Phaedrus And Symposium Analysis
Nowadays, people have heard various stories depicting the licentious and debauched lives of ancient Roman aristocrats, among which the story of the Roman emperor, Caligula, is one of the most famous. Caligula had four wives and countless male lovers; in addition, he raped one of his sisters and made prostitutes out of his other sisters. He also forced sexual intercourse with the wives of his friends, and then publicly humiliated them by issuing a divorce. Empress Valeria Messalina, the wife of Claudius I, also lived a notoriously dissolute life, having scandalous affairs with numberless palace courtiers, entertainers and soldiers when her husband was conquering Europe. Such absurd and ridiculous love life of ancient Roman aristocrats lead us
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to numerous questions. Do the sexual activities among noblemen reflect the attitude of common people? What is the ideology behind that causes such a lifestyle among Roman aristocrats? In this paper, I attempt to answer these question by conducting a discussion on the philosophical conception of love and sexuality in ancient Rome. Since Roman philosophy has considerable dependency on Greek philosophical ideas, I will commence my investigation of the concept of love with an analysis of Plato’s two erotic dialogues, Symposium and Phaedrus. I will provide a detailed interpretation of the ancient morality on eros and homosexual relationships. Then I will proceed to examine the ideologies of some Roman schools of philosophy such as Epicureanism and Stoicism and analyze their similarities and differences with Greek conception of love. At the end of this paper, I will reach a conclusion that the Roman conception of eros is usually associated with other virtues such as temperance and wisdom, and homosexuality is widely accepted by the Roman society insofar as the participated citizens assume a dominating role.
In the ancient world, philosophy did not prosper in the early ancient Roman society, but was overall a product of the Greek civilization. When the Presocratic philosopher, Thales, started to inquire about the essence of the universe around 6th century BCE, the same topic did not excite the interests of Roman people until sometime between 1st and 2nd century BCE. Throughout history, there existed no schools of philosophy that were exclusively Roman, and the most influential Roman scholars, such as Cicero, Varro and Seneca, studied in Athens to develop a better understanding of this subject. Therefore, the development of Roman philosophy is thoroughly grounded in the tradition of Greek philosophy, and our investigation into the philosophical understanding of love in ancient Rome should accordingly start with an insight into Greek philosophy.
Plato was considered as one of the most pivotal figures in the development of Western philosophy and has cast such a significant influence on Cicero that the first work of Cicero was composed of Socratic dialogues and was named De Re Publica, the Republic. Hence, I believe that an analysis on Plato’s erotic dialogues, Phaedrus and Symposium, will provide an insightful understanding of the love life in the ancient world.
In ancient Greek, the word “love” has different connotations and thus has different names, four of which are eros, agape, storge and philia.
Agape appears in the writings of the New Testament, and is considered as the highest form of love, or the love of God; philia often refers to a relationship of mutuality that is shared among family members and friends; storge is also a type of familial love that relates to natural affection between parents and children. Eros, however, is far different from the previous three words and is the kind of love Plato discussed in Phaedrus and Symposium. Eros denotes the sexual desire between lovers, and is defined, in the Phaedrus, as “the unreasoning desire that overpowers a person’s considered impulse to do right and is driven to take pleasure in beauty, its force reinforced by its kindred desire for beauty in human bodies—this desire…is called eros.” From such an account of eros, I have abstracted four traits of love. First, love is irrational and contradictory to reason, which is likely to obstruct human reasoning and result in false beliefs. Second, love is a kind of desire, which I identify as an emotional state of longing for something. Third, love takes pleasures, especially sensual enjoyment, rather than mental contentment. Fourth, beauty is the source of the pleasure in which love indulges. Similar characteristics of eros can also be found in the Symposium, where Plato writes, “Love is the love of something, and … he loves something of which he has a present need. … (T)here is no love of ugly ones. … (Love has) to be a desire for beauty, and never for ugliness. … (I)f love needs beautiful things, and if all good things are beautiful, he will need good things too. … Love is neither beautiful nor good.” The foregoing descriptions of eros contains a strong moral implication and indicate Greek philosophers’ attitude toward love, which is a bizarre mixture of adoration and scorn. On the one hand, love is insufficient and
impotent; it does not possess any beauty or goodness, but is a mere want of such virtue. Moreover, it is an irrational desire that seduces people to value sensual pleasure over good virtue and thus leads them to intemperance and abandonment. In Phaedrus, Plato suggests that when a lover and his boy are infatuated with each other’s body and choose to live a life with physical enjoyment, the wings on their souls will stop to grow, and they eventually will fail to reach heaven in the afterlife. As Plato write, “they adopt a lower way of living… the pair’s undisciplined horses will … bring them to commit that act which ordinary people would take to be the happiest choice of all.” On the other hand, however, because love is the desire of beauty and goodness, the correct manner of love serves as a ladder that guides people to the highest goodness of life, that is, the love of the purest, perfect Forms. According to Plato’s account of the Ladder of Love in the Symposium, one starts with loving the physical beauty in particulars that participate in the Form of Beauty, and then ascends to love the beauty of ideas. Next, one proceeds to be a lover of wisdom, i.e., philosophy, and eventually attains a transcendence of knowledge about the truth via the accumulation of love and recollection. As Plato accounts, “…if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality, …only then will it become possible for him to give birth … to true virtues… and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.” Hence, in Plato’s philosophy, eros has a close relation to the virtue of temperance; that is, if two lovers are able to restrain their physical needs for sex and guide each other to pursue knowledge, they will have a chance to attain the highest good of life. Conversely, if they choose to discard knowledge for an intemperate, mundane life, they simultaneously renounce their access to heaven. In effect, with the spread of Greek philosophy, such ethics in sexuality has carried its influence on to Rome, where hypersexuality was regarded as moral degeneration and was condemned.
