I. The Triangle of Art: Commentary on Speeches IV through VII.
Come to read Aristophanes' and Agathon’s speeches as parts of a whole. Poetry's Answering contrasted with the Philosopher’s Questioning.
In Aristophanes’ speech, Love feels like a promise and as an ache or yearning for an original state. Actualized through caress, in the embrace and the moan, everything else is gibber-jabber and cope. Aristophanes’ constructs in his speech an Original Human, the Human-as-Wheel, grotesque and inhuman with two heads, four arms, and four legs. As I read Aristophanes description of the Total Human a thought occurred to me…perhaps this explains why we are drawn to "hitting it from the back"... we're recreating for a brief moment, our Original Form. Unseemly and disconcerting, a threat to the gods. For this reason Zeus and Apollo divide us. We are split entities, respectively, left with two legs, two arms, and one head forced to gaze at the site of our splitting. Still it could be worse.
Aristophanes warns that we should be pious. Should maintain the proper rites, preserve them, and transmit the correct teachings. Lest we run the risk of being sawed-in-half again. Transformed into a worm. It’s ‘everything is the same until suddenly it isn’t' and the ‘it isn’t’ isn’t always necessarily better. That we lack and we yearn and that is that. Incapable of willing things to improve, confined to performing sacrifices in order to try to keep things from getting worse. Perhaps one day Hephaestus will mend us back together. Knowing that what we want is to be fused together with our Beloved. The Soul made whole again. To live and die together.
For the Comedian, Love indicates a lack. One we can neither think nor f*ck our way out of.
After Aristophanes’ speech, Agathon’s. Struck by the similarities between Agathon the Tragedian’s eulogy to love and the Christian understanding of Love. Eros is for Agathon the God of all gods. He describes Eros as the youngest of the gods who is never old. Agathon’s Love is Absolutely Good and desires for there to be Good. Love is Beautiful and desires for there to be Beauty. Benevolent, incapable of harming others, bringing only good things. He describes Eros as nonviolent and gentle. Love is incompatible with injustice and evil. Being the master of passions he is temperate-moderate. Agathon’s Eros is crowned the King of the gods, all the gods are his subjects. Eros is the greatest artist, the inventor of all arts, imparting this genius on others. Eros is a poet and the author of poetry through others. Eros gives because how can you give to the Beloved what you don’t have. Eros conquers war being the savior of men.
“Thus Eros, in my opinion, Phaedrus, stands first, because he is the fairest and the best, and, after this, he is the cause for everyone else of the same sort of fair and good things. It occurs to me to say something in meter too, that he is the one who makes Peace among human beings, on the open sea calm And cloudlessness, the resting of winds and sleeping of care. He empties us of estrangement, he fills us with attachment; he arranges in all such gatherings as this our coming together with one another; in festivals, in dances, in sacrifices he proves himself a guide; furnishing gentleness, banishing wildness; loving giver of amity, no giver of enmity; gracious, good; spectacular to the wise, wonderful to the gods; enviable to the have-nots, desirable to the haves; father of luxury, splendor, glory, graces, yearning, and longing—caring for good ones, careless of bad ones; in toiling, in fearing, in longing, in speaking, the best governor, mariner, fellow warrior, and savior; the ornament of all gods and human beings, the fairest and best guide, whom every real man must follow hymning beautifully, and sharing the song Eros sings in charming the thought of all gods and human beings.”
Agathon provides the greatest eulogy to Love, to Eros. Noting that the previous speakers had only managed to describe the good that men have done under the influence of Love but didn’t touch upon Love himself, mistaking the gifts with the gift-giver. Agathon first sets out to provide a description of who Eros is, followed by a description of his character, concluding with a description of his deeds. For the Tragedian, Eros is Beauty. The Beautiful is what is Good is what is True. Love is Beauty, Goodness, and Truth.
Agathon’s is the only speech Socrates directly responds too, all the while implicitly containing the rest. Socrates’ Disclosure on Love insists upon disparity. Love is incomplete. The act of eulogizing, selects the good and discards the bad. For this reason it proves inadequate if what we seek to do is disclose Truth in its totality. Focusing too much on the good, might keep us from the full revelation of the Good. To focus on love’s plenty and to discard what love lacks, might keep us from the truthful revelation of Love. Socrates’ judges the content of Agathon’s disclosure of Love as philosophically inadequate, while nonetheless being adequate in its form.
The eulogy as a spoken hymn and the hymn as a sung eulogy, is the only kind of art permitted in Plato’s Ideal Republic. Truthful content should be, ideally, transmitted in a Beautiful form and what is Truthful should be recognized and exalted as Beautiful. Even if, like Socrates, the Truthful may not necessarily have a beautiful visage. The word eulogy in the present day evokes the funeral service. The eulogy as a memorial. Incanted to pacify a, potentially, intranquil spirit. Meant to console and cajole. Meant to sweeten and draw the favor of a god and/or to soothe them in their wrath and turmoil. At one point Agathon contrasts the lightness of Eros with the heaviness of Atë the goddess of misfortune who stomps on the skulls of men, almost as if to say that Eros feminized, Eros-lacking, is Misfortune. Eros wounded, is Nemesis. Agathon’s speech is an offering, offering to Love a positive content. Eros is complete. Eros’ desire, satiated.
For the Tragedian, Love is abundance. Beautiful and resonant is Agathon’s account of love. Especially when read in the context of play. In their drunkness and horny dialectics. Agathon is looking at all his friends and rivals, drinking, and laughing, and philosophizing, and he recognizes what this is. That this is Eros. That the Symposium is a Sphere, a Stage, a World. A Paradise. Generated by people who love one another. How can he not, in his joy, in this ecstasy, proclaim that One is All and All is One. That Love is One and Love is All and All is Love and Love is Good so All is, ultimately, Good. Agathon might as well have said; I know Love is God because I love you all and this moment, this present moment, to me… is Heaven. I know Love is God because Love is what has brought us all together.
What is absolutely grotesque and what is absolutely beautiful, becomes indistinguishable in its effect. Both petrify. Like a Gorgon’s gaze and like Agathon’s gorgeous speech. This understanding of love is what Socrates’ proceeds to challenge and in so doing marking the rupture between poetry and philosophy. Between the Pre-Socratic and the Post.
The Subject of Love and Love’s Object was revealed to Socrates by a woman. The Prophetess Diotima, the perfect sophist, who became famous in her time for having taught the Athenians the proper rites and sacrifices to ward off the misfortune of pestilence. She teaches that Eros is not a god but rather a daemon. An intermediary between the gods and men. That Eros is the child of Plenty and of Lack. That Love is in fact not beautiful or good or true, which is why love desires what is beautiful and good and true.
