves its name). I quote from Stobaeus:

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“ero¯s is a resolve to make friends, on account of beauty being manifested, with youths in bloom” (SVF 3.650; see Schofield 1991, 29). Let us stay with this formulation.24

My phrase “being manifested” renders the term emphainomenon. This participle (or occasionally the variant “manifestation,” emphasis) is recur- rent, and evidently carefully chosen. We miss that fact, and permit good ero¯s too simple a cause, if, with Schofield, we translate simply “apparent.” The verb emphaino¯ is often used literally to mean “reflect.”25 It is also used de- rivatively of displaying or revealing character.26 It so functions within a dic- tum ascribed to Zeno’s Republic that would seem to anticipate the defi- nition: “The wise man will love those youths who by their appearance manifest  (emphainonto¯n)  a  natural  endowment  for  virtue”  (SVF  1.248  =

D.L. 7.130). Beauty that is “manifested” is beauty of mind and heart made apparent in outward appearance.27 Thus, the term is fit to capture the par- adox, now accommodated within theory, of a beauty that is not visual and yet becomes visible.28

An associated phrase is antho s arete¯s (the flower of virtue), identified by two of our sources, Plutarch (Amatorius 767B) and Diogenes Laertius (7.130

= SV F 3.718), with “bloom” (h o ¯ ra) as a stimulus to er o ¯ s . Schofield is skep-

tical, commenting as follows (1991: 114): “This is evidently an attempt to make sense of ‘[youths] in bloom’ in [the definition]. The attempt obvi- ously does not work. On Zeno’s story, the youthful object of the sage’s love is not yet virtuous— not yet in full flower —but merely naturally endowed for virtue. Moreover, if I am right, [the definition] aims at an account of love which is ethically neutral in any case.” He thus supposes that the identifica- tion of “bloom” with “the flower of virtue” is an apologist’s gloss upon the school definition of ero¯s that carries no authority. This seems doubly spec- ulative: first, neither author evidently uses “flower of virtue” to make sense of “youths in bloom”; secondly, if others did, they may have been Stoics. Whether original or imported, does the identification work? I have noted two main grounds against taking the definition to be ethically neutral: the simple contrast that is drawn between a good love set on friendship and a bad one set on sexual intercourse, and the inapplicability of the phrase “on account of beauty being manifested” to a love inspired by visual beauty.29 If the definition is morally loaded, the identification of “bloom” with “flower of virtue” applies only to the object worthy of love (axioerastos) that a good love (spoudaio s ero¯s) finds it fit to befriend (Stobaeus, SV F 3.180.25–27). It is of such a person that Zeno wrote (if Clement is quoting him), “Let mod- esty and a manly look flower upon him” (epantheito¯; SVF 1.58.29–30). So the metaphor of moral “flowering” most likely goes back to Zeno himself;

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yet is it still a fatal objection that the flower of virtue can only be the pos- session of a sage, not of a youth?30 We have to attend to the various senses of anthos (which relate much like those of the Latin flos). Literally, it denotes flower or blossom, which any apple-grower would distinguish sharply from fruit (karpos).31 The term then took on the figurative meaning of “flower of youth” (cf. Proust’s jeunes filles en fleur), still in distinction from matu- rity. Thus, in Plato’s Symposium, the anthos of the body (183e3) is not its physical prime or akme¯ (which Aristotle thinks is reached at thirty; Rhetoric 2.14.1390b9–10), but its visual peak (which for males is at adolescence). Finally, the term could be used figuratively in nonphysical and nonerotic contexts in which the contrast with fruit was lost. Thus, the phrase anthos arete¯s is indeed ambiguous: in an erotic context it may well mean “the blos- som of virtue,” while in other contexts it would rather signify “the ripeness of virtue.”32 It is possible that, in withholding the phrase from moral prom- ise in order to reserve it for moral perfection, Schofield is reenacting a Stoic disagreement, verbal or real. Diogenes Laertius informs us, in a miscella- neous context (but shortly, though not immediately, after a remark about friendship), that Zeno called beauty “the flower of temperance,” while oth- ers called temperance “the flower of beauty” (SVF 1.330 = D.L. 7.23).33 We cannot recover the context of either claim or know whether they shared one. I am tempted to suspect a play on words: Zeno may have meant that youthful beauty was the blossom of temperance, others that temperance was the acme of mature beauty. If they thought themselves at odds (which the passage leaves open), they were speaking at cross purposes.

