Visit Plato's Academy

 

A visit to the site of Plato's Academy (NY Times)

Guide to finding the Academy in Athens

Truthseekers and an accomplished liar

While we are on break for the summer, I've enjoyed a couple of Dante-related resources which might be of interest.

While Dante had no access to most of Greek Philosophy, he clearly had some sense of Aristotle. I happened upon a set of lectures on Greek philosophy that are unusually fine. Professor David Roochnik of Boston University does more than survey some 400 years of Greek thought -- he interrogates it, and tracks how successive thinkers revise, refine, and recast the work of their predecessors. Murky guys like Parmenides, whose poetic works are in ruin, emerge with a clarity that seems true to the complexity and context of their approaches.

The course, Introduction to Greek Philosophy, is available from The Teaching Company. Roochnik is superb on Aristotle, and readers of Dante will benefit from his reading. But each of his predecessors from Thales to Plato receives the same high level of attention.

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Sententiae Antiquae has long been a favorite classics blog. Given that Ulysses remains a most compelling, enigmatic predecessor to the the poet of the Commedia even to the highest reaches of Paradiso, today's post about the Greek hero's contrived tales is both instructive and a pure joy. As a reminder of Homer's brilliance in portraying the multi-layered lies his hero tells -- through an analysis of his calculated fictions found in the Scholia -- it gives us one more example of the degree of human genius against which Dante chose to measure his poem, and his wholly other vision of heroic challenge and triumph.

  

Paradiso 10: Mai da lei l'occhio non parte (1)

Paradiso 10 begins a new moment in this canticle. We are in the Sun, and no shadow from Earth reaches this far -- as such, it is a place of absolute lucidity, and we readers are directly told to raise our eyes and look at the circling heavens - the celestial equator and the ecliptic.

When we do so, he notes, we are not seeing a parallel, symmetric, or perpendicular alignment. One wheel is torta -- twisted, turned 23.5 degrees (axial tilt) -- with respect to the other.

Vedi come da indi si dirama
l'oblico cerchio che i pianeti porta,
per sodisfare al mondo che li chiama. 

Che se la strada lor non fosse torta,
molta virtù nel ciel sarebbe in vano,
e quasi ogne potenza qua giù morta; 

e se dal dritto più o men lontano
fosse 'l partire, assai sarebbe manco
e giù e sù de l'ordine mondano.

Behold how from that point goes branching off
The oblique circle, which conveys the planets,
To satisfy the world that calls upon them;

And if their pathway were not thus inflected,
Much virtue in the heavens would be in vain,
And almost every power below here dead.

If from the straight line distant more or less
Were the departure, much would wanting be
Above and underneath of mundane order. (Par. 10. 13-21)

The axis of Earth remains oriented in the same direction with reference to the background stars regardless of where it is in its orbit. Northern hemisphere summer occurs at the right side of this diagram, where the north pole (red) is directed toward the Sun, winter at the left.

Dante is drawing the reader's attention to an astronomical fact. He had already written about this in Book 3 of the Convivio, citing Albertus Magnus and Lucan, as well as the ancient astrologers, as sources. Here's the prose account:

. . . the sphere of the Sun revolves from west to east, not directly aligned counter to the diurnal movement of day and night, but obliquely to it; so that this ecliptic, equidistant between the poles of its sphere, on which the body of the Sun is situated, cuts the celestial equator between the celestial poles, into two opposing regions, that is at the first point of Aries and the first of Libra, and diverges from it along two semicircular arcs, one towards the celestial north and the other towards the south. The points marking the centres of these arcs are at equal distances from the celestial equator on each side, and at an angle of twenty three and a half degrees to it; the one point is the first point of Cancer, and the other the first point of Capricorn. 

Ecliptic red, celestial equator blue

The apparent motion of the Sun along the ecliptic (red) as seen on the inside of the celestial sphere. Ecliptic coordinates appear in (red). The celestial equator (blue) and the equatorial coordinates (blue), being inclined to the ecliptic, appear to wobble as the Sun advances.

Note that this 23.5-degree angle explains the variation of the seasons regardless of whether one envisions the Earth or the Sun at the center of the solar system.