“In the first place he is always poor, and anything but tender and fair, as the many imagine him; and he is rough and squalid, and has no shoes, nor a house to dwell in; on the bare earth exposed he lies under the open heaven, in-the streets, or at the doors of houses, taking his rest; and like his mother he is always in distress. Like his father too, whom he also partly resembles, he is always plotting against the fair and good; he is bold, enterprising, strong, a mighty hunter, always weaving some intrigue or other, keen in the pursuit of wisdom, fertile in resources; a philosopher at all times, terrible as an enchanter, sorcerer, sophist. He is by nature neither mortal nor immortal, but alive and flourishing at one moment when he is in plenty, and dead at another moment, and again alive by reason of his father's nature. But that which is always flowing in is always flowing out, and so he is never in want and never in wealth; and, further, he is in a mean between ignorance and knowledge. The truth of the matter is this: No god is a philosopher or seeker after wisdom, for he is wise already; nor does any man who is wise seek after wisdom. Neither do the ignorant seek after Wisdom. For herein is the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself: he has no desire for that of which he feels no want."
‘But-who then, Diotima,’ I said, ‘are the lovers of wisdom, if they are neither the wise nor the foolish?’
‘A child may answer that question,’ she replied; ‘they are those who are in a mean between the two; Love is one of them. For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful; and therefore Love is also a philosopher: or lover of wisdom, and being a lover of wisdom is in a mean between the wise and the ignorant. And of this too his birth is the cause; for his father is wealthy and wise, and his mother poor and foolish. Such, my dear Socrates, is the nature of the spirit Love. The error in your conception of him was very natural, and as I imagine from what you say, has arisen out of a confusion of love and the beloved, which made you think that love was all beautiful. For the beloved is the truly beautiful, and delicate, and perfect, and blessed; but the principle of love is of another nature, and is such as I have described.”
What Love loves is Wisdom. Love loves the Soul. Soul is Good, and Beautiful, and True.
Diotima teaches Socrates that Eros is a Philosopher, the Lover of Wisdom. The poet as all craftsmen is too particular. In citing Diotima, we find Socrates as the only speaker who does not engage in the production and disclosure of Eros as a Self-Production. A process that sees the distinction between the Lover and the Beloved collapsed; Eros loves Love and in this self-love, Eros is imagined Whole, for himself in himself. In Plato’s narrative, if we resist the immediate ironic reading, every other speaker, engages in the production and disclosure of Eros. They’ve all contributed to the poetical production of Eros, constructing Love in their own image. All of them besides Socrates. Socrates is simply recognized without need for self-aggrandizement. Socrates doesn’t sell himself.
Does he realize what he’s doing? Does he realize that Diotima is describing him? Barefoot and poor and clever? Knowledgeable and ignorant. His ignorance is the precondition. With Plato’s Socrates it isn’t a bit. Socrates does not love Satyr-like Socrates, Socrates loves the Truth. He does not identify as a Wise Man or Sophist he is simply not content with his ignorance. He doesn’t charge people to hear him rant, he has no “higher” ambition in terms of the Polis and its immediate politics, and doesn’t claim that his teachings hold the keys to success and prosperity and good health which he is more than willing to provide. Socrates does not peddle or poetical produce Myths. He doesn’t provide a ready answer. He isn’t selling something and he isn’t some sorcerer attempting to shoot his soul out of his body and into the body of a younger influential aristocrat in order to gain power and escape his ugly visage and thousand-fold poverty.
Diotima also transmits to Socrates a teaching concerning love’s progressive movement, from Earth to Heaven. Love is an Initiatic force. The desire for Beauty is a progressive or ascendant force. Our Love of Beauty begets a contemplation of the Beautiful. Beginning with love for a particular embodiment of beauty, one body, that inspires beautiful speeches. This in turn begets an awareness of beauty in others, that there are other beautiful bodies, beauty is a common good, “it is great folly to not to believe that the beauty of all bodies is one and the same.” At this stage, the intensity of the Lover’s passion for the original Beloved’s body has diminished. There is a shift from Body to Soul. “So that even if someone who is decent in his soul has only a slight youthful charm, the lover must be content with it, and love and cherish him, and engender and seek such speeches as will make the young better.” The love of the soul or recognition of the beauty of souls leads in turn to the love of knowledge. Here Diotima emphasizes that the Lover is the one that educates the Beloved. The Love of Knowledge is pedagogical. It inspires many beautiful and magnificent speeches and thoughts. This turn away from the pettiness and use and particularity of the corporeal which makes one a “slave and petty calculator” constitutes a “…permanent turn to the vast open sea of the beautiful.” To love knowledge leads to the knowledge of beauty. The Love of Wisdom culminates in the Wisdom of Love, the river to the ocean.
In Diotima’s Eros as Philosopher, Socrates is revealed to be the Patron of the Erotes. Containing and issuing forth from him, a million little lovers inspiring others to love wisdom. The philosopher’s body like a pomegranate bursting. A daemon is a demigod, a hybrid, between gods and humanity. Perhaps like a mule the philosopher is sterile. Socrates’ descendants, his lineage will not inherit any power or wealth by virtue of being the descendants of Socrates, what is generative in philosophy is accidental. An emanation of philosophy’s erotic core. Capable of transcending the conventions of hereditary transmission, social class, property relations, etc… The philosophical lineage is a golden chain, it is Pneumatic, of a breath weaving through time and space, it is not of coarse blood and sem*n. The Philosopher’s Love is a Heroic Love. That does not beget royal houses, political matrimonies, situationships, and squabbles over succession (you’d think). The whole of Philosophy in a Lover’s Sigh in the turning inward provoked by unrequited love. At the highest peak, air cold and thin, he goons. This is not Common Gooning mind you. This is something Higher. Gooning over mountains. Gooning through the depths. The Philosopher’s blood and sem*n is rarefied. An arrow shot by an aerial daemon.
