Gender-Based Notions of Homoerotic Love: Sappho and Plato’s Symposium

In contrast, both pieces depict a love for two different sexes. The vivid depictions of woman-loving-woman situation that occurred in Sappho’s literature influenced many people during her time. Unlike Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey, Sappho’s poems primarily concentrate on the emotional and sexual aspects of life. For example, in Poem 44, when Sappho is speaking about Hector from the Iliad, she describes more of Hector and Andromache’s marriage and relationship, rather than the war (book, 636). Poem 94 always gives an example of the lesbian life in Lesbos:

Sappho's poems are heavily associated with love, the loving of another poem or story of someone driven to action by love. Sappho held to love as the strongest force of all. Love has the ability to change the world for the better. Love is neither censored nor simplified. Sappho's attitudes toward love attracted a great deal of attention, both positive and negative. In modern times there have been those who enthusiastically applauded her celebration of physical love.

Since the beginning of time, in most love stories, a man chases a woman after love. Society tells us that it’s a man’s job to go after a woman he loves and woo her. In Ovid’s story of “Phoebus and Daphne” the lustful Phoebus (Apollo) chases after the nymph Daphne who rejects love due to Cupid’s arrow. Centuries later, author William Shakespeare wrote A midsummer Night’s Dream where it is a woman who chases after a man. Helena is a woman in love with Demetrius yet he is in love with a woman called Hermia. In Shakespeare’s story, the typical love chase is reversed, he turned Ovid’s story around but still keeping most of the key elements, just in reversed gender roles.

Sappho’s poem, entitled Fragment 16, is of the lyrical style instead of the epic style we are used to in Homer’s Iliad. The lyrical style of poetry got its name because it was usually accompanied by a lyre while it was recited. It also was used to express more emotion rather than telling a story. This form of poetry seems to be more artistic rather than the story telling of epic poetry of the time. In this poem we are able to use the comparison of different imagery to understand a common theme within the poem itself. The reason for the interesting title of the poem is because most of Sappho’s poetry is now only found in fragmented forms. Most of Sappho’s writing is from 600 B.C.E.

In “I” the ever present theme of love is very evident. Sappho lists things that people believe to be the most beautiful things on earth, “array of horsemen / and others of marching men / and others of ships” (line 2-3). However, she does not hold these things to have more beauty over the others. She believes that beauty has a different meaning to everyone. She uses Helen, daughter of Zeus, for an example. Helen left her husband to follow her heart. Anactoria is Sappho’s beauty. “For I would rather watch her… than all the force of Lydian chariots,” (19 & 22).

In Plato’s Symposium, sequential speeches praise the god of Love, but they stray from truth until Diotima’s speech provides a permanent form in which love “neither waxes nor wanes” (Sym. 211A). Through the speeches, love shifts from identifying with the concrete to the abstract, but still ultimately advances goals of present: Phaedrus sees love as helping “men gain virtue,” Aristophanes as only a “promise” to restore humans to their “original nature” and Pausanias and Eryximachus have to use two changing notions of love (Sym. 180B, 193D). In contrast, Diotima relates love as the closest humans can come to immorality, a future goal motivating us to seek completeness and an uninhibited timelessness. She uses this shift to explain love’s

Plato is often criticized for preaching the gospel of me first. The claim is that his understanding of love is essentially egoistic, and this is seen as troublesome for the obvious ethical reasons. But there may be an even more troubling issue with Plato's understanding of love. In this paper I will attempt to argue that for Plato, love is in a sense impossible; that it can only ever be a desire for something out of one's grasp. The stakes are high but perhaps there is a way to understand this problem in a way that seems a little less damning. To do this I will analyze arguments from the Lysis and the Symposium, first questioning even the possibility of love and then attempt to show that love is in fact possible, all though in weaker

Other authors after Homer also use reverence for a god’s domain as a tool to gain attention from the gods. In the Fragments, the author, Sappho, uses this tool to gain attention from the gods for herself. Sappho is a lover of love and her work shows her obsession with love as most of her partially retained and transcribed lyrics focus on love and its different forms. In supplication to the goddess Aphrodite, Sappho writes, “Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind… I beg you do not break with hard pains, O lady, my heart” (The Fragments, pg.3). Due to the fact that love is Aphrodite’s domain, Aphrodite pays attention to Sappho – someone who personifies and respects the power of love. Subsequently, after Sappho’s supplication, Aphrodite asks, “Whom should I persuade (now again) to lead you back into her love? Who, O Sappho, is wronging you?” (The fragments, pg.3). The use of the phrase ‘now again’ indicates that Aphrodite not only pays attention to Sappho, but that Aphrodite helps Sappho in issues of love repeatedly. Out of context, the phrase ‘now again’ also denotes and exasperated tone, however, the preceding context states that Aphrodite greeted Sappho smiling – a symbol of pleasure with another. Additionally, Sappho gains the attention of Hera because of her mention and praise of marriage in lyric 44, motherly love in lyric 132 and the praise of women throughout - all powers that lie under Hera’s domain. Recently in a newly discovered and transcribed lyric, Sappho says,

