th rd
3Y03E- December 16 and December 23
Symposium: Speeches
Phaedrus and Pausanius are the first two to make speeches about Eros.
Aristodemus was there, but never spoke. He was so mesmerized by this symposium that he
memorized it and would tell people. He told his friend Apollodorus, who told the person who
wrote this symposium for us.
Back to their speeches, they’re talking about the God Eros and making stuff up about him.
They’re using their own imagination to make it expressive.
Phaedrus
-was beautiful
-suggested to talk about Eros
-your body is inert. When you see a beautiful body it suggests there’s something that animates
it that’s beautiful (your souls- psyche).
-people reveal who they are when they’re talking about love.
Eros only occurs in the lover.
-It’s always the lover doing the extreme things and gestures, not the beloved.
-the beloved knows they have power over you, and so do you but you can’t do
anything about it.
-each speech about love reveals what they truly think about it.
-why does the beloved have to accept the love’s sexual favours to become virtuous? The
professor referred to this as “one-way sex”.
Three different ways for pederastic relations
1. Some societies are so afraid of this higher form of love that they pass a law saying no to
it.
2. Some societies pass a law saying yes to it. This is vulgar because it is based on ignorance.
3. Happens mostly in Athens where the law says no to the seduction of young boys, but
praises those who seduce them with words. (Doing it the right way= everyone forgives
you for breaking the law).
Posaneus:
-“love is above the law”
-no matter how lenient the law will be on pederasty, it will break. Aristophanes has the hiccups, so he asks Eryximachus for a cure and for him to go first.
Eryximachus
-Doctor-medical man-scientist
-there is an erotics in everything that exists
-the universe is made up of forces”
1. Gravity
2. Gravitational force
3. Electromagnetism
4. Weak force
-the universe can only exist if these 4 exist as they are now. If any of these changes, we go into
a void = explode.
Aristophanes
-He kind of criticizes everything that is said before
-made jokes and his speech was memorable for this, and for his hiccups.
-he tells a story about the origin of human beings
Story: Before we were the way we are now, we were all different. We were all spherical with 4
legs and 4 arms and 2 heads (2 faces), facing in different directions. There were 4 species of us
and they all had different male and female genitals. We all resembled Gods. We all lived on the
Earth and reproduced by dropping seeds into the Earth. Zeus punished us and cut us all in half:
right down the middle (more or less the way we are now). Everyone who was cut in half felt
that they were only half of something. They went around looking for their other half, and when
they found it, they clung onto each other and didn’t let go. They wanted to be together soul to
soul, not body to body (sexually). All of them started to die off because they were clinging to
each other very tightly. Zeus realized this and altered their genitals so that the place of
reproduction is now the womb. They lined up their genitals so they could reproduce in the
female body. Lesbians and homosexuals can’t do this, so they long for
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