Quite apart from the bloom, difficulties attach to the beauty that is mani-

fested, as Plutarch sets out succinctly: “The young are ugly, since they are common and stupid, and the wise are beautiful; and yet none of these who are beautiful is either loved or worth loving. And this is not yet the strange part, which is that those who were in love with the ugly cease loving them when they become beautiful” (SVF 3.181.5–9 = De Communibus Notitiis 1073A; cf. Stoicos Absurdiora Poetis Dicere 1058A). Part of his argument may be expanded as follows: the Stoics hold that virtue and vice are all or noth- ing, and that there is nothing in between them;34 so vice must be predicable, without a scintilla of virtue, of even the most promising of the morally im- mature; now vice is presumably as visible as virtue; how then can they attract the love of a sage? To this much of his criticism there may be a ready an- swer. The Stoics acknowledged the existence of “progressors” (prokoptontes), unwise until the moment of enlightenment; and they surely must have rec- ognized that, though these do not count as being virtuous at all (since vir- tue does not come in degrees), yet their transitional state is commendable

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in the young, and should be perceptible with pleasure. Indeed, Plutarch is consistent only in always controverting the Stoics: he argues from their own premises bot h (in order to embarrass their definition of er o¯s) that a promis- ing boy could no more manifest beauty than a wicked man (SVF 3.181.9– 13 = De Communibus Notitiis 1073B), and also (in order to question their preference for pederasty) that girls and boys may equally “make a manifes- tation of a natural endowment for virtue” (Amat. 767B). A sentence of Cic- ero may reflect the compromises of a later age, but ends pertinently: “Since life is passed not in the company of men who are perfect and truly wise, but of those who do very well if they show likenesses of virtue, I think it must be understood that no one should be entirely neglected in whom any mark of virtue is evident” (LS 66D = De Officiis 1.46). It is plausible to suppose that a mark of virtue (“significatio virtutis”) may be perceptibly and agree- ably present in a progressor, especially a precocious one, even though vir- tue is as yet absent. Which is surely confirmed by the passage, probably of Zeno’s, already quoted from Clement (SVF 1.246).35

Yet saying that only parries Plutarch’s point, for a paradox remains. We read in Stobaeus (SVF 3.630) that the good man is “lovely” (epaphroditos, Latin venustus)—which is only a variation on the commonplace that he (and he alone) is beautiful (SVF 3.591, 594, 597–99);36 and yet, as Sextus Empiricus observes, no one falls in love with old men (SVF 3.97.35 = Ad- versus Mathematicos 7.239).37 Even if a youth can be visibly progressing, and so beautiful in a way, why should he be a better object of a moralized ero¯s than a man who is morally mature (and so at least middle-aged)? And why should he cease to be an object of ero¯s once he has achieved maturity (and middle age) himself?38 Presumably the Stoics did not intend a definitional full stop, whereby “a resolve to make friends on account of beauty being manifested” counts as ero¯s when and only when it happens to take a youth as its object; rather, the bloom and the beauty must connect. So the thought has to be that the “flower of virtue” has a double parentage: the virtue that it visibly promises, and the visual bloom that it permeates. Plutarch cites Ariston (more likely Zeno’s pupil than the Peripatetic) as saying that a pure and  orderly  character  can  shine  through  (become  diaphane¯s)  in  outward bloom and charm (ho¯ra and charis of morphe¯), just as a properly made shoe shows the natural shapeliness of a foot (SVF 1.390 = Amat. 766F). If we take Ariston at his word, the visual and the moral beauty of a young pro- gressor do not coexist; instead, they become one (rather as the shape of the shoe is the shape of the foot). And the visual bloom becomes indeed the blossom, and not just (say) the bud, of virtue: the beauty of virtue is beauti- fully prefigured. The phrase anthos arete¯s is thus pregnant, and not out of

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place; it contains in germ the heart of my argument. We must suppose that the Stoics conceived of visual and visible beauties as uniting, within the per- son of a promising adolescent, in a blend that is only apparent to the man who is at once an actual sage and a potential lover. In the terms of a Cicero- nian contrast, flos aetatis (flower of youth) can be infused with spes virtutis (promise of virtue). If there is a mystery here in the chemistry of eyes and heart, it may be one that is not invented but revealed.

The definition of a good ero¯s that I have been discussing is inexplicit about its manner of operation. The dictum of Zeno’s that I cited (SVF 1.248

= D.L. 7.129) says expressly that what is manifested by the boy’s appear-

ance is “a natural endowment for virtue.” A related characterization that we meet in Plutarch is close to Zeno but introduces the metaphor of the chase (the¯ra): “Love is a sort of chase after a lad who is undeveloped but naturally endowed for virtue” (SVF 3.181.14–15 = De Communibus Notitiis 1073B). The term “chase” may sound predatory to us; but hunting was a common Greek metaphor for courtship (see Dover 1978, 87– 88), and Plutarch pairs it with “making friends” (1073C). That it becomes the lover’s task to develop the boy’s potential is already a natural corollary of the requirement that he have that potential if he is to inspire ero¯s. Arius Didymus makes the corollary explicit when he defines the science of love as “knowledge of the chase after naturally endowed youths, [a knowledge] which is directed toward turn- ing them to living in accordance with virtue” (Stobaeus, SVF 3.180.30–31). The charm of such activity is easy to conceive: in enhancing the quali- ties that attract him, the lover is at once indulging and increasing his en- joyment of them. Yet we can see the advantage of a deep explanation of his motivation of the kind that Plato offered in his Symposium. A theory that derived erotic love from a primal need to procreate could easily rationalize why the ero¯menos must be immature (if not why he should be more than coincidentally attractive): he has to be receptive of a new mentality.39 As it is, keeping to the evidence we have, we can only suppose that the Stoics take over from ero¯s as commonly conceived and experienced that the ero¯- menos must be “in bloom,” and introduce the desire to educate not as a cause but as a corollary of ero¯s as they define it. Yet we can confirm the corollary by relating it to their understanding of the explicit goal of er o¯s within the defi- nition, which is making friends. They ascribe to sages a monopoly not only of beauty, but of friendship: “They say that friendship exists only among the virtuous, on account of their similarity” (SVF 3.161.15–16 = LS 67P =