The two circles form the Greek letter Chi, or X -- something which was noted at least as early as the Timaeus, where the Craftsman (demiurge) joins two parts of his prepared matter:

he divided lengthways into two parts which he joined to one another at the center like the letter X, and bent them into a circular form, connecting them with themselves and each other at the point opposite to their original meeting point; (Timaeus 36)

If any classical text posits a benign Creator, it's the Timaeus, which Dante either had read directly or as carried over in other works. As soon the demiurge completes his work, Timaeus says,

When the Father and Creator saw the creature which he had made moving and living, the created image of the eternal gods, he rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copy still more like the original; . . . wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity . . . and this image we call time. For there were no days and nights and months and years before the heaven was created, but when he constructed the heaven he created them also. (Timaeus 37)

The poetic version in the Commedia doesn't speak of the X, upon which later Christian thinkers superposed Christ and the cross. But it goes beyond simply describing the astronomical situation when it offers an interpretation leading to a strong inference. To whit: were it not for the twist (torta) or oblique angle of the ecliptic vis a vis the celestial equator, Earth's seasons would not exist -- extreme temperatures would make Earth inhospitable to life.

All of this forms part of the elaborate 21-line apostrophe to the lettor, the reader, who is directly called upon twice -- the only time this occurs in the 21 times the reader is addressed in the Commedia, according to Hollander. We receive three commands from the Poet:

1. Leva, dunque, lettor, all'alte ruote . . . la vista: Raise then with me, reader, to the lofty wheels your sight . . .
2. Vedi come da indi si dirama: See how from there branches the oblique circle that carries the planets . . ..
3. Or ti riman, lettor: Remain now, reader . . . 

Here's the last part:

Or ti riman, lettor, sovra 'l tuo banco,
dietro pensando a ciò che si preliba,
s'esser vuoi lieto assai prima che stanco. 

Messo t'ho innanzi; omai per te ti ciba;
ché a sé torce tutta la mia cura
quella materia ond' io son fatto scriba.

Remain now, Reader, still upon thy bench,
In thought pursuing that which is foretasted,
If thou wouldst jocund be instead of weary. 

I've set before thee; henceforth feed thyself,
For to itself diverteth all my care
That theme whereof I have been made the scribe. (Par. 10. 22-27)

As readers, we need to ask, what is this meal? Is there another Convivio, a philosophical banquet, of which we just had a foretaste? This foretaste links thought with taste, much as in line 6 above, the contemplation of the art of the Trinity is linked with the enjoyable taste (gustar) of the godhead. How, when, and why will we become jocund (lieto) by "thinking behind" (dietro) what we've been given to attend to?

Before we can ask these questions, the poet peremptorily tells us to feed ourselves; his cura is turning him back to his theme. Longfellow uses "diverteth," which is accurate in sense, but Dante's word is torcere, the same verb whose past participle, torta, earlier described the angle of the ecliptic.

Imagine a scroll being unrolled: The poet is telling the reader to think about what he's just read, even as he himself is being turned, torqued to move on and attend to the materia of which he is the scribe. The poet's experience of Paradiso is dictating, and Dante as scribe is at his bench, writing it down, even as he is addressing us. Or more consequentially, if he's a scribe, who -- or what -- is addressing  us?

We'll look more closely at the relation of this address and its commands of looking up, attending, following, in relation to Paradiso 10 as a whole. We are tracing a unifying motif -- one that comes with a twist. Think Möbiusly.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Two-mouthed play: the duality of the Philoctetes

προσαναγκάζειν τὸν Σωκράτη ὁμολογεῖν αὐτοὺς τοῦ αὐτοῦ ἀνδρὸς εἶναι κωμῳδίαν καὶ τραγῳδίαν ἐπίστασθαι ποιεῖν, καὶ τὸν τέχνῃ τραγῳδοποιὸν ὄντα καὶ κωμῳδοποιὸν εἶναι.

Socrates was compelling them to admit that the same man could have the knowledge required for writing comedy and tragedy—that the fully skilled tragedian could be a comedian as well. Plato, Symposium.