Socrates’ description of Eros reverberated through the firmament. Together with Aristophanes’ and Agathon’s, it produces a triangle of art, through which Alcibiades emerges unto the scene. Like an Avatar of the Worldly Eros triumphant. Not as vagabond but as the Poet’s fixation, a potential King. Aristophanes’ moves to make a comment after Socrates’ speech but is interrupted by the arrival of the dawn-ravished rosy-cheeked Alcibiades, rowdy and marvelous. Alcibiades whose golden shield depicts Eros armed with a Thunderbolt. Socrates’ speech had summoned this Avatar in his Hybrid Discontent. Drunk and reckless and beautiful. Doom-driven heroic Alcibiades. Object of the Eulogizers’ adoration. Crashes the event. He feigns surprise upon seeing Socrates, asks Socrates if Socrates is stalking him, despite practically crab-walking towards him, hips gyrating. He might be acting drunker than he actually is. He hunkers down on the sofa betwixt Socrates and Agathon. Socrates asks Agathon for his protection.
“The love I have of this human being has proved quite bothersome. For since the time that I first loved him, it is no longer possible for me to look at or converse with even one beauty; or else in jealousy and envy of me does amazing things, and abuses me and hardly keeps his hands off me. Take care lest he do something now, and do reconcile us; or if he tries to use force, defend me, since I really quake with fear at his madness and love of lovers.”
Alcibiades swears vengeance, promises to slap Socrates around while no one is looking, but respects the rules of Agathon’s house. Agathon’s response is to tell them to shut up and drink. After awhile of silent imbibing, Eryximachus goads Alcibiades into speak, lets him know about the earlier talks on love, invites Alcibiades to add something to it. Alcibiades again playfully attributes to Socrates his own qualities, “if I praise anything other than Socrates, Socrates gets jealous and beats me!” and Eryximachus without missing a beat, takes the bait, “so then praise Socrates!” And without a moments hesitation Alcibiades proceeds to do precisely that.
“If you insist…”
He starts off with a bit of negging. Noting that Socrates is hideous.
“What’s this? Isn’t he just like the statue of Silenus? […] It’s a Silenus sitting, his flute or his pipes in his hands, and it’s hollow. It’s split right down the middle, and inside it’s full of tiny statues of the gods. Now look at him again! Isn’t he also just like the satyr Marsyas?”
Rough Satyr-like Socrates who never wept. Incredible at holding his liquor, he outdrinks everyone but never gets sloppy drunk. Immune to fear and cold. Snubbed-nosed and hairy. His appearance signals to popular consensus signals a fundamentally uncivilized person. But with Socrates appearances prove deceiving. There is something else. Alcibiades has perceived this something and it has transformed him of all people into a lovesick wretch. Things don’t quite add up. Like his penis, Socrates’ heart is also enormous. He’d saved Alcibiades life once before during a battle and refused to receive any honors for it. Even in retreat Socrates is dignified.
“Know that he’s not at all concerned if someone is beautiful - and he holds this in such great contempt that no one would believe it - any more than if someone is rich or has any other honor of those deemed blessed by the multitude.”
Being very smart and very modest, a Master Dialectician. Imbued with a certain oriental mischievousness, Socrates claims to “know nothing.” But appears to know Alcibiades better than anyone else, up to and including, Alcibiades himself. Alcibiades admits to being wildly in love with the Satyr-like Sage. Admits to all kinds of undignified scheming. Admits to challenging Socrates to a nude wrestling match. Most people would’ve sold their mother into slavery for this sort of positive attention from Alcibiades but Socrates just wanted to wrestle. All of Alcibiades plots were foiled.
“Consequently, I did not know how nor did I have any resources whereby I could attract him. I knew well that - on all sides - he was far more invulnerable to money than Ajax was to iron; and even at that one point where I believed he could be taken, he had escaped me. So I was in a quandary; and enslaved by this human being as no one has been by anyone else, I wandered about in distraction.”
Alcibiades negs Socrates. And in his negging, reproduces Diotima’s description of Eros in his description of Socrates.
Socrates as Eroes had managed to enchant of all of people, Alcibiades. Socrates doesn’t know what to do with him. Suddenly everything has become very serious. Consequences have to be taken into consideration. Friends talking about love transforms into conspirators conspiring against the very foundations of Athens. Things get rather serious when we recall that Alcibiades is a wildly charismatic and popular aristocrat, a general. One full of passion and ambition. Yet here he is, enslaved by his love for a clever plebeian, an ugly one at that. Who speculates about things, who speculates about things that shouldn’t concern commoners, who confuses Athens for Sparta, who questions custom and ritual and the status-quo so much so that others, as Aristophanes points out in The Clouds, consider him godless. His only perceived use, is in teaching people how to lie well.. Yet they don’t learn how to lie well at all, instead their children learn how to question everything and in this questioning their worst irreverent tendencies are legitimate. Socrates’ provides the language needed for the youth of Athens to express their discontent.
The Symposium concludes with the sudden intrusion of random revelers. There is a great confusion, the wine flows, philosophy enters new uncharted territories. Aristodemus passes out. Regaining a glimmer of consciousness, he finds that most of the original participants where either passed out in unseemly positions or had left, all besides Socrates, Agathon, and Aristophanes. Who continued drinking and philosophizing. Aristophanes nodding off on Agathon’s shoulder. Agathon with one eye noticeably larger than the other nodding along to Socrates’ rants. Socrates for his part attempts to convince the Ancestors of the Harlequin and Pierrot that the Genius of Comedy and the Genius of Tragedy are the same and that the true master of the one is a master of the other. “To this they were constrained to assent, being drowsy, and not quite following the argument.” Eventually they both knock out and Socrates’ tucks them in, planting a kiss on both their foreheads before departing.