D.L. 7.124). Consequently, the definition connects twice with pedagogy: loving a promising youth, the man can educate him; desiring his friendship, he mus t do so. A good er o ¯ s must take views as long as those of a bad er o ¯ s are

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short; for the friendship can be achieved only after the pedagogy has suc- ceeded, and so only in the Indian summer, if not in the aftermath, of the erotic relationship. However, this may preecho the eventual friendship be- fore it overlaps with it. If, as I suggested, the Stoics were willing to apply to progressors a conception of moral beauty in the bud, they may also have allowed that a foretaste of friendship can unite the wise and the wise-to-be in a shared anticipation of the full friendship that is to be achieved once the boy’s nature has become second nature. To allow that is to predicate of the budding friendship— call it pro¯tophilia— significant features of friendship itself.40 Like Aristotle, the Stoics conceive of this as mutual benefit, not in the manner of a quid pro quo, but with the thought that to benefit a friend is eo ipso to benefit oneself: “All goods are common to the virtuous, and all that is bad to the inferior; therefore, a man who benefits someone also ben- efits himself, and one who does harm also harms himself” (Stobaeus, SVF 3.626 = LS 60P). A mature friendship is a sharing of virtue: Seneca assures Lucilius that good men are mutually helpful, exercising one another’s virtues and maintaining wisdom in her position (Epistulae Morales 109.1). A ped- erastic relationship that makes a person virtuous and wise cannot be equally reciprocal, but the benefit that it bestows is greater, and equally shared.

Whereas, according to Seneca (Epistulae Morales 9.15), a sage does not need friends in order to live happily, a progressor may well need a mentor in or- der to become happy. And, for his part, the lover can hardly find a better way of practicing his actual qualities than in realizing the qualities of a per- son who will owe to him not only their friendship, but his capacity for friendship. His education will be at once an exercise of pro¯tophilia and a preparation for friendship proper. Much as in Plato, the pedagogic project combines the private urgency of ero¯s with the public value of doing good.

 

 

5

 

To a large extent, the Stoic definition of ero¯s is the key to their conception. Yet in one respect the pedagogic demands derivative from a demanding con- ception of friendship appear to have made a curious and concrete differ- ence to their practice in disregard of the definition. We read that, harping on the theme “One must love not bodies but the soul,” they prescribed re- taining an ero¯menos until the age of twenty-eight (Athenaeus, SVF 1.247 = Deipnosophistae 13.563E). That it was praiseworthy to sacrifice a little bloom for a little more maturity was not a new idea. Plato’s Pausanias, who con- trasted noble with vulgar love in a manner anticipatory of the Stoics, had

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distinguished lovers who “do not love boys so much as those who are al- ready beginning to be intelligent, and this occurs around the time when the beard is growing” (Symposium 181d1–3). That preference still respected the convention that it was high time for an ero¯menos to switch to being an eraste¯s when adolescent down had finally made way for the adult beard. According to the Hippocratic tradition, most famously set out in an elegy of Solon’s

(27) which divides a man’s life into hebdomads (periods of seven years), that allowed just seven years, from fourteen to twenty-one, for a youth to play the role of an er o ¯ meno s without any suspicion of unmanliness on ei- ther side. Clearly, reality was more variable. At the start of Plato’s Protago- ras, a friend teases Socrates for still “hunting” after Alcibiades when he was a man, “with his beard already coming” (309a1–5); and yet, if Plato is care- ful and C. C. W. Taylor correct (1991 ad loc.), Alcibiades was then just sev- enteen. In taking precisely twenty-eight as the terminus, the Stoics were of course falling in with conventional hebdomadology;41 but in envisaging er o ¯ meno i well into their twenties they were breaking with a tradition alive within their own definition. On the other hand, we have no evidence that they also preferred a later starting point. How may they have rationalized a terminus a quo certainly not before fourteen, and a terminus ad quem as late as twenty-eight?

A scholiast ascribes to Zeno (but also to Aristotle and the Pythagorean Alcmaeon) this gloss upon the age of fourteen: “Then perfect logos is dis- played” (SVF 1.149). The grammatical interests of the Stoics make it natu- ral to suppose that “perfect logos” in their mouths meant in part a full mas- tery of syntax. We can also cite Aëtius, who has them hold that by fourteen there exists a conception of good and evil (SVF 2.764). Taking these to- gether, we can infer that an adolescent boy was accepted as a potential par- ticipant in ethical dialogue. Why twenty-eight? It may be pertinent that Solon placed within the fourth hebdomad, from twenty-one to twenty- eight, the peak in a man’s strength, “by which men indicate virtue” (27.7– 8).42 At least according to Aristotle (History of Animals 7.1.582a29), twenty- one itself was a little early: at that age men, unlike women, have still to grow. Materialists about the mind, the Stoics found physical fitness more than a sign of a sound character. When we read in Stobaeus: “Just as strength of body is adequate tension (tonos) in the sinews, so strength of soul is ade- quate tension in deciding and acting or refraining” (SVF 3.68.29–31), we must remember that tension was at once physical and mental. Hence they will naturally have supposed that a man’s twenties were a crucial period of moral maturing just in virtue of human biology. However, their main rea- son is likely to have been grounded within ethics: their ambitious and “all-

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or-nothing” conception of what it is to be virtuous demanded more time for ethical progression.

