A god can do it. But will you tell me how
a man can penetrate through the lyre’s strings?
Our mind is split.
Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus
Wings mark the difference between a mortal and an immortal story of love. Lysias abhors the beginning of eros because he thinks it is really an end; Sokrates rejoices in the beginning in his belief that, really, it can have no end. So too, the presence or absence of wings in a lover’s story determines his erotic strategy. That miserly and mortal sōphrosynē (256e) by which Lysias measures out his erotic experience is a tactic of defense against the change of self that eros imposes. Change is risk. What makes the risk worthwhile?
On the negative side, the Phaedrus gives us several images of changelessness. We have seen how, in their various ways, Midas and the cicadas and the garden of Adonis stand unalterably aloof from the processes of a life in time. The images are not encouraging: at best you will “escape your own notice having died” (cf. 259c). More positively, Sokrates’ myth of wings is a glimpse of what mortals stand to gain from the entry of eros into their lives. But we should look very closely at this glimpse and the way in which Sokrates unfolds it. He is not at all naive about the terms of the transaction involved. Falling in love gives you access to an infinite good. But it is also very clear that, when Eros impinges on you in his true form, something is lost, something hard to measure.
When you fall in love you abandon the forms of ordinary life. The lover’s only care is to be with his beloved. All else slips into insignificance, as Sokrates describes:
… ἀλλὰ μητέρων τε καὶ ἀδελφῶν καί εταίρων πάντων λέλησται, καὶ οὐσίας δι᾽ ἀμέλειαν ἀπολλυμένης παρ᾽ οὐδὲν τίθεται, νομίμων δὲ καὶ εὐσχημόνων, οἷς πρὸ τοῦ ἐκαλλωπίζετο, πάντων καταφρονήσασα δουλεύειν ἑτοίμη καὶ κοιμᾶσθαι ὅπου ἂν ἐᾷ τις ἐγγυτάτω τοῦ πόθον·
… he forgets his mother and his brothers and all his comrades, couldn’t care less if his property is lost through neglect, and, in disdain of all those proprieties and decorums whose beauty he once cherished, he is ready to be a slave, to sleep anywhere he is allowed, as close as possible to his desire. (252a)
Falling in love, it seems, dislocates your view of what is significant. Aberrant behavior ensues. Rules of decorum go by the wayside. This is the common experience (pathos) of lovers, Sokrates says, to which men give the name Eros (252b).
But Eros has another name, Sokrates suddenly announces, and proceeds to develop this curious revelation into a pun. Inasmuch as puns are a somewhat preposterous form of reasoning and verge on injustice in their persuasive power, serious authors feel obliged to apologize when they use them, so Sokrates cautions Phaedrus that his pun is “pretty outrageous” (hybristikon panu, 252a) and perhaps untrue (“you can credit this or not,” he concludes, 252c). Besides, it is unmetrical. For the pun is contained in two spurious lines of Homer, and the second line does not scan. The lines address themselves to the difference between the language spoken by gods and that of men. As far as the word for desire is concerned, the difference is a matter of only two letters:
τὸν δ᾽ ἤτοι θνητοὶ μὲν Ἔρωτα καλοῦσι ποτηνόν,
ἀθάνατοι δὲ Πτέρωτα, διὰ πτεροφύτορ᾽ ἀνάγκην.
Now mortals call him winged Eros
but immortals call him Pteros, because of the wing-
growing necessity.
(252c)
By adding pt- to Eros, the gods create Pteros, which is a play upon the Greek word pteron meaning ‘wing.’ In the language of gods, then, desire itself is known as ‘the winged one’ or ‘he who has something to do with wings.’ Why? The gods have a reason for their Pteros, namely that desire entails a “wing-growing necessity.”
It is an old idea in Greek that the gods have their own language. Homer alludes to the divine language several times (Il. 1.403-404; 2.813; 14.290-91; 20.74; Od. 10.305; 12.61) and Plato takes up the matter in his Cratylus (391ff). Modern philologists are of the opinion that we have here a vestige of the difference between Greek and pre-Greek populations of the mainland. The ancients took a bolder view. “Clearly the gods call things by the names which are naturally right,” says Sokrates in the Cratylus (391e). It would be nice to believe that divine names have a clearer meaning or a larger significance than mortal ones. Unfortunately, one cannot easily see this in most of the extant examples, but it was apparently a viable opinion in Plato’s day and is certainly part of Sokrates’ implication in the Phaedrus, as well as in the Cratylus. “Surely gods call themselves by their true names,” is his assertion in the Cratylus (400e). Pteros is truer than Eros.
