On the observable facts of erotic experience Sokrates and Lysias are in rough agreement, but there is a world of difference between the readings they give to those facts. The facts are that eros changes you so drastically you seem to become a different person. In conventional thinking, such changes are best categorized as madness. What is the best thing to do with a mad person? Write him out of your novel, is Lysias’ answer. It is an answer that would make some sense to his contemporaries, for his version of eros proceeds from thoroughly conventional premises. It conceives of desire, in the terms of a longstanding poetic tradition, as devastating takeover of the self and a generally negative experience. It assumes, as was standard in the popular moral thinking of the day, self-control or sōphrosynē as the rule of an enlightened life. Sokrates subverts both clichés. His approach is radical. He does not doubt that a nonlover will rise to feats of sōphrosynē. He does not deny that eros is takeover, a form of mania, but he vindicates mania. Let us see how.
Change of self is loss of self, according to the traditional Greek attitude. Categorized as madness, it is held to be an unquestionable evil. Sokrates does not agree:
λεκτέος δὲ ὧδε, ὅτι Οὐκ ἔστ᾽ ἔτυμος λόγος ὃς ἂν παρόντος ἐραστοῦ τῷ μὴ ἐρῶντι μᾶλλον φῇ δεῖν χαρίζεσθαι, διότι δὴ ὁ μὲν μαίνεται, ὁ δὲ σωφρονεῖ. εἰ μὲν γὰρ ἦν ἁπλοῦν τὸ μανίαν κακὸν εἶναι, καλῶς ἂν ἑλέγετο· νῦν δὲ τὰ μέγιστα τῶν ἀγαθῶν ἡμῖν γίγνεται διὰ μανίας, θεία̨: μέντοι δόσει διδομένης.
I must say this story [logos] is not true, the story that a nonlover should be gratified in preference to a lover on the grounds that the latter is mad while the former is sane. Now, if it were a simple fact that madness [mania] is evil, the story would be fine. But the fact is, the greatest of good things come to us through madness when it is conferred as a gift of the gods. (244a)
Sokrates’ central argument, as he goes on to reevaluate madness, is that you keep your mind to yourself at the cost of closing out the gods. Truly good and indeed divine things are alive and active outside you and should be let in to work their changes. Such incursions formally instruct and enrich our lives in society; no prophet or healer or poet could practice his art if he did not lose his mind, Sokrates says (244a-45). Madness is the instrument of such intelligence. More to the point, erotic mania is a valuable thing in private life. It puts wings on your soul.
Sokrates’ exposition of mania as a profitable experience for the individual depends on a theory of the dynamics of the soul that is carefully crafted to respond to the questions of erotic control raised by traditional poetry. His analysis subsumes, and at the same time subverts, the poets’ standard metaphors of eros so that he may recast their traditional picture of erotic experience. Where they see loss and damage, Sokrates insists on profit and growth. Where they see ice melting, he says wings grow. Where they brace themselves against takeover, he unfolds himself for flight.
Despite elementary points of concurrence, there is an enormous difference, in the end, between the erotic attitudes of Sokrates, on the one hand, Lysias and traditional Greek sentiment on the other. It is a fine thing to see Plato sum up all that difference in one image. Wings, in traditional poetry, are the mechanism by which Eros swoops upon the unsuspecting lover to wrest control of his person and personality. Wings are an instrument of damage and a symbol of irresistible power. When you fall in love, change sweeps through you on wings and you cannot help but lose your grip on that cherished entity, your self.
We have seen how Sappho describes the loss of self in fragment 31. As desire takes over her body, mind and perceptual functions she says eptoaisen, which means something like “it puts the heart in my chest on wings” or “it makes my heart fly inside me” (31.6). Anakreon speaks of the same sensation, and assigns to it the same cause:
ἀναπέτομαι δὴ πρὸς Ὄλυμπον πτερύγεσσι κούφῃς
διὰ τὸν Ἔρωτ᾽· οὐ γὰρ ἐμοὶ 〈 ͞ ͝ 〉 θέλει συνηβᾶν.
I am soaring toward Olympos on light wings
for the sake of Eros, for [the boy I desire] is not
willing to share his youth with me.
(378 PMG)
The desire that drove Helen mad is represented by Alkaios in similar terms:
κἀλένας ἐν στήθ[ε]σιν [ἐ]πτ[όαις
θῦμον Ἀργείας Τροΐω δ[.].αν[
ἐκμάνεισα ξ[ε.]ναπάτα πιπ[
ἔσπετο νᾶϊ
… [Eros] made Helen’s heart fly like a wing in her
chest
and she went out of her mind for a Trojan man
and followed him over the sea.…
(LP, fr. 283.3-6)
The significance of Eros’ wings has become a poetic topos by Hellenistic times, as we see in this epigram of Archias:
“Φεύγειν δεῖ τὸν Ἔρωτα” κενὸς πόνος· οὐ γὰρ ἀλύξω
πεζὸς ὑπὸ πτηνοῦ πυκνὰ διωκόμενος.
“You should flee Eros”: empty effort!
How shall I elude on foot one who chases me on wings?
(Anth. Pal. 5.59)
Plato takes the traditional wings of Eros and reimagines them. Wings are no foreign machinery of invasion in Plato’s conception. They have natural roots in each soul, a residue of its immortal beginnings. Our souls once lived on wings among the gods, he says, nourished as gods are by the infinite elation of looking at reality all the time. Now we are exiled from that place and quality of life, yet we remember it from time to time, for example, when we look upon beauty and fall in love (246-51). Moreover, we have the power to recover it, by means of the soul’s wings. Sokrates describes how the wings will grow, given the right conditions, powerful enough to carry the soul back to its beginnings. When you fall in love you feel all sorts of sensations inside you, painful and pleasant at once: it is your wings sprouting (251-52). It is the beginning of what you mean to be.
Beginnings are crucial. It becomes clearer now why Sokrates is so intent on them. For Sokrates, the moment when eros begins is a glimpse of the immortal ‘beginning’ that is a soul. The ‘now’ of desire is a shaft sunk into time and emerging onto timelessness, where the gods float, rejoicing in reality (247d-e). When you enter ‘now,’ you remember what it is like to be really alive, as gods are. There is something paradoxical in this ‘memory’ of a time that is timeless. The real difference between Sokrates’ and Lysias’ erotic theories resides in this paradox. Lysias is appalled by the paradox of desire and crosses it out: for him every erotic ‘now’ is the beginning of an end, and no more. He prefers a changeless, unending ‘then.’ But Sokrates looks at the paradoxical moment called ‘now’ and notices a curious movement taking place there. At the point where the soul begins itself, a blind point seems to open out. Into the blind point ‘then’ disappears.