And yet the upshot was problematic. I have argued that the Stoics could reconcile moralistic ideal with erotic reality through a fusion of visual and visible beauties, of flos aetatis and spes virtutis. But a bearded young man in his twenties would have lost the bloom that transmuted mental promise into bodily blossom. So in linking pederasty to pedagogy, while raising the leaving age to match an exigent conception of what it was to be educated, the Stoics risked extending their conception of ero¯s well beyond the “youths in bloom” of their definition, in a manner that either etiolated ero¯s or en- joined erotic eccentricity. Plutarch anyway accuses them of the first, com- plaining, “Nobody would stop the enthusiasm of the wise for the young, given that there is no passion [pathos] in it, if it is called ‘a chase’ or ‘mak- ing friends’—but they wouldn’t let them call it ‘love’” (De Communibus Notitiis 1073C). There may be some terminological trouble here. The Sto- ics defined pathe¯ as species of false belief, and so could have nothing of them; the sage’s loves must have counted as eupatheiai, emotions that es- caped illusion and anxiety by valuing intentions and deprecating contin- gencies, and so achieved elation without agitation. Hence, their alternative to passion was not impassibility. However, Plutarch has a concrete ground of complaint in the extended age range for an ero¯menos: in Greek eyes, a de- cently masculine ero¯s that admitted men as its objects risked being ero¯s only in name.

It may be that the Stoic answer was to stress a distinction. What Athe- naeus has in mind is not a man who falls for a beard, but an established eraste¯s who retains his ero¯menos even past his visual prime. It is even pos- sible (though not likely within such a context as he offers) that what is en- visaged is that the ero¯menos be retained not as an ero¯menos, but so as to be- come a friend. (If he was simply discarded before becoming virtuous and eligible  for  friendship,  the  goal  of  ero¯s—which  was  friendship—would never be achieved.) If the Stoics did intend the relationship to remain eroti- cally charged, they may have been sensitive to a feature of human attach- ment overlooked by the later Greek topos (see Tarán 1985) that the arrival of a beard put an ero¯menos out of court. No more erotically than personally do we reassess one another every day. (Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds.) If Stoic eyes could see a mental future in an adolescent face, they could surely see a physical past in an adult one; and then they could enjoy perceiving mental beauties in physical features reminiscent of recent visual charms. (Here the conceptual theory of perception can do fur- ther work.) This could constitute the psychological truth lying behind an

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anecdote in Plutarch: Euripides is said to have exclaimed, as he kissed an Agathon who was already growing (or had already grown) a beard, “Of all those who are beautiful even the autumn is beautiful” (Amat. 770C)— though Plutarch himself endorses that only for Alcibiades “and a few oth- ers” (Alcibiades 1.5).

Athenaeus raises the different possibility of a recourse to technology when, apparently echoing early satire aimed at the Stoa, he accuses the Stoics of taking their ero¯menoi around with shaven chins (Deipnosophistae 13.564F, cf. 563D–E). This was at least a conceivable solution: Dio Chry- sostom describes how those who first tried shaving their beards found that their faces became “pretty and boyish beyond their years when rid of that down” (Orationes 33.63.7– 8). Aristophanes already mocked Agathon for practising a close shave (Thesmophoriazousae 191–92); a smooth cheek may have helped him to retain, well into adulthood, lovers (perhaps including Pausanias) less willing to make allowances than Euripides. And yet one might well dismiss Athenaeus’s charge as scurrilous if two considerations did not give one pause. First, the early Stoics inherited a Cynic preference for impropriety. It has not been relevant here to draw attention to their con- scious unconventionalities; but if Zeno could raise Plutarch’s hackles (SVF

1.252 = Quaestiones Conviviales 653E) by finding space in his Republic,

rather than in some Symposium, for his “intercruralities” (diame¯rismous, pre- sumably candid and unceremonious discussion of intercrural copulation), he may not have disdained to resolve our problem in a similarly down-to- earth way.43 Secondly, Athenaeus cites names: he has Chrysippus observe, presumably without disapproval, that shaving the beard increased under Alexander (Deipnosophistae 13.564F –565A); he also has Antigonus of Ca- rystus accuse the Stoics of leading their ero¯menoi around “with shaven chins and posteriors” (565F)—which is more likely a vulgar parody (much in the manner of comedy, always imputing anality) than an invention out of nothing.