To some it seems impossible that I could still have something left to say about Sophocles' Philoctetes. A friend has delicately suggested that I should make an end. Let's end with the man who wrote it - a man whose work embodies a fusion of thought and feeling. As the late Eduardo Galeano wrote,

My language is a feel-thinking language, feeling and thinking at once, that is why it is a celebration of life, and at once it is a denunciation of everything that is not allowed in life to be real life, its plenitude.

Sophocles was about 88 when his Philoctetes was performed, winning first prize. It's an old man's play, a storehouse of an extraordinary life in 5th century Athens.

It's worth noticing that his abandoned character was neither a woman, a poor man, or someone of less than 100% Greek ethnicity. This is not a tale of racism, sexism or classism. Rather, it's a story about what the best are capable of doing to their peers under the intense pressures of life, war, and duty.

Never in dispute is the fact that Philoctetes was most cruelly used by the Atreides and by Odysseus at their bidding. His resulting suffering and alienation are explored in potent speeches. Nothing hides the sordidness of the case, nothing embellishes. The harsh natural world coupled with the mute neglect and indifference of his peers is voiced with the plenitude Galeano speaks of:

Birds my victims, tribes of bright-eyed wild creatures,
tenants of these hills, you need not flee from me or my house.
No more the strength of my hands, of my bow, is mine.
Come! It is a good time to glut yourselves freely on my discolored flesh . . .
                                                                        (Grene 1148-52)

ὦ πταναὶ θῆραι χαροπῶν τ᾽ ἔθνη θηρῶν, οὓς ὅδ᾽ ἔχει χῶρος οὐρεσιβώτας, μηκέτ᾽ ἀπ᾽ αὐλίων φυγᾷ 1150πηδᾶτ᾽: οὐ γὰρ ἔχω χεροῖν τὰν πρόσθεν βελέων ἀλκάν, ὦ δύστανος ἐγὼ τανῦν, ἀλλ᾽ ἀνέδην, ὁ δὲ χῶρος ἄρ᾽ οὐκέτι φοβητὸς οὐκέθ᾽ ὑμῖν, 1155ἕρπετε: νῦν καλὸν ἀντίφονον κορέσαι στόμα πρὸς χάριν ἐμᾶς σαρκὸς αἰόλας: 

But the thrust and climax of the play is not here. His suffering is rendered with naturalistic power, but this is one moment within a larger mythical encounter. (We noted the co-presence of both naturalism and mythic language early on in our reading of this play.)

Sophocles expands the tragic frame to bring in Odysseus, the man of occasion, the crafty illusionist, the resourceful man of words. Odysseus is comedic through and through; his skills are practical, group-oriented, businesslike. He is an agent sent to do a job -- he is there to ensure through winning words a happy end for all.

We miss part of the strange texture of the play if we do not relish the potential comedy of Odysseus. His self-referential denigration as the false Merchant would be delightful in the hands of the right actor. Twice in the play Odysseus runs offstage to avoid being shot by Philoctetes or pummeled by Neoptolemus. Depending on how this is performed, it can be a dramatic show of cowardly smarts, or a broader "feets-don't-fail-me-now" piece of farce typical of low characters in ancient Comedy.

Odysseus announces at the very start that he has a ruse; he seems confident of its ability to persuade Philoctetes to return to the war. At every point in the play, we are uncertain whether fateful events are unfolding of themselves, or we are audiences to a script authored and directed by Odysseus. The tension is structural: Tragedy's dignity, pathos, and claim to significance are never more at risk than when comedy threatens to puncture the spell.

. . . the fully skilled tragedian could be a comedian as well.

Sophocles appears to have fulfilled the high goal of Socrates: he has shown he knows how to produce both genres -- a double-mouthed play. Poised perfectly, the text turns endlessly around this duality, not unlike one of those ambiguous illusions that seem one moment to be one thing, and suddenly quite another thing altogether.

The heightened relation of the comedic and tragic in the Philoctetes differs from earlier works of this playwright. The text holds both masks in tension.

