Socrates the Beautiful: Role Reversal and Midwifery in Plato's Symposium

Socrates the Beautiful:Role Reversal and Midwifery in Plato's Symposium* Radcliffe G. Edmonds III In a society that valued physical beauty, he was an ugly man. In a culture that idealized youth, he was an old man. Snub-nosed, with protruding eyes, he looked like one of the ridiculous satyrs on the painted vases: (215b3-6) I say that he is like the satyr Marsyas. That you are like them, at least in form, Socrates, you yourself would not deny. Thus Alcibiades the beautiful taunts him in the Symposium as he begins his speech in praise of Socrates. Yet Alcibiades tells in his speech how he is captivated by this man, an individual like no one else he has ever known or heard of: . (221c4-6) The wholly amazing thing is that there is nothing like him among human beings, neither among the ancients nor among those now. Although the symposiasts laugh at him because he seems still to be in love with Socrates, Alcibiades accuses Socrates of having played an outrageous trick on him, of having pretended to be in love with him, yet of somehow ending up as End Page 261 the pursued and not the pursuer in their relationship. Beware, he warns Agathon, he could do the same to you: (222b1-5) He has done these things, not only to me, but also to Charmides, son of Glaucon, and to Euthydemus, son of Diokles and to many others, whom he deceived, pretending to be a lover, but instead he became the beloved himself rather than the lover. I am telling you these things, Agathon, lest you too be deceived by this man.1 Why does Socrates keep pulling this trick and what does it mean in terms of the philosophical education of these young men? In Plato's Symposium, there are several pairs whose roles as lover and beloved are reversed or confused: Socrates and Alcibiades, Socrates and Agathon, Socrates and Aristodemus. In each case, confusion arises as to who is the active, educating, dominant lover and who the passive, educated, subordinate beloved. The significance of these reversals for Plato's ideas of philosophic education may be seen if we examine Socrates in the Symposium as both lover and beloved in terms of Diotima's erotic theory and its confusing imagery of spiritual pregnancy and midwifery. On the one hand, Plato identifies Socrates with the , the needy, barefooted philosopher who is eternally seeking. He seeks out beautiful youths and engages them in conversation about the good life and virtue (cf. 209b-c). But Socrates is also Socrates the beautiful, the most desirable , whose outward ugliness hides supreme beauty, which Alcibiades compares to little golden images of the gods: , "and they seemed to me so divine and golden and totally beautiful and amazing" (216e7-217a1). This beauty serves as midwife to the thoughts of all the young men with whom Socrates consorts—Charmides, Euthydemus, Agathon, Aristodemus, and Alcibiades—relieving them of the pains of their spiritual pregnancy and helping them actively pursue philosophy. Socrates plays the role of both lover and beloved in these relationships and compels his partners to do the same, breaking down the hierarchical relation and replacing it with a kind of philosophic reciprocity. End Page 262 Models of Eros As Alcibiades and the other symposiasts make their speeches in the Symposium, they all start from a basic model of an erotic relationship between a lover and a beloved, an and an . Halperin describes the paradigms that underlie the roles in erotic relationships in the Athens of Plato: ... sex, as it is represented in classical Athenian documents, is a deeply polarizing experience: constructed according to a model of penetration that interprets "penetration" as an intrinsically unidirectional act, sex divides its participants into asymmetrical and, ultimately, into hierarchical positions, defining one partner as "active" and "dominant," the other partner as "passive" and "submissive." Sexual roles, moreover, are isomorphic with status and gender roles; "masculinity" is an aggregate combining the congruent functions of penetration, activity, dominance, and social precedence, whereas "femininity" signifies penetrability, passivity, submission, and social subordination.2 Clearly, this rigid hierarchical dichotomy was not as rigid, hierarchical, or dichotomous in reality as in the...