Be that as it may: it is not our task to extricate the Stoics from embarrass- ments of their own making. Relevant here is rather that we have evidence that the awkwardness that has arisen is not the mirage of a misinterpretation, but a reality that raised eyebrows at the time. The Stoics were concerned both to change men’s lives and to respect common experience (so¯zein te¯n sune¯theian; Plutarch De Communibus Notitiis 1063D). They strove to weave innovation within tradition, not demanding of the eraste¯s a totally new sen- sibility, but rather reconceiving the conventional bloom of the ero¯menos in a way permitted by their philosophy of perception and prescribed by their moralization of ero¯s. It is remarkable how far they succeeded.

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6

 

A modern liberal philosopher who looks back at such attempts to define a distinctively philosophical love is likely to feel that they were all miscon- ceived. Proust somewhere remarks, “There is no such thing as a good choice in love, for in love all choice is bad.” A philosopher may find his loves touched by his philosophy (and vice versa), but hardly in ways that he would wish to have planned. Love, like life, is something that happens. Isaiah Ber- lin understood that when, toward the end of his life, he wrote this for the Chinese: “‘Where is the song before it is sung?’ Where indeed? ‘Nowhere’ is the answer — one creates the song by singing it, by composing it. So, too, life is created by those who live it, step by step” (Ignatieff 1998, 295). What we may be readiest to admire in Plato and the Stoics is a sensitivity to real- ity that illumines their ingenuity in theory — a sensitivity richly displayed in all we have of Plato, and economically evidenced in what little we have of Zeno. These are theorizers who are always making things up, but in ways that are quickened as much by collaboration as by resistance from the world of experience. Even as they urge a change of life, they open our eyes to the intricacies and amenities of the actual lives that are the only lives we know we can lead.

 

 

Notes

1. The Greek terms for lover and beloved within a pederastic relationship were erast e ¯ s and er o ¯ menos , respectively. I shall frequently use the term “boy” for the er o ¯ menos, and occasionally the term “man” for the erast e ¯ s , without intending any precise implica- tions about their absolute or relative ages. As I briefly discuss later, convention pre- scribed for an er o ¯ meno s any age between fourteen and twenty-one—which overlaps with Martha Nussbaum’s slightly sanitizing suggestion of “the age of a modern college undergraduate” (1994, 1551).

2. Two exceptions to prove the rule are Republic 5.468b12– c4, and Laws 8.836a7. Sir Kenneth Dover is circumspect but hardly dissentient: “We must leave open the pos- sibility that [Plato’s] own homosexual emotion was abnormally intense and his hetero- sexual response abnormally deficient” (1978, 12).

3. Malcolm Schofield cites a third-century Cynic poem which identifies “Zenonian love” with a form of homosexuality (1991, 45 n. 39). On my modes of reference to sources for the early Stoics, see n. 18 below.

4. Aristotle concedes causal cross-currents: beauty alone may provoke only a desire for pleasure; but an athlete who is both beautiful and brave may inspire goodwill in re- sponse to both qualities (Nicomachean Ethics 9.5.1167a18–21).

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5. I once suggested (1989, 249), in connection with another passage (Nicomachean Ethics 7.5.1148b28–34), that Aristotle has a quasi-medical concern to keep pederasty to “looking rather than loving,” as Plato had put it (Laws 8.837c4–5). I should have noted that, as his anxiety attaches to habituation to sexual passivity from boyhood, no blanket proscription of sexual relations is in question. Further, I may well have been wrong to set aside the discussion of anal intercourse in the pseudo-Aristotelian Proble- mata (4.26); for Aristotle’s own History of Animals (7.581b12–21) connects a need of surveillance of young adolescents, male and female, with a special concern about the dilation of certain “passages.” His own predilections may have been, or become, con- nubial; but he says nothing that begins to tell against intercrural intercourse that is not too frequent with a boy who is not too young. I fully accept correction on this point by Nussbaum (1994, 1591–92).

6. Schofield raises a slightly different question: “On Plato’s premisses, there is no reason why someone who exhibits the physical beauty which provokes the philoso- pher’s desire must also be someone likely to develop into a morally admirable person” (1991, 31); he nicely labels this “the Alcibiades problem.” It is pertinent to the Stoics, but less apt to Plato: in the Symposium, the lover on his way to becoming a philosopher may well switch objects as he ascends from physical to mental beauty (210a4– c2); in the Phaedrus, he selects someone congenial to love from the ranks of the beautiful (252d5– 6).

7. Here I follow Schofield (1991, 32) and Nussbaum (1995, 258–59) on the Sto- ics, and diverge from Nussbaum (1995, 248– 49) on Plato— for she finds the break- through already present in the Phaedrus. Each is a parent of this essay (pat e ¯ r to u logou; Symposium 177d5), though I shall sometimes bite the hand that feeds me. In quota- tions from Plato, I keep fairly close to C. J. Rowe’s translations of the Symposium and Phaedrus (1998, 1986).

8. Translators vary between permitting an er o ¯ meno s who has littl e bloom or a little bloom— a tiny but telling difference. I take kan smikron (Symposium 210b8) to indicate the second. If so, Socrates is demanding a little physical appeal (if not much), and not just supposing idly that any boy is physically appealing to a degree. In either case he is not far from Pausanias, who commended loving the noblest and best “even if they are plainer than others” (182d7).

