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
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