It might be fanciful to see a resemblance here to the tension Socrates speaks of in the Symposium with regard to Eros, but it's hard to resist. At the feast he tells Diotima's tale of the inevitable attraction of Poros and Penia, Resource (or, Contrivance) and Poverty, whose union produces Eros the archer. Poros and Penia are like figures in the tapestry of the Philoctetes: a man in isolation, lacking all, unloved, encounters an artful speaker seeking his seduction.

As Socrates puts it:

Eros is ever poor, and far from tender or beautiful as most suppose him: [203d] rather is he hard and parched, shoeless and homeless; on the bare ground always he lies with no bedding, and takes his rest on doorsteps and waysides in the open air. . .

Eros is . . .  always weaving some stratagem; desirous and competent of wisdom, throughout life ensuing the truth; a master of jugglery, witchcraft, [203e] and artful speech.

The rhetorical duel of the Philoctetes -- strangely akin to that which Socrates finds within Eros itself -- sets in motion the endgame of the Trojan war and mirrors its beginning. Odysseus woos Philoctetes and takes him off in his ship, much as Paris had seduced Helen. Fortunes are turning. Philoctetes' heel will be made whole, enabling him to wound Paris mortally in the heel. The saddest man on Earth has the Heraclean bow, and he's on his way to Troy.

χαῖρ᾽, ὦ Λήμνου πέδον ἀμφίαλον, 

καί μ᾽ εὐπλοίᾳ πέμψον ἀμέμπτως, 

ἔνθ᾽ ἡ μεγάλη Μοῖρα κομίζει 

γνώμη τε φίλων χὠ πανδαμάτωρ 

δαίμων, ὃς ταῦτ᾽ ἐπέκρανεν.

Farewell, foothold of Lemnos embraced by two seas, [1465] and send me sailing fair to my heart's content there where mighty Fate and the intent of my friends carries me, and the all-taming god who has brought these things to pass.

Contesting worldviews, interpreted via their own legacy

Has the ancient world become the meme of the moment? Following fast upon Mary Beard's book, the WSJ offers yet another review shared by Jutta. The book is The Cave and the Light by Arthur Herman. According to reviewer Roger Kimball:

Mr. Herman takes the reader on a rollicking trip from classical Athens to 21st-century New York to make the case that "everything we say, do, and see" has been shaped—"in one way or another"—by the ideas of Plato or Aristotle.

The book covers a good deal of later ground in its 675 pages. Later in the review, the age-old contrast of the two philosophers is sketched out:

Early on, Mr. Herman cannily observes that "one of the most crucial differences" between Plato and Aristotle is that Plato is backward-looking, Aristotle forward-looking. It is striking, for example, that Plato should describe knowledge as a sort of anamnesis, "recollection." There is something deeply nostalgic about Platonism: homesickness elevated to metaphysical longing. Aristotle, though, is at home in this world. "All men by nature desire to know," he says at the beginning of the "Metaphysics," "and the proof of this is the delight we take in our senses." For Aristotle, the senses don't so much beguile us, as in Plato, as they provide a window on the world and hence a means of liberation.

And of interest to us, in light of the Hippolytus's obsessive concern with the word:

. . . what makes "The Cave and the Light" so enjoyable is Mr. Herman's command of that most uncommon virtue, common sense. "Balance"—what Aristotle called sophrosune—stands at the top of his list of virtues. And although he insists that sanity and balance require the spiritualizing impetus of Plato as well as the pragmatic outlook of Aristotle, it is clear that he harbors a partiality for the latter.

 Another notice of the book is here, courtesy of the American Enterprise Institute,with a lecture by the author. 

Beware the poets -- and Attic tragedy

In a possibly apocryphal dialogue called Minos, Plato has Socrates explain how Minos came to have the terrible reputation he garnered at Athens. He blames the Athenian authors of tragedy:

Socrates
Do you not know which of the Greeks use the most ancient laws?
Companion
Do you mean the Spartans, and Lycurgus the lawgiver?
Socrates
But whence is it that [318d] the best of those ordinances come? Do you know?