II. Aristophanes: Envious?
Aristophanes’ The Clouds is referenced by Alcibiades when he puckishly conjures up the play’s description of Socrates, “there you might see him, Aristophanes, as you describe, just as he is in the streets of Athens, stalking like a pelican, and rolling his eyes, calmly contemplating enemies as well as friends, and making very intelligible to anybody, even from a distance, that whoever attacked him would be likely to meet with a stout resistance…”
Aristophanes’ caricature of Socrates in The Clouds would be repurposed by dumber people. Transformed into the charges levied against him during the trial that would result in his “suicide”. Yet I can’t help but read it as being, at the same time, the Philosopher’s greatest defense. Better to be laughed at than slaughtered. Safer to not be taken seriously than to be taken too seriously. “Look at this f*cking idiot. Isn’t it great that we have such a colorful and ridiculous character in our midst.” From this perspective The Clouds is damage control, meant to assuage growing anxieties surrounding the personage of Socrates and his influence. The protagonist of the play, Strepsiades is dealing with the debts accrued by his spoiled dandy son’s gambling habit, one encouraged by the boy’s aristocratic mother. Strepsiades tries to get his kid to join Socrates’ thinkery, imagining that doing so would equip his son with the rhetorical skills needed to convincingly argue away the family’s debt in court. The son doesn’t want to join the thinkery seeing it as a lame place full of nerds, would rather exercise and stunt in the gymnasium. So Strepsiades joins in his stead. After the initiation he quickly comes to the realization that Socrates is full of sh*t and that sophistry amounts to nothing more than masturbating under a blanket. Socrates catches him literalizing the revelation and expels him. This leads Strepsiades to put pressure on his kid. When the son learns that being a silver-tongued corrupt piece of sh*t who relativizes everything and holds nothing sacred guarantees fame and success in Athens, and that a silver-tongued corrupt piece of sh*t is precisely what Socrates teaches you to be, he enthusiastically volunteers to join the thinkery. After some time has passed, the son returns home a pale pseud. Immediately wielding everything he learned from Socrates to punish his parents. Philosophically justifying beating his dad before going off to concoct a valid argument for why it’s okay for him to beat his mom. Strepsiades blames Socrates and the play ends with him rounding up his servants and setting Socrates’ thinkery on fire. Chasing after the fleeing students…
Read somewhere that Plato’s Symposium is in part a response to Aristophanes' play The Frogs. In it the god Dionysus laments the declining quality of Tragedy in Athens and proceeds to travels to the underworld in order to resurrect one of the past greats. Eventually Dionysus, having managed to successfully infiltrate the underworld, assumes the position of judge in a competition between the tragedians Euripides and Aeschylus. The winner of the contest would be brought back to the world of the living in order to set things right. This sets the stage for a contest between the Old Tragedy as represented by Aeschylus and the New Tragedy represented by Euripides. As a playwright Euripides influenced by Socratism.
Dionysus’ final verdict comes down to a single question, “Should the exiled Alcibiades be permitted to return to Athens?” Euripides disavows Alcibiades, proceeding to ramble in a most ambiguous manner, failing to provide a conclusive answer or judgment. Aeschylus in contrast immediately answers yes, Alcibiades should be forgiven and allowed to return to Athens, and with this Dionysus declares him the winner. What Aristophanes appears to be judging about Socratism, is that in its rambling questioning, in its negativity… it riles up only to disavow. It is based on the disavowal. We might further distend this and say that Socratism is premised upon Socrates’ seduction of Alcibiades and the rejection of Alcibiades that followed. Aristophanes sees this disavowal infecting Poetry and the Theater. To subvert Poetry and Theater was to subvert the Mysteries. Infecting the production of morals, of values, of heroes and gods.
Viewed in this light the whole of Plato’s Symposium is meant to refute Aristophanes while simultaneously incorporating him. What makes Socrates the “winner” is that he is recognized by others. Twice confirmed. There is Diotima’s recognition and then by Alcibiades. There is a third. Socrates is thrice declared someone worth loving. Every figure which recognizes Socrates is a figure Aristophanes would have held in high regard. A prophetess, a hero, and a god.
We might ask, was it envy that motivated Aristophanes’ critique of Socrates and Socratism? Aristophanes’ ugliness mirrors an ugliness within Socrates himself, if we read Socrates’ rejection of Alcibiades as having been born out of an attempt at self-preservation. Necessity.
Nice resonance with Girard’s Mimetic Theory. Who we model is neither the idealized version of our Self-as-Object (the projected object-choice) or the Beloved. Rather we model our Rival. With the potential for a most intimate understanding. Recognition remains.
III. Aristophanes and the Hidden God
Aristophanes opens his speech by letting everybody present know that they don’t know the truth about love. He lets them know that despite his status as a comedian, his speech in nothing to laugh about. He is there to set the record straight so don’t laugh. They have in fact failed to understand the power of Love.
“Mankind, he said, judging by their neglect of him, have never, as I think, at all understood the power of Love. For if they had understood him they would surely have built noble temples and altars, and offered solemn sacrifices in his honour; but this is not done, and most certainly ought to be done: since of all the gods, he is the best friend of men, the helper and the healer of the ills which are the great impediment to the happiness of the race. I will try to describe his power to you, and you shall teach the rest of the world what I am teaching you.”
If Humanity understood Love we would all worship it. That’s the obvious reading. Eros is himself a deity, so if people truly understood the deity Eros, they would all worship Eros and Eros alone. This reading is very much in keeping with my prior thesis concerning the complimentary nature of Agathon and Aristophanes’ speech. Yet an interesting (“mis”)reading emerges. About a year ago I was made privy to it, believe the one who made it might have been Chinese, but I can’t be certain and I haven’t been able to find it since. This reading seemingly forgets the Poet’s deification of Love or Eros. Instead the being to whom we surely would have “…built noble temples and altars, and offered solemn sacrifices in his honour…” if we only understood, is read as a deity presiding over Eros. Of whom Eros is thought of as an attendant. This read posits that there is a hidden god in Aristophanes’ speech, a patron of Eros. This hidden and unnamed Lover. Already it was established, a given, that Eros is part of Aphrodite’s court, her entourage. Aphrodite is Eros’ Matron. In other myths Venus is explicitly Cupid’s mother. Recall in Pausanias’ speech, the second speech of the Symposium, Eros is revealed as two, as Erotes based on the existence of two Aphrodite, one celestial and the other terrestrial. According to the great pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles. Aphrodite the goddess of love and beauty, fashioned the eye.
“wrought them with the dowels of love
when they first grew together in the devices of Kupris [Aphrodite]
As when someone planning a journey prepared a lamp,
the gleam of the blazing fire through the wintry night,
and fastened linen screens against all kinds of breezes,
which scatter the wind of the blowing breezes
but the light leapt outwards, as much of it as was finer,
and shone with its tireless beams across the threshold;
in this way [Aphrodite] gave birth to the rounded pupil,
primeval fire crowded in the membranes and in the fine linens.
And they covered over the depths of the circumfluent water
and sent forth fire, as much of it as was finer.”
The goddess of love and beauty shaped our eyes so that we might behold what is beautiful and what is lovely. To spot the ripe fruit, to witness my lover’s face flushed, that my own cheeks should redden with activity and all manner of personal intimacies. To recognize that we are the only animals that blush.
Aphrodite is anything but hidden in relation to Eros. Though perhaps this hidden god, is hidden in plain sight within Aristophanes? Or perhaps there is more than one.
First, Aphrodites’ husband, Hephaestus who appears at the end of the speech as a compassionate force offering to mend us back to our original state. To die as we should.