Images of male homosocial and homoerotic relations pervade Athenian culture. From plays to poetry and jugs to the justice system one can find these relations represented pictorially and in words. But do all these images align with each other or are there irreconcilable differences between them? To look at this question we will take two small pieces of culture, a philosophical treatise, Plato's Symposium and the lyric poetry of Theognis and Anacreon.

In Plato’s work Symposium, Phaedrus, Pausania, Eryximachus, Aristophane and Agathon, each of them presents a speech to either praise or definite Love. Phaedrus first points out that Love is the primordial god; Pausanias brings the theme of “virtue” into the discussion and categorizes Love into “good” one or “bad” one; Eryximachus introduces the thought of “moderation’ and thinks that Love governs such fields as medicine and music; Aristophanes draws attention to the origin and purposes

One type of love that is brought up by many speakers in Plato’s Symposium is that of an older man, around thirty, and a much younger boy, around thirteen. This love is rare in today’s society, but all of the speakers present feel the need to defend this pederasty, proving the increased role that this love played in their society. Although this love was more common during the time of the Symposium, there are similar types of relationships still occurring. Not all of these modern relationships include sex as the old relationships did, but they still have the exchange of virtue and wisdom that the past relationships did. Many of the speakers address the issue of pederasty directly, and others do so indirectly through inferences and conclusions.

Desire is described as a strong want for any specific entity, and it is a theme commonly found throughout literature, albeit every time period and work has their own particular interpretation. In particular, Plato’s The Symposium and De Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons depict desire in a similar fashion, involving intense passion and longing. However, they differ in their interpretation of morality and integrity of individuals when faced with great desire, illustrating the evolving nature of the human condition, and how we come to make sense of our deepest emotions. Written during the time of the Ancient Greeks, The Symposium approaches the justification for desire and love from a mythical creation perspective, which was a common method used to understand the natural world.

There are different forms of love, ranging from the lust of one another to a familial fondness. Two poets, Sappho and Catullus, each represent a different type of love in their respective poems. Sappho, a female poet born in the early sixth century B.C. on the Greek island of Lesbos, was said to be the tenth Muse and a supreme lyric poet of her time. Her life remains mostly a mystery, but through her poems it has been found out that she had a husband, and a daughter named Cleis. Catullus, a Roman poet that lived from roughly 84 to 54 B.C., found inspiration in and was influenced by Sappho, opting to write about love rather than politics like the rest of the poets of his time. He also popularized the style of “love elegy” in poems. Sappho and Catullus, as seen in “Sleep, Darling” and “If Ever Anyone Anywhere” respectively, use diction, the speaker, figurative language, and imagery in similar and different ways to express varying versions of love.

Platonic love only partially identifies with Pausanias’s theory. Pausanias’s speech and the speeches of the rest

Plato was a philosopher from Classical Greece and an innovator of dialogue and dialect forms which provide some of the earliest existing analysis ' of political questions from a philosophical perspective. Among some of Plato 's most prevalent works is his dialogue the Symposium, which records the conversation of a dinner party at which Socrates (amongst others) is a guest. Those who talk before Socrates share a tendency to celebrate the instinct of sex and regard love (eros) as a god whose goodness and beauty they compete. However, Socrates sets himself apart from this belief in the fundamental value of sexual love and instead recollects Diotima 's theory of love, suggesting that love is neither beautiful nor good because it is the desire to possess what is beautiful, and that one cannot desire that of which is already possessed. The ultimate/primary objective of love as being related to an absolute form of beauty that is held to be identical to what is good is debated throughout the dialogue, and Diotima expands on this description of love as being a pursuit of beauty (by which one can attain the goal of love) that culminates in an understanding of the form of beauty. The purpose of this paper is to consider the speeches presented (i.e. those of Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and Agathon) in Plato 's Symposium as separate parts that assist in an accounting of the definition and purpose of platonic love.