The Nurse's saucy reply: Hippolytus scene II continued

The regal speech of Phaedra in scene II of Hippolytus captures the queen in her moment of resolve. Earlier, with the Nurse, she was raving of wild hunts and kills. Once the secret burden is uttered, Phaedra collects herself, ponders her options, and delivers her speech with poise to the women of Troezen.

The Nurse then returns and the entire tone of the scene changes. If we had any doubts that the Nurse is a "low" character (apart from her servant status, "crone" qualities, lack of a proper name, etc.), her erratic behavior is another clue. Earlier, upon learning Phaedra's secret, the Nurse declared her intention to jump off a cliff. Moments before that she had been confidently speaking of the mixing bowl of Sophrosyne, diluted enough to handle any crisis, including love.

She now returns, speaking in a jumpy, colloquial style, with yet another perspective. She's had time to reflect on her earlier intention to end it all, she says, and now has a better idea:

You are in love: why is that so strange? It is a condition you share with many. [440] Will you, because of love, destroy your own life? Those who are in love today or shall be tomorrow get little profit, then, if they must die for it.

Where Phaedra had spoken of "a life's shipwreck," the Nurse says, in Grene's translation,

                              The tide of love,
at its full surge, is not withstandable.

Is the Nurse's language really reaching so high? Her blunt literalness makes complete sense without having to resort to figuration:

Κύπρις γὰρ οὐ φορητὸν ἢν πολλὴ ῥυῇ,ἣ τὸν μὲν εἴκονθ᾽

Cypris, if she streams upon us in great force, cannot be endured. (Kovacs)

When the Nurse then speaks of sex and procreation, she cites "old writings" and those who bother with the Muses. Her examples of wisely dealing with overpowering eros -- Semele and Cephalus -- seem like the learned citations in the mouths of Shakespeare's rude mechanicals while undermining her point. Euripides' audience, like the bard's, would relish the ironies.

The contrasting styles of the two women say much about how they think, where they "are coming from." The queen has offered a philosophic deliberation; she began with elaborate address and proceeded from generalities to the particulars of her situation, before reaching a firm resolve on the side of honorable motherhood and a free, strong Athens.

The Nurse is of the commons, and her arguments appeal to pragmatic problem solving. She laces her words with sarcasm:

ἐρᾷς: τί τοῦτο θαῦμα; σὺν πολλοῖς βροτῶν You are in love - is that a wonder? It is a condition you share with many.

Or, more colloquially: "What's the big deal? Join the crowd."

So there is the interplay, here, of a royal tragic figure with a commoner. Their lexical "attire" reflects their station and their orientation -- their values, assumptions about the world, and readiness to "go with the flow." But other oppositions are bundled in -- the one and the many, the philosophic claims of knowledge of the Good:

Phaedra: Only one thing, they say, competes in value with life, the possession of a heart [γνώμην - judgment, purpose, resolve] blameless and good. 426-7

μόνον δὲ τοῦτό φασ᾽ ἁμιλλᾶσθαι βίῳ,

γνώμην δικαίαν κἀγαθήν ὅτῳ παρῇ.

versus the seeming logic -- the slippery rhetorical enthymemes of the sophist, whose strictly pragmatic techniques promise to serve anyone to attain any end. ("This is one of the wise principles mortals follow --" the Nurse says -- "dishonorable deeds should keep to the dark.")

The dialogue is operating from much the same dichotomy found in Plato's dialogues between his philosopher and any number of sophists. On the one hand, a quest for real knowledge mirroring the Good; on the other, any argument, well deployed, that persuades the crowd that the speaker is right.

Phaedra's reply with its political forewarning could almost be taken from the critique of poets in the Republic:

Phaedra
This is the thing that destroys the well-governed cities and houses of mortal men: words that are too skilfully spoken! Words to delight the ear—that is not at all what you must speak, but rather such advice as brings a good name [εὐκλεὴς]!

τοῦτ᾽ ἔσθ᾽ ὃ θνητῶν εὖ πόλεις οἰκουμένας

δόμους τ᾽ ἀπόλλυσ᾽, οἱ καλοὶ λίαν λόγοι.

