#Phaedrus

[blvvdk3ep]

I think we should replace all essays with yaoi of our favorite philosophers and playwrights arguing #embracetradition

[loneberry]

This itching in the wings, in the absence of the beloved, is a violent pain: The channels through which the wings push up are dried up and closed and hinder the growth of the wing. What is inside them, full of desire but closed in, beats like a pulse in an inflamed sore; it pierces these channels like a needle. Thus the whole soul everywhere is stung (κεντουμένη) as if bitten by a gadfly and tortured. At the same time, having the memory of beauty, it is full of joy. [When it sees the beautiful, the part where the wings are pushing is soothed], it has a respite from the prickings and the tortures, and tastes for a time the sweetest of delights.  —Plato's Phaedrus, quoted in "God in Plato," Simone Weil's fragmentary notes on Plato. Weil: “The soul recovers a memory of the god that it followed above and whose image it sees in the beloved. ... The lover tries to make the beloved as much like this god whose memory he has found again as possible, and when the beloved responds to this love, there is established between the two of them a friendship founded on a common participation in divine things.”

[anthropologistfromentropy]

OK but imagine: Richard talking Henry out of suicide through Phaedrus by Plato.

Like how friends/lovers help each other to remember the beauty of heaven, to be better and wiser people so they can reincarnate faster. Henry can't kill himself yet since Henry and Richard have barely had time to love each other yet. They haven't reached wisdom or lived well/morally yet.

I definitely think Henry believes in immortal souls and reincarnation. Like how he considers death just "redistribution of matter". I also think he promised to Camilla to come back, and asked her to wait for him.

It's also very gay and romantic.

(In my fic it also perfectly ties into Wings by Mikhail Kuzmin. They become friends with Kuzmin and E.M Forster, and they can talk about Phaedrus and Wings. Publishing Wings and Maurice, and then resisting their bans is gonna be quite a big part of the plot. At least for Henry, Richard and Francis. Alex, Camilla and Charles do their own things in Paris.)

[kebriones]

(had to split bc they're on different pages)

Alcibiades: You won't refuse to drink from my hand.

Phaedrus: who can refuse oblivion and beauty given by your hands?

🫣🥴🥴🥴okayy

[renegadephilosopher]

shut uppppp socrates. what do you mean if you dont know him youve forgotten yourself.

"let me see under your cloak. well heh. i bet youre hiding a speech under there. but um show me so i can see. ok?"

AND THEN THEY GO TO THE BANKS OF A RIVER TO... WADE TOGETHER??? WHAT????

(this is socrates btw) he literally said 'please sprawl out and lay down beside me so we can read' girl he can just. sit against the tree. this is insane behavior you do NOT need to be doing this

[zenphaedrus]

To celebrate the release of the Minecraft movie, don't miss the midnight premiere of my latest video, Every Minecraft Main Menu theme played at once!

[renaultphile]

John Addington Symonds on Plato

A Problem in Greek Ethics, John Addington Symonds, privately published in 1908.

This passage reminds me of the way Mary Renault uses Plato in The Charioteer. Laurie does seem to read the Phaedrus as poetry, and Ralph seems to believe in the divine gift of love, a gift which seems to torture him while offering salvation. it reminded me particularly of his response to finding out that Laurie was not dead after all:

"There must be some reason why things happen. Something in us must touch them off. Like a magnetic mine."

[grape-v1nes]

Wolfstar (specifically remus) is so Plato’s-philosophy-on-beauty-and-love coded

(remus genuinely feels like sirius’ beauty physically heals his soul and brings him closer to god)

[fredbensonenthusiast]

So, here are my thoughts on the excerpt from The Life of Alcibiades. I found it very interesting, because it kind of says more about the time it was written than about the customs of Ancient Greece. I apologize for the length of this!

"No girl at Athens had any education at all, and could not possibly be a companion to a man except for one purpose."

"The absence of the culture and of the mental and moral development of women"

Here, dear old Fred is displaying a logic typical of an Englishman of his period: formal education and culture are intrinsically linked; therefore, since Athenian women had no access to formal education, they had no culture at all!

“With such a guardian, then, we must make allowance for a lad whom Athens was doing her very best to spoil and corrupt. She was crazy about him: whatever he did, as the preservation of these innumerable adventures of his youth shows, was the subject of laughter and gossip. As a boy and a young man he provoked all the social interest which is now shown in the doings of some high-bred, daring, witty and wonderfully beautiful girl; if Athens had had daily papers they would have been full of paragraphs about Alcibiades. Every madcap insolence was forgiven him by the adoring city for his amazing charm and his beauty at an age when, in modern life, he would still have been in the fifth form of a public school and liable to be set down to write five hundred lines of Homer or to be birched. But we find him in his school-class asking his master for a Homer, and, because he had not got one, smacking his face. He was forgiven; nothing happened.”

I don’t know if Benson was the first person to come up with this concept, but this is truly a fantastic description: Alcibiades as a media phenomenon! Everybody talks about him, everybody knows what he’s done, every boy wants to be as cool as him. He seemed unstoppable, until suddenly he wasn’t. He’s debauched, reckless and self-destructive, yet his imperfections are actually a large part of his appeal, a way for people to form a parasocial relationship with him and somehow understand his deeply flawed but shining humanity. The Marilyn Monroe of Ancient Greece!

If Benson were a very bold author, he could’ve written a decadent novel around this. He knew how to write social comedy, so this would’ve been an obvious progression. But as we know, his self-preservation instincts always got the better of him.