“If Hephaestus with his tools were to stand over them as they lay in the same place and were to ask, ‘What is it that you want, human beings, to get for yourselves from one another?’ - and if in their perplexity he were to ask them again, ‘Is it this you desire, to be with one another in the very same place, as much as is possible, and not to leave one another night and day? For if you desire that, I am willing [192e] to fuse you and make you grow together into the same thing, so that - though two - you would be one; and as long as you lived, you would both live together just as though you were one; and when you died, there again in Hades you would be dead together as one instead of as two.”
Aristophanes establishes a bond between Hephaestus the Blacksmith and Eros. That the Lover, hidden away from sight, is the craftsman. The Ideal Lover, unnamed by Aristophanes, is the Artist. Perceived of by the leisurely as ugly, crippled, and cucked. They don’t have time to appreciate the finer things in life, they don’t have time and independence to appreciate thought and conversation amongst friends and lovers. They have no time to breath-together, to conspire, to dream of ideal republics and revolutions. Philosophy in myriad ways defines itself and its insights, its vision of the World and of the good life, in opposition to the burgeoning class of artisans and merchants emerging within the Polis. To the artisan and merchant confined to the workshop and the market. Bonded to techné. To Art. Their lives dedicated to the particularities of their given trade or craft. Rely on some to source the raw materials used in their craft and on others to purchase the commodities they’ve produced. The distinction and the rivalry reveals the dependence.
The third speaker, Eryximachus the Physician connects health, morality, erotics, and divination,
“For impiety as a whole is won’t arise if one does not gratify the decent Eros and honor and venerate him in every deed, but instead gratifies and honors the other one, in matters that concern parents, both living and dead, and gods. And so it is, accordingly, that divination is charged with the overseeing and healing of lovers; and divination, in turn, is the craftsman of friendship between gods and human beings, since it has expert knowledge of human erotics, as far as erotics has to do with sacred law and piety.”
As developed in the second speech of the Symposium, Love is two. The higher or celestial form of love which draws us towards the contemplation of the higher forms. The lower or earthly form of Love draws us towards carnality and material objects, namely bodies. One pulls towards the mind while the other pulls towards touch. Both induce in the lover a kind of frenzy. Love intoxicates. These two Eros personified, erotes are situated within the lover as two daemons. The higher called good spirit (eudaemon or kalodaemon) and the lower called bad spirit (kakodaemon). Good or clean and bad or unclean but perhaps also hot and cold. Eryximachus posits that the role of the oracle is to help the lover align with this good daemon, with this higher form of love and with maintaining the friendship between gods and humans. Sacred laws and piety.
The Healer-Prophetess Diotima through Socrates teaches that all craftsmanship is a kind of poetry. In so far as they are related to poesies or making/shaping/crafting,
“After all, everything that is responsible for creating something out of nothing is a kind of poetry, and so all the creations of every craft and profession are themselves a kind of poetry, and everyone who practices a craft is a poet.”
Continuing Plato’s Socrates’ Diotima’s exposition on Eros, she notes the desire for immortality that motivates mortal beings. The lower or animalist expression of this desire manifested through copulation and reproduction. The higher expression begets a higher form of creation. Sexual coupling is incidental to this. Non-procreative and wasteful from the perspective of the lower-kind. Breaking with Pausanias’ explicit celebration of the inherent superiority of hom*oerotic coupling over heteroerotic matrimony (no division between erotics and “romantics” at the time of the Symposiums composition, romantic and hom*osexual are latter-day terms, Eros is Eros)… there is a further shift, base animal sexuality between whoever, is understood to be a baser manifestation of Eros (Eros as Will to Life). Love, or the appreciation and attraction to Beauty, begins with the recognition of these corporeal forms but as with all things we grow old. Love cannot be reduced to procreative or non-procreative sexual acts. Just as seduction is not synonymous with sex, nor does seduction guarantee a life of devotion. Devotion emerges passionate and prideful and is tempered in time. Eros pins Pan, Chronos clips Eros’ wings. And yet it is a moment and vital one, there is no assumption that one can simply think passed this natural desire. Beauty must come to be recognized through the body to the soul. [Renaissance commentators would be careful to distinguish this, from wasteful non-procreative forms of sexuality. Judging onanism, sodomy, and abortion as three manifestations of the same fundamental sin, an affront against life, this was the Latin and Christian moral standards of their time.] Diotima ascribes this higher expression of Love and creativity to the poets,
“Therefore, those of this sort maintain a greater association and firmer friendship with one another than do those who have children in common, because the children they share in common are more beautiful and more immortal. And everyone would choose to have for himself children like these rather than the human kind; and if one looks at Homer, Hesiod, and the other good poets, one envies them: what offspring of themselves they have left behind! For as these offspring are in their own right immortal, they supply the poets with immortal fame and memory.”
In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel touches upon the etymological root of Poetry as Poesis or “making” goes so far as to say that Homer and Hesiod were the ones who gave the Greeks their gods. In the Classical-Apollonian or Grecian-Hellenic world the poets were prophets.
Morality is the answer given to the question of how you should relate to others, a social standard. Constantly reasserting the given distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, high and low. Morality is concerned with how human’s should go about interacting with one another and the world. There is a correct way and there is an incorrect way. All morality is conventional morality, morality cannot by definition be unconventional, if something is not conventionally moral then it is instead either amoral or immoral. A distortion, a subversion, or contamination by some alien presence. Morality preserves and is an adhesive. Whilst immorality decays and acts as a solvent. Morality is piety and immorality is impiety. To promote impiety is to promote immorality is to promote the decay and eventual collapse of your own civilization. Mired in mortal condition. We are presupposing universal or transcendental values. Now what happens if the pious moral actor comes to be considered an eccentric or a fool or an extremist by the compromised majority during times of societal decay, if they’re a moral person they actually preserve, defend, and transmit the authentic founding values (and by extension, the greatness) of their people to future generations. One day a god will arrive and set matters straight. But does it really continue to be morality? Within the community of people or social strata who maintain it, yes. It’s the standard by which they relate, maintain proper relations, with one another. What of the individual outside this community of the elect? When you have to interact with others living an inauthentic existence or one which is radically antithetical to your own and who consider those who uphold the authentic mode of existence something that must be totally eradicated from their profoundly corrupted society? These people call good evil and evil good. Where everyone is sick, illness gets conflated with good health. While good health gets called an illness. Their immorality gets called conventional morality, while your genuine morality gets called immorality. So I guess you’re immoral.