Profoundly influenced by Greek philosophy, Roman scholars’ perspectives of love share many similarities that can be found throughout their writings. In his book De Rerum Natura, Lucretius,
to numerous questions. Do the sexual activities among noblemen reflect the attitude of common people? What is the ideology behind that causes such a lifestyle among Roman aristocrats? In this paper, I attempt to answer these question by conducting a discussion on the philosophical conception of love and sexuality in ancient Rome. Since Roman philosophy has considerable dependency on Greek philosophical ideas, I will commence my investigation of the concept of love with an analysis of Plato’s two erotic dialogues, Symposium and Phaedrus. I will provide a detailed interpretation of the ancient morality on eros and homosexual relationships. Then I will proceed to examine the ideologies of some Roman schools of philosophy such as Epicureanism and Stoicism and analyze their similarities and differences with Greek conception of love. At the end of this paper, I will reach a conclusion that the Roman conception of eros is usually associated with other virtues such as temperance and wisdom, and homosexuality is widely accepted by the Roman society insofar as the participated citizens assume a dominating role.
In the ancient world, philosophy did not prosper in the early ancient Roman society, but was overall a product of the Greek civilization. When the Presocratic philosopher, Thales, started to inquire about the essence of the universe around 6th century BCE, the same topic did not excite the interests of Roman people until sometime between 1st and 2nd century BCE. Throughout history, there existed no schools of philosophy that were exclusively Roman, and the most influential Roman scholars, such as Cicero, Varro and Seneca, studied in Athens to develop a better understanding of this subject. Therefore, the development of Roman philosophy is thoroughly grounded in the tradition of Greek philosophy, and our investigation into the philosophical understanding of love in ancient Rome should accordingly start with an insight into Greek philosophy.
Plato was considered as one of the most pivotal figures in the development of Western philosophy and has cast such a significant influence on Cicero that the first work of Cicero was composed of Socratic dialogues and was named De Re Publica, the Republic. Hence, I believe that an analysis on Plato’s erotic dialogues, Phaedrus and Symposium, will provide an insightful understanding of the love life in the ancient world.
In ancient Greek, the word “love” has different connotations and thus has different names, four of which are eros, agape, storge and philia.
Agape appears in the writings of the New Testament, and is considered as the highest form of love, or the love of God; philia often refers to a relationship of mutuality that is shared among family members and friends; storge is also a type of familial love that relates to natural affection between parents and children. Eros, however, is far different from the previous three words and is the kind of love Plato discussed in Phaedrus and Symposium. Eros denotes the sexual desire between lovers, and is defined, in the Phaedrus, as “the unreasoning desire that overpowers a person’s considered impulse to do right and is driven to take pleasure in beauty, its force reinforced by its kindred desire for beauty in human bodies—this desire…is called eros.” From such an account of eros, I have abstracted four traits of love. First, love is irrational and contradictory to reason, which is likely to obstruct human reasoning and result in false beliefs. Second, love is a kind of desire, which I identify as an emotional state of longing for something. Third, love takes pleasures, especially sensual enjoyment, rather than mental contentment. Fourth, beauty is the source of the pleasure in which love indulges. Similar characteristics of eros can also be found in the Symposium, where Plato writes, “Love is the love of something, and … he loves something of which he has a present need. … (T)here is no love of ugly ones. … (Love has) to be a desire for beauty, and never for ugliness. … (I)f love needs beautiful things, and if all good things are beautiful, he will need good things too. … Love is neither beautiful nor good.” The foregoing descriptions of eros contains a strong moral implication and indicate Greek philosophers’ attitude toward love, which is a bizarre mixture of adoration and scorn. On the one hand, love is insufficient and
impotent; it does not possess any beauty or goodness, but is a mere want of such virtue. Moreover, it is an irrational desire that seduces people to value sensual pleasure over good virtue and thus leads them to intemperance and abandonment. In Phaedrus, Plato suggests that when a lover and his boy are infatuated with each other’s body and choose to live a life with physical enjoyment, the wings on their souls will stop to grow, and they eventually will fail to reach heaven in the afterlife. As Plato write, “they adopt a lower way of living… the pair’s undisciplined horses will … bring them to commit that act which ordinary people would take to be the happiest choice of all.” On the other hand, however, because love is the desire of beauty and goodness, the correct manner of love serves as a ladder that guides people to the highest goodness of life, that is, the love of the purest, perfect Forms. According to Plato’s account of the Ladder of Love in the Symposium, one starts with loving the physical beauty in particulars that participate in the Form of Beauty, and then ascends to love the beauty of ideas. Next, one proceeds to be a lover of wisdom, i.e., philosophy, and eventually attains a transcendence of knowledge about the truth via the accumulation of love and recollection. As Plato accounts, “…if someone got to see the Beautiful itself, absolute, pure, unmixed, not polluted by human flesh or colors or any other great nonsense of mortality, …only then will it become possible for him to give birth … to true virtues… and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he.” Hence, in Plato’s philosophy, eros has a close relation to the virtue of temperance; that is, if two lovers are able to restrain their physical needs for sex and guide each other to pursue knowledge, they will have a chance to attain the highest good of life. Conversely, if they choose to discard knowledge for an intemperate, mundane life, they simultaneously renounce their access to heaven. In effect, with the spread of Greek philosophy, such ethics in sexuality has carried its influence on to Rome, where hypersexuality was regarded as moral degeneration and was condemned.
Profoundly influenced by Greek philosophy, Roman scholars’ perspectives of love share many similarities that can be found throughout their writings. In his book De Rerum Natura, Lucretius,