“The flesh, so ran his most Christian gospel, warred against the spirit; the two were like a pair of ill-mated horses harnessed to a chariot which was driven by the lover of beauty, and the wicked black horse of the flesh had to be tamed, and its wanton desires beaten out of it, till at length it learned its lesson, and no longer lusted after the fair form, but with awe and holy reverence discerned through it the eternal beauty of God. [...] It is in this spirit that, at the end of his dialogue with the young Phædrus under the plane trees of the Ilyssus, he offered the prayer which, but for the paganism of its invocation, might have been that of some enlightened Christian mystic after the realization of Him who is altogether lovely.”

Another typical fallacy: he was “righteous” and enlightened, which means he was a proto-Christian! This one has been around since the Middle Ages, as a way to justify the moral validity of Ancient Greek philosophers.

“It is also important, in rendering his environment, to try to dissipate the erroneous view of Athenian love which is current.”

“But the Athenian lover, as defined by Plato, was no carnalist, but one who filled the mind of his beloved with all manliness and noble aspirations. He was not, as Socrates the arch-lover of youth is never tired of insisting, the lover of the beauty of his body, but of the beauty of his soul, which he discerned and adored through the fair veil of the flesh. The whole instinct, largely the result of the social non-existence of women at Athens, was not considered shameful or secret it was in no sense a hidden moral cancer, nor could it possibly have been, since, as far as we can judge, there was as much cancer as healthy tissue, and many, probably the majority, of the most high-minded of intellectual Athenians, Socrates and Plato, Themistocles and Sophocles, accepted and shared it as a normal instinct, and saw in it an elevating influence.”

"There was an ideal affection behind it; it did not result in the promiscuous and abnormal immorality with which it usually credited."

There’s a lot of bad faith arguing here, and this rationalization continues to be repeated throughout the text. Benson took Plato’s idealization of Socrates at face value and extended it to the whole Athenian society, while conveniently ignoring all the evidence within Plato’s own texts that indicates most Athenian men didn’t follow this anti-carnalist philosophy to the letter (or at all). There’s even an adult male/male couple in the Symposium!

I also noticed he raised the matter of gender segregation in Classical Athens, but excused himself from making any potentially worthy comparison between it and his own deeply homosocial society, where boys used to grow up mostly around only boys. And considering his comments in Mother, we know he was aware of this reality.

I don’t take Benson as stupid, nor do I think he was a gullible and/or pious man. I believe he knew a lot of his arguments didn’t hold water. He was doing his usual preaching-to-the-choir number, which allowed him to write about the things he was interested in without making too much of a fuss. He probably thought it was the only option available at the time (which is understandable, of course).

---

I remember you also mentioned a possible correlation between Benson's and Ralph's arguments. I think they're different in nature. Benson was basically arguing that homosexuality in Classical Athens was a rather incidental thing, since the average male/male relationship there was free of “any promiscuous and abnormal immorality.” Ralph, on the other hand, seems to acknowledge the prominence of homosexuality in this historical context; what he was actually trying to say is that men like Bunny and Sandy would be ridiculed and disrespected even in Ancient Greece, because they are effeminate and enjoy (or are perceived to enjoy) bottoming, while Laurie would be respected because he maintains a traditionally masculine appearance (and is a top?) — a sound point, mind you.

Oh, this is such a treat @alovelywaytospendanevening 😊 I have been pondering on this all day, no apologies needed for the length of it! I am so glad I asked you for your thoughts on the way Fred tries to 'explain' or perhaps 'explain away' Athenian 'love'. I feel like both Fred and Ralph are using a kind of 'straw man' argument, as in 'people talk a lot of rubbish', conveniently leaving it to the reader to infer what that might be and both avoiding the need to commit themselves to an actual view - both distance themselves from it in different ways......fascinating. Anyway, thank you! I so enjoyed this 🧐

[incoherentblob]

since i cannot decide between names the name phaedrus is used for my azem professionally and in his private life he uses eros. something something the side of yourself you show to the world and the side you hide

[legitspidey]

Ok

I need the classics nerds to listen to me here

(and the chronically online, you can stay too)

So in Plato's Phaedrus, he goes on about the soul being two horses and the charioteer and stuff but my point is about the part when he says that when someone sees a 'godlike face' or someone who they think is the image of beauty then they revere them like they were a god and their soul starts to grow wings.

And if they are without the person they love then their soul growing wings is painful but as soon as they see the person they love the pain is soothed.

Stay with me here...

Soulmate AU

WHAT IF when they see their soulmate they start to grow wings and it hurts BUT when they're with their soulmate its soothing and not painful and they can let their wings grow

guys do you see the vision

because there's so much potential - you've got soulmates, wings, forced proximity, hurt/comfort

[slaps roof of car] this bad boy can fit so many tropes in it

Imagine, if you will, person A turning up to person B's house in the middle of the night bent over in pain. As soon as person B opens the door, it's like its all better. The pain leaves and the itching stops and it's like the sight of them soothed them. Person A asks if they can stay over because they can't bare it anymore and of course person B agrees

cue domestic fluff

I'm going insane someone sedate me I have exams to revise for I cannot be thinking about ts

[corvushocfecit]

de vulpe et uva

done for SCAD ILLU 100

[weatheredfailnot]

A’loq’s adoptive parents <33

[marydarkblacknoir]

Love is a serious mental disease.

Plato, Phaedrus

[zenphaedrus]

Who's got time to listen to the whole hour of Minecraft - Volume Alpha? Listen to all of it at once in five minutes here!

#Minecraft #c418 #volumealpha

[renaultphile]

John Addington Symonds on 'Greek love'

'A problem in Greek Ethics', John Addington Symonds, privately printed in 1908.

One of the earliest English writers to attempt to address directly the subject of 'sexual inversion' as he called it, this book describes what he views as the unique position of ancient Greece in this respect.

This passage seems the best description I've read of how Ralph might have felt about finding a moral code that he could sign up to, outside the Christian one he was given. Still pretty strict, but it allowed him some standards.....