Hegel characterizes the Classical Hero as an entity, “connected with his entire willing, acting, and achieving, so he also takes undivided responsibility for whatever consequences arise from his actions.” As I’d written earlier with the Pre-Socratics and with the Poets we already find the break with the Asiatic expressed through the solid differentiation between the Master-Citizen as a type and the Slave-Barbarian as another. It is in the poetic recollection of the Master-Citizen, of the Aner, that we find the figure of the Hero as Exemplar Individual. Separate but not alienated, at least not in the way alienation is understood philosophically. The Hero is naïve, is innocent, and in this simplicity is good, even when they engage in acts of trickery and acts of great brutality and cruelty. The Hero gets what they want because they can and if they can’t they swear revenge and try again and perhaps end up dying in the process, or they simply move on, imposing themselves somewhere else. They, and by extension we, exist as a source of entertainment for the gods and there is in fact a certain reciprocity in this.
The morality of the Homeric Epic is the poet’s morality or perhaps the poet’s perversion. The Hero (and Monsters) emerge from the Molten Virtual. Nomos or Law has yet to solidify. The time of Heroes is the time of lawlessness. The Heroic Individual, inconsolable in isolation, in his fury he impresses his authority over and into the World. The Ideal solidifying into their Person. Their Person is the actualization of the Ideal. We admire the sculpture of the Hero, it conveys a great beauty, the miraculous revelation by the spirit of the spirit through an image fashioned and sculpted from inorganic matter into the idealized shape. The phantasmic given sensuous expression. Poetry though lacking such an obvious visual expression, flourishes precisely thanks to this deficiency, the lack is a wellspring. It is through this lack that Imagination illuminates and animates. Revealing motives, and movement, feelings, and thought. Poetry is the medium through which we pour our spirit into and inhabit the sculpture. It is a Transference of Consciousness. This happens; a seed shoots out, it might land on the surface and germinate, the vines spread, one-hundred eyes blossom. What are those hundred-eyes looking at? What can they not see?
Who reveals this? What is the Greek Ideal? I posit that it was neither Aristophanes, nor Agathon, nor Socrates. In the Symposium it was the very first speaker. The one who initiated the Contest. Phaedrus who is lovely. The fickle beloved. He does this when he notes that the greatness of love is that it inspires lovers to accept their doom. To die for their beloved. To die gloriously.
Willing, like Achilles, to abandon not merely his life, but his other social relations. Achilles whose commitment to avenging his lover had become his sole motive. A desire so powerful that for a brief moment the gods themselves had had to intervene to make sure he wouldn’t drastically change the story by directly assaulting Troy and killing everyone within the city walls single-handedly. In the same manner his bereavement threatened the tapestry of fate, it strengthened and actualized it, his doom now inevitable. Recall that Achilles is moved to sympathize with King Priam, weeping, he is reminded of his own elderly father, Peleus, he sees in Priam’s grief the grief of his own father.
Phaedrus then goes on to note a particular ambiguity, a contradiction he doesn’t appear properly equipped to parse through but which he, in confidence, nonetheless articulates. Achilles’ couldn’t have possibly been Patroclus’ lover, but rather, he was Patroclus’ beloved. Meaning the Object of Patroclus’ affections and devotions. Achilles was younger (unbearded), was the younger partner in the relationship, and was the most beautiful of the heroes. How could Achilles, the most beautiful of the heroes, love anyone? How could he be anything other than the beloved? Here Phaedrus locates the exemplary nature of Achilles. Why Achilles is exalted by the gods, above Alcestis and Orpheus. It’s a given for Phaedrus that the Lover, who is under a state of divine possession by Eros, should in their ecstasy commit themselves to acts of reckless devotion. Eros being the primordial cosmic force, the cosmogonic force, that compels us to advance, to reach out, to expand, to embrace… It doesn’t come as a surprise that the lover in devotion to the beloved should perform great feats. It is surprising when the one who is the Object of Love, should return the favor in kind. This is what the gods find miraculous, what they view as glorious, as worthy of eulogies and apotheosis. It is a mystery that Achilles who is truly without equal, should reciprocate the affection and devotion of Patroclus, that Patroclus should become the eidola that allows Achilles to fully embrace his doom. The exemplary lover then appears to be the Beloved-as-Lover. How is it that one seemingly worthy of love and praise can be moved to sacrifice themselves for another who, at face value, is unworthy of it? After all gods don’t make sacrifices for mortals, mortals make sacrifices to the gods. That, from the mytho-poetical perspective, is humanity’s raison d'être. Reciprocity is not a given in the case of the gods who can have favorite humans but cannot truly love us as a lover loves his beloved… right?
Dying gloriously for the one you love. That's it. Living gloriously for the one you love. Fully. Truly being alive. Striving for excellence. To be beautiful and wise and clever. The figure of Achilles emerges in the heat Patroclus' inspiration. The historical particularities of the customs from which it arises, gives way to something unbound from the historically particular and reveals something Universal. It's something that transcends history itself.
Doom-driven lover redeem Humanity! Therein lies the importance of an eye capable of differentiating the High from the Low.
Maybe. Achilles was just using his beloved as an excuse. The reality was that he was terrified of growing old. Of not dying in battle. That's understandable. Still in my feminine cruelty I would like to see them grow old.
The heroes and gods brought-forth by the poet are not Stoic. They do not grin and bear it and suffer with dignity. They do not accept a death that they perceive as being unbecoming of their status. Achilles’ cries out to the gods in panicked indignation as he’s throttled by a river god. If he must die let it be at the hands of Hector. Earlier he curses his fellow Achaeans and delights in their losses, seething over Agammenon’s flex. None of these heroes would fight and die if they weren’t materially rewarded, glorified, and eulogized.
On Greece, Heidegger writes in On the Question of Technology,
“In Greece, at the outset of the destining of the West, the arts soared to the supreme height of the revealing granted them. They brought the presence [Gegenwart] of the gods, brought the dialogue of divine and human destinings, to radiance. And art was simply called techne. It was a single manifold revealing. It was pious, promos, i.e., yielding to the holding-sway and safekeeping of truth.
The arts were not derived from the artistic. Art works were not enjoyed aesthetically. Art was not a sector of cultural activity.”
Greece here is a site of cosmogenesis or world-birthing. Greece-as-Origin emerges as a space that exists independent of the study or contemplation or criticism of the beautiful or beauty enframed and confined to the museum or the mausoleum. Heidegger sees in the Greek the revelation of and through poesis, crafting/poetry. Techne-Art is revelatory. In the process Heidegger refers to as “bringing-forth”, the Greek Mode of Creativity per Aristotle, all four Causes conspire towards, or invest in, the revelation. The material, formal, final, and efficient causes.