9. It is true that the term homopteros itself only ascribes a similar nature, and not a common growth, to the lovers’ plumage. Yet one may compare Aristotle Nicomachean Ethic s 8.4.1157a10–12 (quoted earlier), where, in a related context, homo e ¯ thei s ontes (“being alike in character”) ascribes to lovers who remain faithful an affinity that they realize together (see Price 1989, 247– 48).

10. Of course compare the recurrent connection between attending to an object, and communicating about it through logoi, in the ascent passage of the Symposium. What is lacking there is the complication of differing cognitive mentalities.

11. Thus, de Vries comments ad loc., “The ‘image’ of the god is meant, which is present in the beloved” (1969, 162).

12. The tripartite psychology of the Phaedrus is in some ways simplified (Price 1995, 77–78), and I doubt whether it is really a good question which part of the tripar- tite soul is the subject of all or some perceiving (ibid., 70–71). However, if we are to

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identify some part as the subject of the erotic perception, we have to opt for reason, for the perception is also recollection of a Form.

13. Compare how, in the Republic (8.561d2), the democratic man, though a crea- ture of appetite, takes on a dilettantish taste for philosophy that presumably derives by way of depravement from the philosopher’s passion for truth. (See Price 1995, 62– 63.)

14. The interpretation of Phaedrus 250e is disputed (see Nussbaum 1994, 1575– 78). I still incline to think that it deprecates heterosexual intercourse as animal, and homosexual intercourse as not even that (Price 1989, 230). It is then all the more strik- ing that Socrates is later indulgent to the occasional but continuing lapses of a spirited man and boy (256b7– e2). Presumably what redeems these lovers is that, unlike those of 250e who know no better, they are ambivalent (c6–7). If Plato means what Socrates says, he is not distant from a thesis of the Stoics (see n. 43 below): it is all right for lov- ers to indulge each other sexually so long as this is marginal to their relationship. How- ever, Plato’s conflictual psychology must make him more anxious: he would rather say not that it is alright, but that it need not be fatal. Though he lacks any doctrine of Orig- inal Sin, he would agree when Peter Geach writes (albeit with Christian qualifications), “A plunge into sex is of its nature a plunge into a strong current running the wrong way” (1977, 146).

15. Thus, it tells against Nussbaum that what is said to deliver the lover from evil by reminding him of the Form of Temperance is not the sight of a temperate face, but a vision of the Form of Beauty, associated in his memory with the Form of Temperance, that is inspired by the “flashing” of a face seen close up (Phaedrus 254b4–7). (For “flashing” as an erotic visual phenomenon, cf. the parallels that de Vries cites ad loc. from the Palatine Anthology.)

16. We may well be surprised by the implication that shape cannot be seen. This can hardly be an oversight, when the Republic had admitted that the same size and shape may look different at different distances or in different media (10.602c7–12). Plato may be supposing that visual shape can be seen as tactile shape can be felt, and that “shape” is equivocal between different modalities of shape (see Bostock 1988, 115). This would not seem to help Nussbaum, for there is no visual modality of moral character (as there may well be of beauty).

17. This needs heavy qualification in any case, not least because Plato does not conceive of the body as a machine for living; see, on the Phaedo, Price (1995, 36–37).

18. In my references to Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (= SVF), a pair of numbers signifies volume and section, a trio of numbers volume, page, and line. I also refer, where possible, to Long and Sedley (1987) (= LS). I generally add the original refer- ences for passages cited in SVF or LS when the author’s works are widely available. I make use, where possible, of translations in LS or Schofield (1991). Inwood and Ger- son (1997, 203–32) usefully translate what is believed to be the Stoic part of Arius Didymus’s Epitome of Ethics as preserved in Stobaeus’s Eclogae — though different ways of giving references make it impossible to collate their version directly with SVF or LS (and their understanding of Stoic er o ¯ s is very different from mine).

19. On whether perceptual impressions are verbalizable without residue, compare Frede (1987, 161– 62) and Striker (1996, 84– 85).

20. It may have been to match this complexity that Chrysippus preferred to call

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impressions not “imprints,” but “alterations” or “modifications” (SVF 2.55 = LS 39A3

= D.L. 7.50); see Frede (1987, 167).

21. SVF 1.204 also cites Aëtius as having the Stoics say that the wise man was “cognizable from his appearance evidentially (tekm e ¯ ri o ¯ d o ¯ s),” which suggests not the evi- dent, but the evidenced. Cf. Galen, De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis 170.23–25 Lacey: the location of the h e ¯ gemoniko n eludes us “because there is no clear perception, nor any evidence (tekm e ¯ rion) from which one could infer it.” I take Aëtius to be missing the point that I am pressing.

22. On “cognitive impression” (phantasi a katal e ¯ ptik e ¯), see LS 1.250–52, Frede (1999).

23. For later evidence that I shall not cite elsewhere, see Philo, SVF 3.592; Marcus Aurelius Ad Se Ipsum 3.2 (and texts cited ad loc. by Farquharson 1944). Evidence for Greek acceptance that character could be inferred from physiognomy goes back well before the Stoics (e.g., Plato, Phaedrus 253d3– e4; Aristotle, Analytica Priora 2.27); their philosophical innovation, I am suggesting, was in explicitly making character not infer- able but perceptible.