οὐ γάρ τι τοῖσιν ὠσὶ τερπνὰ χρὴ λέγειν,

ἀλλ᾽ ἐξ ὅτου τις εὐκλεὴς γενήσεται.

The Nurse's saucy comeback smacks of the Aristophanic world of ribald comedy:

Nurse
[490] Why this high and haughty tone? Noble-sounding words are not what you need but the man!

τί σεμνομυθεῖς; οὐ λόγων εὐσχημόνων
δεῖ σ᾽, ἀλλὰ τἀνδρός.

With each accusing the other's manner of speech, the argument has moved from substance (logos) to metalanguage, to critiques of style (lexis). The oppositions at work -- knowledge vs technique, nature vs art, elegant words vs. carnal realities -- are now fleshed out. (It is interesting that Phaedra offers a dichotomy between pretty words and εὐκλεὴς -- good name (or fame) -- some would find a distinction without a difference.) The chorus will mutter about how each has something worth saying.

Underlying all these oppositions is a contested question: What, when all is said and done, do we know of ourselves?

The Nurse says to the Queen:

οὐ γὰρ ἄλλο πλὴν ὕβρις 475
τάδ᾽ ἐστί, κρείσσω δαιμόνων εἶναι θέλειν,

It is hubris, nothing else, to try to best the gods.

Nothing in our binary schemes quite helps here. We are left in mid-air, juggling the comicality of the Nurse's character against the common sense of her insight. At root is the essentially contested question of human nature. Are we to struggle with the Gods or are we their slaves? Our lives and human world are forged in how we answer.

Liberal education is a conversation . . .

Mark Kingwell, a teacher in Toronto, on returning to a humanistic basis for education:

We philosophers don’t value Plato because he has been around so long; he has been around so long because he’s valuable. . . .

Sitting together in groups, with a shared text before us, still works as well as it did two millennia ago. And many innovations, such as flashy PowerPoint slides or “clickers” that rate instant comprehension, are just gadgets. Gadgets can be fun, but they are no substitute for reading, writing and discussion. . . 

Liberal education is a conversation, not a data transfer that might be accomplished as well online. That conversation starts in a room, with other people. It can even be a large room, if the professor is engaging and enthusiastic.

Inferno 4

Translated into English terza rima by Peter D’Epiro
[Note: A revised version of this translation was posted on 3.23.15]

A deafening peal of thunder broke the deep
Slumber inside my head and made me start
Like someone forcibly aroused from sleep.
Standing, I let my rested vision dart
Around that place, then fixed my gaze to know
What clue to where I was it could impart.
I stood at the edge of a cliff—down below
There gaped the abysmal vale of suffering, where
The blare of countless shrieks gives voice to woe.
It was dark, and deep, and full of misty air,
And though I peered to plumb its vast extent,
I failed to see a single thing down there.
“To that blind world now let us make descent,”
The poet, deathly pale, began to say;
“See that you follow me.” And I, intent
On learning what his pallor might convey,
Said, “How shall I come if you yourself appear
Frightened, who comfort me in my dismay?”

Eros in Plato

Delancey Place offers "eclectic excerpts" from a large variety of books and blogs. You can subscribe and get them every day. Here's the excerpt from the Symposium for Valentine's Day:


In today's excerpt - symposia, the private banquets of the elite in ancient Athens. One such famous gathering was hosted by Agathon and attended by Socrates. The subject of the evening's discussion was the nature of Eros, the great god of desire. It is worth noting how esteemed homosexuality was at this time:

"Agathon, in a grand rhe­torical flourish befitting a poet, concludes [the early portion of the discussion by saying] that though all the gods are happy, Eros is 'the most happy, since he is the most beautiful and the best.'
 
"To this much, all the participants save the still-silent Socrates agree. But beyond Eros's power and proximity to happiness, there is little else on which the guests can establish common ground. One speaker, Pausanias, refuses to see Eros as a single entity, claiming that he must be divided in two as Common Eros and Heavenly Eros - the one, a seedy creature drawn by sexual appetite and so depraved that he will even sleep with women; the other, a more transcendent being attracted by mind as well as beauty, who finds his consummate expression in the higher love between boys and older men. Eryximachus, on the other hand, views Eros as a pantheistic force found not only in the hearts of gods and humans but 'also in nature - in the physical life of all animals, in plants that grow in the ground, and in virtually all living organisms.' 