“For centuries philosophy has taught that there are four causes: (1) the causa materialis, the material, the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made; (2) the causa formalis, the form, the shape into which the material enters; (3) the causa finalis, the end, for example, the sacrificial rite in relation to which the chalice required is determined as to its form and matter; (4) the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, in this instance, the silversmith. What technology is, when represented as a means, discloses itself when we trace instrumentality back to fourfold causality.”
It is not so much that poets “invent” the gods. That view stems from a modern nihilism snagged in the monotonic and the ironical narrative of progress which views the human in service to itself and everything surrounding the human as being defined primarily by its utility or function. Is the poet an idol-maker breathing into the idol, animating? Transmitting through air and spit and blood, a divine radiation into the fetish-receptacle. Is the poet inventing in order to organize and control? Or is the poet engaged in a revelatory process. Bringing-forth the gods, facilitating, recognizing, and exalting the hybrids. There is a split intimated. One concretized by Christ’s Nativity and Passion. The presence of two times. One Mythic and the other Historical. For now it’s worth noting that situated alongside the Stoic and the Cynic, is the Skeptic. Who points out that the so-called god is really just a sock-puppet.
Aristophanes’ burps. Love intoxicates.
Perhaps Eros’ hidden patron deity is in fact Dionysus. Patron of intoxication, the festival, and the theater. Things become very interesting when we notice how Plato’s Symposium mirrors The Frogs. Alcibiades revealed here, not as an Avatar of Eros, but rather Eros’ biggest fan and patron deity. Alcibiades as Dionysus, the Patron of Theater. And Alcibiades-Dionysus proclaims Socrates his Beloved. And Alcibiades-Dionysus is Aristophanes’ Beloved and Ideal Lover. It’s perhaps for this reason that Aristophanes judges Socrates an inadequate teacher, unworthy of Alcibiades’ love and attention. Green with envy. My Alcibiades please stay, Socrates does not love you like I love you. How could he? If everything he teaches seeks to ruin what is good about Alcibiades? Socrates the Apostate Poet, a traitorous satyr. Dionysus won’t you judge him so?
Socrates might be wise, he might be uncanny, he might be vexing and daemonic, but he isn’t particularly cunning. If forced to plot and strategize he’ll plot and strategize but will ultimately be outmaneuvered by sharper, more ruthless, political opponents. This would, with retrospect, be narrativized as a choice. Socrates’ weakness transformed into a strength. Plato’s revisionism serves to convey the sentiment that Socrates’ choice was the correct one, that in choosing to die rather than pollute himself or run away, Socrates’ is vindicated in his uncanniness and in his principles. At the decisive moment Socrates’ blinked and in so doing philosophy found itself confined to the realm of speculation and pedagogy. Socrates died and philosophy remained, a consolation for the lovelorn, the perplexed, and the doomed. The Philosopher then emerges as an anomaly, like a daemon, a hybrid. The demigod of the Tragedy and the drunken satyr of the Comedy. Between the Master-Citizen of the City and the Slave-Barbarian of the Country. Like Eros, a child of Prosperity and of Lack. It is the unhappiness of this Split-Consciousness that allows the prospective philosopher to begin to contemplate the Ideal. Philosophy is born from a state of defeat, of the one who is ravaged rather than the one that ravages, and of the experience of unrequited love. The potential philosopher is one who is forced to turn inward, whose creative and vital energies are swallowed up into their person. Philosophy is fueled by ressentiment and the Philosopher’s Morality is the Morality of Slaves. The Dialectic is Slave Morality. Womanly. The Classical Poet’s Hero is not a Stoic.
Socrates’ questioning of the Human Inhumanity of the Ancestral gods is experienced as a kind of rejection, a rejection of Inhumane Humanity itself. The Greek Cosmos of the pagan imagination with its fundamental inequality or unevenness. Essentially deviant. An Anomalous Cosmos emerging from the erotic radiations emanating from a great wound. The once sovereign Ouranos’ blood cascades into the ocean, sea foam, and from the foam Aphrodite and from Aphrodite the eyes and our reason for them. Conquest and poetry and sacrifice. The gods do not forgive or as James Hillman writes in Re-visioning Psychology, they…”forgive little and rarely. Aphrodite’s love does not forget. She lays her claim on those who forget her, she retaliates through her relatives, the Furies, who - like the return of the repressed, as they are called in psychoanalysis - forget nothing. The Gods want to be remembered, and they do not ask forgiveness for their havoc, so that their havoc is also remembered.”
Hegel locates the End of Classical Art in the development of New Comedy and the Roman Satire. The New Attic Comedy as the express embodiment of this decline in Hellenic Civilization, remember that for Hegel, the end of a given period of art and civilization is marked by laughter and irreverence, not grief or lamentation, laughter conceals within itself the lamentation, disillusionment, but also the development of the new expression and a redeeming and situating of the prior in its relation to what comes after. “The realization of an end is at the same time the end’s own destruction.” From Tragedy to Farce.
The New Comedy with its emphasis on the lives and affairs of humans, of the common man moving through society and their social relations. Is markedly ‘secular’ and ‘realist’ compared to previous fantastical modes. The supernatural and heroic no longer visibly a part of the Stage-World. Just normal people having a normal one when suddenly hijinks ensue, lessons are learned, the prior order is reestablished and normal people continue having a normal one. Personal drama overcomes public affairs. In Nietzschean terms, contemplation is replaced by thinking and ecstasy is replaced by feeling. This movement is interesting to contemplate. In it Nietzsche sees the death of Tragedy (for him the perfect hybrid of the Apollonian-Contemplative and the Dionysian-Ecstatic). Without the gods there can be no tragedy, the gods beget the tragic. If people are simply people and there are no gods and demigods or daemons or heroes. What remains? Humans and their discourse and their dramas? What of the Underworld?
Having mentioned Hephaestus and Dionysus. Let us recall a curious fragment by Heracl*tus who observes that Dionysus and Hades are the same god. Here we come to Dionysus with his back-turned to the viewer. Dionysus enthroned in the depths. Hades intoxicated and forgetful returning to his place. Perhaps the hidden patron of Eros is the hidden god of the Greeks. Who passes judgment on the shades of the dead and situates them in their proper place within his kingdom.
