Symposium 209b

Greek Learning Greek
1

I’m quoting this partly for the distinction that Dover makes between the ει of the manuscript and ῃ of the papyrus, but also because he didn’t convince me on ᾔθεος. 206c6 is good enough for me to support θεῖος and Dover’s objection about “…implying that the fertile in body are not” strikes me as a quibble. Plato’s logic, as Dover has shown, doesn’t try to be that tight.

τούτων δ’ αὖ ὅταν τις ἐκ νέου ἐγκύμων ᾖ τὴν ψυχήν, ᾔθεος ὢν καὶ ἡκούσης τῆς ἡλικίας τίκτειν τε καὶ γεννᾶν ἤδη ἐπιθυμεῖ. ζητεῖ δὴ οἶμαι καὶ οὗτος περιιὼν τὸ καλὸν ἐν ᾧ ἂν γεννήσειεν· ἐν τῷ γὰρ αἰσχρῷ οὐδέποτε γεννήσει.



τούτων…b2 ζητεῖ δή: ᾔθεος ‘unmarried’ is Parmentier’s emendation of θεῖος, and it makes good sense if we take it with positive connotations, ‘belonging to the very young adult male age-group’ and ‘looking for a philosophical partner as a youth looks for a girl’. So: ‘whenever one of these…, (sc. then,) when he is an “eligible bachelor” and …, he desires…So he seeks…’. The papyrus text, with θεῖος and ἐπιθυμῇ, means ‘when one of these (sc. the fertile in soul) is, early in life, pregnant in soul, being divine, and his maturity having come, desires now to procreate and generate, (sc. then) he seeks…’. θεῖος is ‘godlike’, ‘superhuman’, or ‘belonging to the gods’, ‘manifesting the divine power’; since all humans are ‘fertile in body and soul’ (206c1-3), it would be curious if Plato characterised the fertile in soul as θεῖος, implying that the fertile in body are not (cf. 206c6, where sexual procreation is θεῖον in so far as it achieves a kind of immortality). To take θεῖος as = ἔνθεος ‘inspired’ (cf. 179a7) does not help; in any case, when Socrates in Meno 99cd argues that politicians who achieve success without understanding should be called θεῖος because they must be ‘possessed and inspired by the god’, he is consciously manipulating language, not following existing usage. The medieval text (with θεῖος ὤν and ἐπιθυμεῖ) means: ‘when one of these is, early in life, pregnant in soul, (sc. then), when he is divine and his maturity has come, he desires…So he seeks…’. δή is no problem here, because connective δή ‘then’, ‘so’, is common (cf. 191d5 ζητεῖ δή, 219e3 ἠπόρουν δή; GP 236-40), but θεῖος is still a problem, for it would have to imply ‘when the power of Eros (sc. previously latent) is manifested in him’.

2

To me, ᾔθεος is more appealing. It seems to me more consonant with the context and more closely linked to what follows: καὶ ἡκούσης τῆς ἡλικίας, he is unmarried, and the prime of his youth has arrived. It’s at that point that he goes around seeking τὸ καλὸν ἐν ᾧ ἂν γεννήσειεν. Being unmarried or unattached (in a psychic or spiritual sense) and thus lacking a partner at the age when he’s pregnant and experiences the desire to give birth is precisely what impels him to go out and seek a beautiful partner. ᾔθεος seems to me exactly the right concept here.

By contrast, θεῖος here seems out of place. Plato isn’t developing in this passage the idea that the youth has somehow become divine through the power of love. In 206c6, it’s sexual congress that is described as divine, in the sense that it confers a kind of immortality on the couple through procreation, not the human participants in the act themselves. And in 209c-d, the children are divine, but these are spiritual (for want of a better word) children, and specifically not ἀνθρωπίνους children. The outcome of the pregnant youth’s union with a beautiful partner is what Diotima says is divine, not the youth himself. In fact, it’s through the union that the youth attains to something divine or immortal; he doesn’t do so until the union is consummated, so, again, to me θεῖος seems out of place in 209b.

Some editors (Burnet) put a comma after ἐπιθυμεῖ.

I have to say, at the risk of offending Platonophiles, I find the metaphor of the pregnant youth giving birth by consummating a union with the Beautiful a little too weird.

I’m eager to learn what mwh thinks about this.

3

The LSJ article points to Plat. Laws 840d for ἠίθεοι being applied to animals: μέχρι μὲν παιδογονίας ἠίθεοι καὶ ἀκήρατοι γάμων τε ἁγνοὶ ζῶσιν

The sense of “unmated” does make much more sense to me here than “unmarried.” As you say “unattached (in a psychic or spiritual sense).”