"Finally, Aristophanes maintains in a celebrated fable that human beings were originally joined two at a time to form complete wholes. Overly powerful, these four-legged creatures provoked the suspicion of the gods, who had them sundered to reduce their strength; now each half walks the earth in search of its other. The fable explains our sexual orientation, for men originally joined to men will seek their complement in the same sex, while those origi­nally joined to women will seek their other half accordingly. It also explains our sense of longing and loss, as we wander the earth in search of the one who will make us whole. '[W]here happiness for the human races lies,' Aristophanes concludes, is 'in the successful pursuit of love.' Eros is the great benefactor who will '[return] us to our original condi­tion, healing us, and making us blessed and perfectly happy.'

"A pantheistic force animating the world; a schizophrenic deity both plebeian and patrician; a guide who leads us only to ourselves: Eros, clearly, is no simple god. He is, Socrates contends, no god at all. Draw­ing together the strands of these various reflections, Socrates main­tains that Eros is, rather, a 'great spirit' who is 'midway between what is divine and what is human,' his ambiguous nature owing to the strange circumstances of his conception. Sired at the birthday party of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love, Eros is the child of Pov­erty, who came to the festivities uninvited as a beggar, and the god Plenty, a welcome guest who passed out there drunk. How Plenty is able to perform in such a state, we are not told (presumably, a feat of the gods), but perform he does, producing a son who is neither 'mor­tal nor immortal.' Now fully grown, Eros takes after his mother. Con­stantly in need, he is 'hard, unkempt, barefoot, homeless.' But, like his father, he is 'brave, enterprising, and determined.' Having inher­ited 'an eye for beauty and the good,' Eros continually searches for these two qualities through love, as befits one conceived in the pres­ence of Aphrodite. 

"Straddling the human and the divine, Eros is an emissary, con­ducting 'all association and communication, waking or sleeping,' between the gods and men. His twofold nature explains his defin­ing characteristic - desire itself. For what is desire but the human acknowledgment that one is in need, that one is lacking? As Socrates explains, 'the man who desires something desires what is not avail­able to him, and what he doesn't already have in his possession.' "

Author: Darrin M. McMahon  
Title: Happiness: A History 
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly PressDate: Copyright 2006 by Darrin M. McMahon
Pages: 32-34

Happiness: A History

by Darrin M. McMahon by Atlantic Monthly Press

Hardcover

If you wish to read further: Buy Now

 

Tales told by Socrates and Raphael

As has been mentioned before, Verity's notes to Paradise Lost, some of which are available online, are quite sensible and useful. His notes to Books 5 and 6 can be accessed here.

Of the Father's 16-line decree that begins on line 600 announcing the Son, his rule, his power of mediating the Father's glory, word and will, the editor wisely begs off, saying, "upon the particular theological bearing of this passage it would, I think, be out of place to comment," confining his note to scriptural sources, of which there are several.

Rather than look at the theology (we did, somewhat, in our last session, finding it more subtle, cryptic and complex than its austere brevity lets on), I want to suggest that the shape of Raphael's story might offer some interesting parallels and contrasts with Plato's cave allegory, which Socrates tells in Republic 7. The reasons for the comparison should become clear.

In the Republic, Socrates describes the human condition as essentially benighted. We are bound, like prisoners, fixed in the darkness, compelled to look at shadows of stage props. The props are behind us, between our backs and the fire that projects their images on the cave wall.

The story tells how one of these turns his neck and sees the two-dimensional props, and immediately understands that he's been seeing something of less substance than these. He's then dragged out of the cave into the bright light of day, where he is at first blinded, then gradually becomes accustomed to the sun's illuminating actual things. Socrates assures us that if this fellow were to return to tell his fellow cave dwellers what he saw, they would take him for a madman. But the shape of the story is clear: it's a journey through space, a paradigm of the eye and of light. It moves from darkness and servitude to light and freedom, from illusion to truth, from a kind of dreamworld to a stable, clear and serene upper world where one can contemplate things as they really are. So far, Plato's tale can be said to correspond to the pervasive solar imagery of dawn in Book 5 -- a process of gradual illumination.