24. An incidental obscurity within the definition is the term epibol e ¯ : I render it as “resolve,” Inwood and Gerson as “effort,” Schofield as “attempt” (after Cicero’s conatus; SVF 3.652 = Tusculan Disputations 4.72). Arius Didymus records that an epibole¯ is a “preliminary impulse” (ho r m e ¯ pr o ho r m e ¯ s ; Stobaeus, SV F 3.41.30)—which means what? The easiest suggestion would seem to be this: conceiving the project of making a friend (cf. h e ¯ epibol e ¯ t e ¯ s historias , “my historical project”; Polybius Historia e 1.4.2) precedes willing particular actions towards realizing it; this relates it closely (if imprecisely) to orousis, of which we are sparely told that it is “a movement of the mind towards some- thing future” (Stobaeus, SVF 3.40.13). Schofield (1991, 29–30 n. 14) is ingenious: de- spite his translation, he takes the preliminary impulse to be not an attempt, but an im- pulse to an attempt (here, the attempt to make a friend), called “preliminary” on the ground that trying is prior in realization, if not in conception, to succeeding. However, we read that only a mental act of “reservation” (roughly, qualifying an impulse by a Deo volente) insulates an epibole¯ from the danger of frustration (Stobaeus, SVF 3.564); but an impulse to try is not vulnerable to external contingency in the manner of an impulse to succeed. Brad Inwood (1997, 64 n. 25) cites an oral suggestion by Richard Sorabji which is ingenious too: the preliminary impulse is toward the goal, variably good or bad (ethical or sexual), of the motive behind the desire to make a friend. How- ever, it is essential to Sorabji, as it is not to Schofield, to take the definition as ethically neutral. One consideration that tells against that, as will become clearer, is the Stoic conception of friendship.

25. It is so used of colors in a mirror (Plato Timaeus 71b8), of letters in mirrors or in water (Republic 3.402b6), of the Milky Way in water (Aristotle Meteorologica 1.8.345b26), as parallel to an echo (Analytica Posteriora 2.15.98a27), and of light in the bronze bowl of a lamp (Xenophon Symposium 7.4).

26. It is so used of character apparent on the face (pseudo-Aristotle Physiognomica 2.806a30), of virtue apparent in a boy’s appearance (Plutarch Alcibiades 4.1— doubtless a Stoic reminiscence), and of character more apparent in speech than on the face (Cato Major 7.2).

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27. Thus the Stoic lover escapes a Biblical either/or: “For the Lord seeth not as man seeth : for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart” (I Samuel 16.7).

28. The paradox is further disarmed by the Stoics’ materialist view of the mind, which took every virtue to be a body and even an animal (SVF 3.305–7). A modern materialist obsessed by brain states might still have problems, but Clement alludes to a visible tension or tonos (SVF 1.58.27). The concept of tension was central to the Stoics’ psychophysiology of virtue.

29. Indicative too, though less reliable (since there may be some telescoping), are contexts in Stobaeus. Arius Didymus continues after the definition I quoted (Stobaeus, SVF 3.650), “This is why the sage will also be expert in love, and will love those worthy of love, i.e., those well born and naturally endowed,” which surely implies (even if it does not entail) that it is good er o ¯ s that is being defined. And elsewhere he associates  the definition with a denial that er o ¯ s is either desire or “for any common thing” (SVF

3.180.33–35). When he immediately precedes that by saying that “loving itself,” to eran auto, is an “indifferent,” since it may on occasion happen to common people too (32– 33), he evidently means love as a determinable, which, unlike er o ¯ s proper, is an ab- straction without a nature, and neither good nor bad. It is true that Diogenes Laertius appears to use the Stoic definition of er o ¯ s to capture a species of desire (7.113 = SVF

3.96.28–29); but Schofield finds the passage “evidently lacunose” (1991, 31 n. 17).

30. I presume that Schofield would contrast the virtue that distinguishes the wise (and can be called “the natural perfection of a rational being qua rational”; SVF

3.19.27–28 = D.L. 7.94) from the modesty (or sense of shame, aid o ¯ s) that becomes the

young (cf. Plato Charmides 158c5– 6), and contend that a youth can display the flower of modesty but not of virtue. In fact, the Stoics take aid o ¯ s to be equivocal: it may signify either “fear (phobos) at the expectation of blame,” which is “the finest passion” or pathos (Nemesius, SVF 3.101.34), or “caution (eulabeia) against correct blame,” which as a species of good emotion or eupatheia (Andronicus, SVF 3.105.40) must presuppose right reason. Neither sense seems precisely pertinent here, but perhaps even a respect- able young man may have an expectation of blame conditional upon his acting as any young man may be tempted to act.

31. Thus their colors are sharply contrasted in pseudo-Aristotle De Coloribus

5.796b6ff.