Pteros can be said to have more truth than Eros because it tells us not just what desire should be named, but why. Or, as Sokrates puts it, the gods’ name includes both the pathos (describable experience) and the aitia (definitive cause or reason) of desire (252c). It is apparent from the first line of the Homeric quotation that mortals, even in their ignorance of his true name, were perceptive enough to call Eros ‘winged’—that is, they had grasped the pathos of the experience, had felt desire swoop through their insides. But they had no notion why this experience should have this particular character. They had not grasped the aitia of the feeling. Gods know the reason why things are, necessarily, the way they are. Out of this knowledge they name their names.
Pteros, then, represents a net gain on the semantic level. But as poetry it blunders. Sokrates warns us that his quotation is unmetrical; he leaves it to us to perceive that Pteros itself is the word responsible for dislocating the rhythm of the second line. Here is the problem: the verse is a dactylic hexameter and scans fine except for the word de, which precedes the divine name Pteros. De is by nature a single short syllable and stands at a position in the line that requires a short syllable; the rules of Greek prosody, however, regularly call for a short syllable, when it is followed by two consonants, to become a long syllable. Thus the pt- with which the gods enlarge erōs forces this verse into a metrical dilemma. It is a dilemma with a familiar contour: we might be reminded of the children in Sophokles’ poem who want to hold ice in their hands and also want to put it down. De cannot be both a long syllable and a short syllable at the same time, at least not in reality as we see it.
Gods evidently see reality differently. But it is not surprising if their better version of the truth resists reduction to human measures. They are, after all, infinite beings and ancient thought is imbued with the notion of an incommensurability between their ways and ours. Plato gives this cliché a particular, meaningful turn in his Homeric quotation. Pteros disrupts our metrics in just the way that Eros deforms our lives. Meter, essentially, is an attempt to control words in time. We impose such control in the interests of beauty. But when Eros flashes into your life he brings his own standard of beauty and simply cancels out “all those proprieties and decorums whose beauty you once cherished” (252a).
Plato’s bit of botched epic verse epitomizes our human transaction with Eros. Its terms are wrenching. We may profit enlargement of meaning, by admitting Eros in his true godly form as Pteros, but only at the cost of the formal beauty of our line of verse. Reversing these terms we see a reflection of Lysias who, with the craft and calculation of a novelist, designs a formally perfect love affair that has no meaning at all.
Eros’ wings mark a critical difference between gods and men, for they defy human expression. Our words are too small, our rhythms too restrictive. But the true meaning of desire eludes our mortal grasp not only on the level of orthographic and metrical convention, that is, not only on the level of form. Even when we glimpse Eros in his divine version, even when a line of poetry gives us accidental access to the true pathos and aitia of desire, we do not necessarily catch on. For example, what does the poet of these two epic lines intend by the phrase “winggrowing necessity”? The translation is inept because the translator does not know what it means. This phrase ostensibly supplies us with a divine aitia for the true name of Eros. But whose are the wings and whose is the necessity? Does Eros have wings? Does Eros need wings? Does Eros cause others to have or to need wings? Does Eros need to cause others to have wings? Does Eros need to cause others to need to have wings? Various possibilities, not incompatible with one another, float out from the epic quotation. It is arguable that in their enhancing way the gods mean to imply all the possibilities at once when they use the name Pteros. But we cannot know that. As Sokrates says to his interlocutor in the Cratylus, when they are discussing this very question of divine names and their truth-value: “No doubt these are larger matters than you or I can figure out” (382b).
For a modern reader, prospects of figuring out the truth about Eros’ name are even bleaker than they were for Sokrates or for Plato or for Plato’s audience. We (modern readers) are the victims of a dubious textual tradition at this point in the Phaedrus. The manuscripts transmit three different readings of the adjective here rendered as “wing-growing.” Since the adjective is likely a Platonic invention, problems of transmission are not surprising, or insurmountable: ‘pterophutor’ (‘winggrowing’) emerges clearly as the most plausible reading. Yet our doubts about the text serve to confirm and sharpen Plato’s point, in a way he could not have predicted but might truly have appreciated. No matter what technologies we devise, the knowledge of Eros available to us is no clear or certain thing (cf. Phdr. 275c). Gods may know exactly what is meant by the name Pteros or by a phrase like “wing-growing necessity” but, in the end, we do not. We do our utmost to grasp the pathos of erotic experience as it soars through our lives, but the aitia folds itself away and disappears into the written words of Plato’s text.