If we turn to the story Raphael tells Adam and Eve, we find an parallel ascent, from Nature, the garden, the flower that turns to the sun, upward along a dynamic scale of being which follows the sublimation being described by the Angel as all things are consumed, transformed and refined. At a certain point, prompted by Adam's questions, Raphael has to pause and make clear that he is about to speak of warring spirits and high matter beyond the reach of human experience:

how shall I relate
To human sense th' invisible exploits [ 565 ]
Of warring Spirits; how without remorse
The ruin of so many glorious once
And perfet while they stood; how last unfould
The secrets of another World, perhaps
Not lawful to reveal? yet for thy good [ 570 ]
This is dispenc't,

He is, then, going to speak in allegory, in figure -- we must be wary of taking what is said too literally, it will require interpreting:

and what surmounts the reach
Of human sense, I shall delineate so,
By lik'ning spiritual to corporal forms,
As may express them best, though what if Earth
Be but the shaddow of Heav'n, and things therein [ 575 ]
Each to other like, more then on earth is thought?

One might be tempted here to find a suggestion of Platonism -- the spiritual world is to the physical world as Plato's Forms are to the shadowy figures on the walls of the cave.

But the story Raphael goes on to tell is anything but a journey that ends in gradual, eye-opening enlightenment. Instead we are carried back in time to a prime moment before our world was made. And we hear, rather than see, an act of power. God decrees the rule of his Son, and almost instantaneously Satan conceives malice, revolts, and launches the cataclysm of Book 6. Instead of a tranquil contemplative conclusion, Raphael's tale rises to a moment of perfect order; at God's Word, heavenly order shatters.

Raphael's story is but a beginning -- an enigmatic opening of a story still unfolding. He will go on to speak of Satan's rout and fall, which brings us back to the opening of Book 1. But is this a purely cyclical structure? With the creation in Book 7, another chapter begins; it will encompass another fall, then all of human history, then look beyond history.

The shape of Milton's story strongly diverges from Plato's. Where the cave dweller begins in dark servitude and ascends to brilliant plenitude, the tale of the angel and the poet begins in sweetness and light, and falls into disorder and harsh history. In Plato, knowledge, gained by toil and struggle, is the goal and liberating end of education; for Adam and Eve, knowledge will neither be the goal, nor the means of leaving or repairing the fallen world. Still, the Greek world's highest literary form was tragedy, where the culture of Milton and Dante finds its fullest expression in the comic.

A few supplemental links for Horace

Horace tacitly assumes his readers will be entirely familiar with Aristotle's Poetics, which he cites, alludes to, and plays off of throughout the Ars Poetica.

Many of the key oppositions in the Ars -- virtus et venus, ordo / facundia, utile / dulce - derive from Aristotle's systematic approach to speech and theater in the Poetics as well as in the Rhetoric.

Here is how the philosopher parses the modes of persuasion:

it has three divisions -- (1) the speaker's power of evincing a personal character which will make his speech credible (ethos); (2) his power of stirring the emotions of his hearers (pathos); (3) his power of proving a truth, or an apparent truth, by means of persuasive arguments (logos).

The rich Greek word logos (λόγος) is set in opposition to lexis, the outward form that motions of the soul take when clothed in words. See, in the Poetics, book III, on style. Curiously, even as this distinction becomes a fundamental opposition in the Ars Poetica, its binary terms are actually forms of the same root, as Wikipedia notes:

both words, both logos and lexis derive from the same verb legō (λέγω), meaning "to count, tell, say, speak."

Finally, the question of where poets are supposed to acquire the logos:

To have good sense, is the first principle and fountain of writing well. 

            scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons. 

leads to Plato:

 The Socratic papers will direct you in the choice of your subjects

For the readers of the Ars Poetica, the Symposium and the Phaedrus, and the Republic, at the least, would help. Behind the tension between logos and lexis stands the banishment of the poets by the Philosopher King.