32. So Apollonius of Tyana (first century a.d.) called madness “the flower of irasci- bility” (Stob. Ecl. 3.549.12 W)— just as an Elizabethan writer was to call matrimony “the Flower of Friendship” (Tilney, Brief and Pleasant Discourse of Duties in Marriage 1568, A 8). However, this does not fit the only other occurrence of antho s arete¯s that

I have retrieved from the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae data bank: Theodoret writes (in the fourth century a.d.) that a heart parched by a dearth of logos lacks the power to “put forth the flower of virtue” (Migne, PG 80, 1677B). Here the botanical metaphor is alive, though there is no contrast between flower and fruit. Nor was there when De- mocritus called temperance “the flower of old age” (68 B 294 DK).

33. This involves an emendation, to s o ¯ phrosun e ¯ from ph o ¯ n e ¯ (“voice,” which indeed makes no sense).

34. They compared those who are drowning though close to the surface, or blind

plato, zeno, and the object of love

 

though about to recover their sight (Cicero, SVF 3.530 = De Finibus 3.48; Plutarch, SVF

3.539 = LS 61T = De Communibus Notitiis 1063A–B); also a stick that is straight or crooked (SVF 3.536 = LS 61I1 = D.L. 7.127). We must remember that, for the Stoics, to be vicious is not to be wicked, but to lack the unified ethical knowledge that consti- tutes virtue and yields all the virtues, and of any unitary body of knowledge it is plau- sible to say that a man either has it, or does not have it.

35. See also Seneca (LS 60E5 = Epistulae Morales 120.8): “Virtues and vices, as you know, border on one another, and a likeness of what is right pertains to those who are also depraved and base.” Here his point of view is critical; a different context might per- mit an element of appreciation.

36. Thus, the Stoics proposed earnestly what Socrates used to pose playfully (cf. Theaetetus 185e3–5; Xenophon Symposium 5). epaphroditos suggests but need not signify sexual attractiveness (cf. Hindley 1999, 93–95).

37. Whence the force of the paradox whereby Socrates keeps becoming rather the er o ¯ meno s than the erast e ¯ s of Alcibiades and others (Plato, Symposiu m 219e3–5, 222a8–b4).

38. There is also a paradox at the other end. Young boys do not count as virtuous or vicious — there tertium datur—until they have acquired logos (Alexander of Aphrodi- sias, SVF 3.143.28–32). When they do (at around fourteen), the best of them become at once visibly vicious and worthy of love. But we have already addressed that.

39. Daniel Babut (1963, 61) briskly explains the immaturity as a presupposition of the educative project (citing Stobaeus, SVF 3.180.30–31). In the absence of Plato’s analogies between intellectual and sexual procreation, this deeroticizes er o ¯ s , demoting the central Stoic definitions and characterizations to become corollaries, more or less plausible, of a pedagogic vocation. Such streamlining fits a preconception of the Stoics, but I believe that an interpretation sensitive to the evidence must be less Bauhaus and more baroque.

40. When Plutarch writes that er o ¯ s , attaching itself to a soul young and well en- dowed, brings it through friendship to virtue (Amat. 750D), he must have what I am calling pr o ¯ tophili a in mind. So must Arius Didymus when he counts anyone worthy to be loved (axioerasto s) as worthy to be befriended (axiophil e ¯ tos) also (Stobaeus, SVF

3.180.25–26).

41. So was Aristotle when he placed prime of mind at “around forty-nine” (Rheto- ric 2.14.1390b10–11). Contrary to a suggestion by the Oxford translator ad loc., this signifies not his own age at the time of writing (let alone, as Roland Hall once put to me, an Aristotelian joke), but seven times seven, the close of the seventh hebdomad, in which Solon placed a man’s mental and verbal prime (27.13–14).

42. Alternatively, “by which men complete virtue” (depending on whether one emends from mn e ¯ mat a to s e ¯ mat a or peirata). See the pseudo-Hippocratic D e Hebdomadi- bus (5.24–5 R), which places in the fourth hebdomad a “growth of the whole body,” i.e., presumably, in breadth as well as in height.

43. I have risked giving a priggish impression of Zeno by focusing upon his ac- count of er o ¯ s , which is indeed moralistic, and neglecting his sexual permissiveness. Within the Stoic scheme of values, pederastic lovemaking was an “indifferent” (Sextus,

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SVF 1.249 = Pyrrhoneae Hypotyposes 3.200); perhaps for Zeno it was a “preferred indif- ferent” (cf. Stobaeus, SVF 3.128 = LS 58E). Epiphanius testifies that he would have men make love to their boyfriends “without hindrance” (SVF 1.253); and yet Zeno im- plies that this falls outside the projects that make up a good er o ¯ s when he also tells us, according to Sextus, not to discriminate between boyfriends and others in making love (SV F 1.250 = Hypotyp . 3.245). Thus, lovemaking is central to a bad er o ¯ s , and tangential to a good one. The lovemaking that has its place within the life of the wise is not an ex- pression of er o ¯ s , even when the parties to it happen to be erast e ¯ s and er o ¯ menos.

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Nussbaum, M. C. 1994. “Platonic Love and Colorado Law: The Relevance of Ancient Greek Norms to Modern Sexual Controversies.” Virginia Law Review 80 : 1515– 1651.

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Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

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