Plato’s Phaedrus in emails – email 7

Socrates’ last reason for the Palinode deserves special attention; there is no place for it in the Palinode. Let me repeat it:

“And indeed, good Phaedrus, had we been heard by a man of noble character, who loved another such as himself – us saying that for some trifling reason lovers conceive hatred towards their loved ones – he would think that we were brought up among sailors, and never saw a free Eros (eleutheron Erȏta). Then out of shame for what this man would think, and out of fear of Eros, I shall wash the bitter taste out of my mouth with a wholesome speech.”

The Palinode is about love without sexual intercourse, which is inspired by philosophy and guided by the Forms. There is a place in the Palinode in which sexual intercourse is admitted and tolerated, but it is a very different intercourse from the one guided by the free Eros:

“But if the lovers turn to a coarser way of life, without philosophy, then when they are drinking, or in some other moment of carelessness, they take that choice that is called blessed by the many, and carry it through. And once having done so, they continue with it, but sparingly, because what they are doing has not been approved by their whole mind.”

It is this kind of constrained attitude to sexual intercourse from which the free Eros makes lovers free.

But there is a place in the Palinode at which Plato transgresses his philosophic love guided and constrained by the Forms: “This experience, fair boy, people call Eros, but when you hear what the gods call him, you will laugh because of your youth: ‘The immortals call him the grower of wings, because of his wing-growing force.’ Hermeias, the ancient commentator, says that this verse appears to be of Plato’s own invention.

This invention of Plato is related to the story of Ganymede: “As the fair boy comes close to his lover in talks on philosophy, and even closer in the gymnasium, where they are touching each other, then the spring of that stream, which Zeus as lover of Ganymede named desire (himeros), flows in abundance upon the lover, some sinking within him, some flowing off as he brims over. And like an echo that returns to its source, so the stream of beauty passes back into the fair boy through his eyes and causes his wings to grow, filling in turn his soul with love. So he is in love, but with what he does not know. He does not know what has happened to him, nor can he even say what it is.”

There can be little doubt that Plato introduces the story of Zeus and Ganymede into the Palinode to glorify homosexual intercourse, but the erotic relationship he speaks about, that of Zeus to his cupbearer, of an elderly philosopher to a fair boy in the bloom of his virginity, is not the same as the relationships entertained by those who enjoy free Eros.

Note 1

Plato in his old age commented on the Zeus and Ganymede story:

‘When the female and male get together for the purpose of procreation, the pleasure they get from it seems to be in accordance with nature, whereas the coupling of male with male, or female with female, is thought to be contrary to nature – and an enormity of the highest order, due to the abandonment of self-control where pleasure is concerned. Certainly we all blame Cretans for the story of Ganymede; we think they are spinning a yarn. Since their laws were believed to come from Zeus, we think they added this story about Zeus so that they could claim Zeus’s authority for their enjoyment of this pleasure too.’ (Plato, Laws 636c2-d4, tr. Tom Griffith.)

Malcolm Schofield comments; ‘According to Homer, Ganymede was a young Trojan carried off to heaven on account of his outstanding beauty to become Zeus’s cupbearer (Iliad 20.231-5). The homoerotic dimension of the relationship becomes explicit in later poetry and in Attic art.’ (Plato Laws, Cambridge texts in the history of Political thought, Cambridge University Press 2016.)

Tom Griffith and Malcolm Scofield Say in their Editorial note: ‘The notes to the translation (by MS) have benefited in various ways from TG’s scrutiny, and the translations in their final form are the outcome of several rounds of comment by MS and rethinking by TG.’

All that work was worth it; the translation is simply glorious. The Authors showed what great possibilities there are in English language, how true it can be to the Greek original by being true to the English idiom. In the given passage I did not like the phrase ‘we think they are spinning a yarn’: What on earth can it be in the original? I looked, and I was amazed. Plato says hȏs logopoiȇsantȏn toutȏn, which the authors’ ‘we think … yarn’ renders perfectly.

Note 2

I haven’t come across a translation that translates Plato’s eleutheron Erȏta as the Greek has it, i.e. as ‘free Love’ or ‘free Eros’. Jowett ‘translates’ eleutheron Erȏta as ‘good manners’ (‘sailors to which good manners were unknown’); Hackforth ‘translates’ ‘a case of noble love’. But Walter Hamilton is pretty good, I must admit: ‘love between freeborn men’ (published 1973); Rowe ‘a love of the sort that belongs to free men’ (published 1986).