4

I know very little about the institution of marriage in ancient Greece, but I suspect that while marriages within the propertied classes, perhaps even including smallholders, were solemnized by elaborate wedding ceremonies, there would have been a range of levels of formality, including what we would call common-law marriages, where a man and a woman simply took up residence with one another and regarded each other as husband and wife (or perhaps even an Agathon-Pausanias relationship?).

I suspect the term ᾔθεος, which was capable, as you note, of being applied by Plato to birds, probably did not carry the implication of the absence of a formal, legal relationship, but instead meant, more generally, a man whom we would call “still unattached”, i.e., not yet in a stable and lasting relationship with a woman, whether formalized or not. In that sense, the conjecture ᾔθεος in 209b seems to me preferable to the received text.

The expectation was that every man would eventually take a wife, but the legal relationship of marriage was, I think, really a matter of regulating the disposition of property (as it is today), and individuals without property to dispose of probably had no need to go through any formal ceremony.

I’m not sure I understand Dover’s “fertility in body vs. fertility in soul” argument.

5

θειος seems indefensible to me, while ηιθεος is just right. It could be objected that it doesn’t add anything, paired with ηκουσης της ηλικιας as it is, but I’d say that it helps establish the scenario. I haven’t any doubt that it’s right.

I suppose Dover’s point about fertile in soul vs body is just that it would make no sense for an exclusively soul-fertile person to be said to be θειος, when no-one at all is exclusively soul-fertile (206c2). It’s true that Plato doesn’t say “exclusively”; hence Dover’s “implicitly.” It doesn’t seem a particularly strong argument to me, but no matter.

206c6 (θειον το πραγμα) clearly does not support θειος here. That applies to the sexual act, the συνουσια of man and woman, not to the individual him/herself. The immortal (the conceiving and the begetting) is in the mortal (c7). To call the individual θειος here in 209 would be both inconsistent and irrelevant.

I don’t think we should press “unmarried.” ηθεος is simply fixing the time of life—the age at which hormonal development results in sexual desire. That precedes marriage, at least in men, but I don’t think marriage comes into question at all.

Seems to me that Plato is effecting a rather dodgy transition from the bodily male-female reproductive model (with mortal children) to a model in which the principal partner is male and seeking to partner not with a beautiful female but evidently with a beautiful younger male. That’s to say he’s accommodating his theory to the Athenian aristocratic norm, but he uses το καλον to mediate and to put the relationship on a psychic plane, where the “children” are not somatic (how could they be, between homosexuals?) and not mortal. (They’re not said actually to be divine are they?) The relationship is somatic insofar that a young gentleman is attracted to beautiful bodies, but otherwise psychic, with such things as σωφροσυνη as offspring. The best of both worlds.

If all this seems weird, well, this is Plato after all, with his theory of forms and suchlike etherialized stuff. And it may be significant that he filters it through Diotima, a weirdo if ever there was one, as if to warn us it may be a bit far out. I’m not sure I’d call it a metaphor. An analogy, yes (σωμα ~ ψυχη), though it’s not actually presented as one. He’s constrained to use somatic terms, apart from ψυχη itself. And where would he be without τὸ X?

6

Seems to me that Plato is effecting a rather dodgy transition from the bodily male-female reproductive model (with mortal children) to a model in which the principal partner is male and seeking to partner not with a beautiful female but evidently with a beautiful younger male.

The principal partner is not only male, but pregnant!

M seeking M to give birth. Must be καλος. Send photo.

7

The principal partner is not only male, but pregnant!

Well yes. How else could he give birth?

I think we would say fertile rather than pregnant, since it precedes Intercourse. εγκυμων echoes κυουσιν at the start of her mantic/Mantinean exposition in 206 (cf. 209a):
ἀλλ᾽ ἐγώ, ἦ δ᾽ ἥ, σαφέστερον ἐρῶ. κυοῦσιν γάρ, ἔφη, ὦ Σώκρατες, πάντες ἄνθρωποι καὶ κατὰ τὸ σῶμα καὶ κατὰ τὴν ψυχήν, καὶ ἐπειδὰν ἔν τινι ἡλικίᾳ γένωνται, τίκτειν ἐπιθυμεῖ ἡμῶν ἡ φύσις.
We all start out “pregnant,” but we can’t τικτειν without intercourse (συνουσια, 206c5-6, identified with τοκος). Whether on the bodily plane or on the spiritual it takes two to tango.

Psychic M seeking psychic M to give birth to immortal goods.