Prelude to an enigma: Aristophanes’ account of Eros in Plato’s Symposium

Abstract

This paper focuses on Aristophanes’ myth from Plato’s Symposium and starts from a critical evaluation of two different interpretations of this text. The first hermeneutic attempt I address belongs to Leo Strauss and emphasizes the political entailments of the Aristophanic account by linking, on the one hand, Eros with mutiny and identifying, on the other, the pederasts with the best fit individuals for the government of body politic. The second interpretation, proposed by Arlene Saxonhouse, is part and parcel of a feminist exegesis and starts from a literal reading of the Aristophanic speech in order to argue that the inevitable bodily separation of the post-split condition of humans can be overcome only through a trans-corporeal union of souls. Whereas Strauss draws the political implications of Eros, Saxonhouse views erotic love as both going beyond the boundaries of polis and simultaneously undermining politics understood as the realm of masculine power. My contention is twofold: firstly, that by explicitly linking eros with an essential fragmentariness and stating that love always implies an ineffable non-corporeal aspect, Aristophanes may be taken as a prelude to Socrates’ speech from the same Platonic work; secondly, I hold that the Aristophanic quasi-hierarchical political tenets are limited to a certain paradigm of political theory without exhausting the entire meaning of politics. In my exegetic effort, I also suggest that Aristophanic love is a protean figure with multiple and sometimes obscure potentialities; at the same time, I hold that by starting from a mythological standpoint, through which the present human condition is tied with an unattainable origin that is perpetually sought, Aristophanes’ speech is mainly concerned with the human relation to the divine.