Phaedrus in his speech elevates Achilles above Orpheus who is, in Phaedrus’ Youthfulness, condemned a coward. After all, Orpheus turned. Having gone through all that effort. He turned inches away from the exit. Perhaps he thought it better for his career that Eurydice remain a ghost… Was he so in love with his grief? With her inspiration? That he would exercise so little self-control. If the urge to reunite with her was so powerful, powerful enough to sing his way through the Underworld, and powerful enough to self-sabotage in the final stretch… then how come Orpheus didn’t just kill himself immediately after Eurydice succumbed to the serpent’s venom? Love and in love, loyalty. To embrace and be intoxicated in love, to abandon oneself in it and refuse to betray it and in this youthful intoxication to not even consider the possibility. There are no alternatives. The future is canceled. The lover who truly loves his beloved lovingly embraces his doom. This is the key to glory.
Eros is Anomalous. It is Daemonic. Mutagenic. It makes Heroes. All Heroes, as all Philosophers, are Hybrids. Spiritual Mischlings and Mulattoes. Gods and monsters. Heroic Love is a Universal Love because it is, in the face of mere life, an anomaly. Anomalous it serves no tidy "utilitarian" biological/procreative purpose, actively subverting or transcending evolutionary or economic explanation. It both subverts, transcends, and informs self-interest. To love someone so much, so very much, that you would like nothing more than to die besides them. To die by your side well the pleasure, the privilege, is mine.
Like Hegel we recognize in Achilles the Greek Ideal which is the Ideal of Youth realized poetically, the Doom-Driven Lover. The historical realization of this Greek Ideal, again like Hegel, we might recognize in the person of Alexander the Great. Plato’s disciple Aristotle was Alexander's teacher. The knowledge and critique of this Ideal was transmitted to both Alexander and Hephaestion. Where Achilles could avenge Patroclus by killing Hector and in so doing ensuring his own death and reunion with Patroclus… How could Alexander avenge Hephaestion? By killing the physician? The expectation and the reality of the Ideal refracted. Alexander the Great did not immediately kill himself after the death of Hephaestion, as perhaps a Phaedrus or a Pausanias in their youthfulness would have sentimentally lauded as the only adequate response for a hero put in such an unfortunate position. Hephaestion died and Alexander having conquered Egypt, relied upon the Apotheotic (God-Making) technologies of Khemia to insure the deification of his lover. That they might be entombed together forever. Hand-in-hand they walk into the Western Lands, as equals.
What is the Human? What is Anthropoi?
….
Diotima the Prophetess who had gained great notoriety after saving the City of Athens through the reception and performance of the correct or effective sacrificial rites.
Over the course of my studies I've found myself consulting time and again to The Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Agrippa, in the chapter Of sacrifices and oblations, and their kinds and manners we find myriad of examples of sacrificial practices documented and reflected upon.
"There was in times past amongst the gentiles the sacrifice of expiation, by the which cities were purged from famine, pestilence, or some horrible calamity; whose rites were to search out the most wicked man in that city, and to lead him to the place appointed carrying in his hands a cheese and wafers and dry figs; afterwards to whip him seven times with rods, and then to burn him to ashes with the same rods, and to cast the ashes into the sea; of these Lycophron and Hipponax make mention; neither doth Philostratus relate things much different from these, concerning Apollonius of Tyana while he chased away the pestilence from Ephesus."
I wonder if the prophetess Diotima did anything of the sort in order to appease and expel the plague that had drifted into Athens. Perhaps Socrates had been offered up without his knowing. Coy, he quotes Diotima's description of Eros as Philosopher. Not realizing that Diotima had marked him for death. She recognized Socrates, identified him as the sacrifice needed to save the City-State. A child of plenty and of lack, barefoot daemon, exemplar, head of the table, rugged and pagan and eloquent. Never drunk. Shameless. Always drinking but never drunk. Always with his heads in clouds his bare feet on the earth. The most wicked man of Athens. The most holy man. A great freak. One must consider the possibility that Diotima's recognition, as is often the case with a woman’s affection, is a ruinous omen.
Did Socrates commit suicide? Was he murdered? Was Socrates martyred? Insisting upon the truth. Death before compromise or exile. Socrates chose to drink hemlock rather than escape into exile. An event set in motion by Alcibiades’ actions. Alcibiades proved to be Socrates’ Doom. Reminiscent of how Patroclus was Achilles’ the difference being that in his rejection of Alcibiades he embraces his doom. Embraces Alcibiades. Being the only one who truly Loves him.
Socrates is judged the Ideal Eroes. Judged to be someone worth loving and worth being loved by. Judge by-and-in his Doom.
Recalling that Eros is a daemon and daemons are intermediaries and messengers. We might locate another patron for our Eros in the divine personage of Hermes the patron of messenger. Like Hermes, Eros is described by Diotima as a magician, a trickster, and a bird-catcher or seducer. After all wasn’t it Hermes who served as arbitrator in the myth of Eros and Psyche? Who pacified Aphrodites’ jealousy and concern, and insured a happy ending to the myth. Hermes was also the one tasked with helping Zeus rescue his mortal lover Io after she’d been transmogrified into a cow and taken by Hera in her jealousy. Hera set the All-Seeing Argus to guard Io, leaving Hermes little choice but to slay him. He did this by lulling the guardian of Hera’s livestock to sleep. Disguised as a shepherd he first won the bored giant’s trust by promising to entertain him with stories and music, from there he began incanting charms in the form of boring stories while playing the pipes, till one by one all of Argus’ one-hundred eyes closed. It was in this somnambular state that Hermes slew the watchmen. The first divine murder to occur after the Titanomachy. Allowing Zeus to free Io the ancestress of Heracles. Demanding justice, Hera put Hermes on trial, calling hundreds of lesser gods to serve as a jury. With each god tasked with tossing a pebble at the feet of the one they considered to be in the right. Hermes made his case, with such charisma and persuasiveness, that by the end of the trial he was buried up to his neck in rocks.
Hera grieves the loss of her giant. The Peaco*ck comes into existence. Beauty arising as an unintended consequence of sorcery and of violence. The Greeks attributed to Hermes’ violence and cunning; the peaco*ck, the cairn, and the lyre.
Something curious happens to Hermes mirroring the transformation of the Greek Ideal of Youth. In Renaissance Europe, Hermes would come to be envisioned as an Old Sage, understood to be the Ancestral Patriarch of Philosophy. The head of a lineage of Philosophers running parallel to the Abrahamic Patriarchal lineage. Hermes the Thrice-Great.
[To be Continued: Excursion, the Thrice-Great Hermes]
