Pausanias' speech in Plato's Symposium

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jeidsath
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Pausanias' speech in Plato's Symposium

Post by jeidsath »

This section of Pausanias' speech in the Symposium stumped me. 184d,e
ὅταν γὰρ εἰς τὸ αὐτὸ ἔλθωσιν ἐραστής τε καὶ παιδικά, νόμον ἔχων ἑκάτερος, ὁ μὲν χαρισαμένοις παιδικοῖς ὑπηρετῶν ὁτιοῦν δικαίως ἂν ὑπηρετεῖν, ὁ δὲ τῷ ποιοῦντι αὐτὸν σοφόν τε καὶ ἀγαθὸν δικαίως αὖ ὁτιοῦν ἂν ὑπουργῶν, καὶ ὁ μὲν δυνάμενος εἰς φρόνησιν καὶ τὴν ἄλλην ἀρετὴν συμβάλλεσθαι, ὁ δὲ δεόμενος εἰς παίδευσιν καὶ τὴν ἄλλην σοφίαν κτᾶσθαι, τότε δή, τούτων συνιόντων εἰς ταὐτὸν τῶν νόμων, μοναχοῦ ἐνταῦθα συμπίπτει τὸ καλὸν εἶναι παιδικὰ ἐραστῇ χαρίσασθαι, ἄλλοθι δὲ οὐδαμοῦ.
Dover's notes:
d3 εἰς τὸ αὐτὸ ἔλθωσιν 'meet', 'come together'. δ4 νόμον ἔχων ἑκάτερος 'each having a principle'. ὁ μέν...7 ὑπουργῶν: with ὁ μέν... we must understand 'thinking' νόμος involved in each case. In d7 older manuscripts have ὑπουργῶν, later manuscripts ὑπουργεῖν; if we adopt the participle, we must understand the infinitive. φρόνησιν 'intelligence'.

e1 συμβάλλεσθαι 'contribute'; cf. 185c3. εἰς παίδευσιν...2 κτᾶσθαι: if this is what Plato wrote, we must understand φρόνησιν καὶ ἀρετήν as object of κτᾶσθαι; but if εἰς were deleted (as by Schütz) παιδευσιν...σοφίαν would be the object, and the sentence would be easier to follow. e3 συμπίπτει 'comes about'.


My best guess:

For whenever the lover and the boy come together, each having a principle, the one to justly serve however he might, doing service to the willing boy, the other also to justly serve however he might, assisting the one making him both wise and good, and the one who is able contributes to the intelligence and virtue of the other, while the one who is lacking gains these through education and the wisdom of the other, then, truly, with these laws brought into one, only here in this place it comes about that the good is for a boy to accept a lover, elsewhere not at all.
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Re: Pausanias' speech in Plato's Symposium

Post by Timothée »

I take ὑπηρετῶν ὁτιοῦν δικαίως ἂν ὑπηρετεῖν somewhat chiastically: ‘serving anyway whatsoever to serve justly’, or, ‘howsoever he serves, (so that) he serves rightly’.

Χαρισάμενα παιδικά: rather than “willing” maybe ‘who obliged (him)’, ‘who has done (him) favours’.

I read the ἄλληνs as “prudence and other virtue — — education and other wisdom”, i.e., the latter includes the former in both cases.

ἐνταῦθα rather than of place, of time, I’d say: ‘only then’. If so, then ἄλλοθι maybe not taken literally ‘elsewhere’ but ‘in any other situation’ or something to that extent.

The tag “I could be wrong” naturally applies.

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Re: Pausanias' speech in Plato's Symposium

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ὁ δὲ δεόμενος εἰς παίδευσιν καὶ τὴν ἄλλην σοφίαν κτᾶσθαι
Perhaps "and the one wanting to acquire" – δεόμενος and κτᾶσθαι go together.

μοναχοῦ ἐνταῦθα συμπίπτει τὸ καλὸν εἶναι παιδικὰ ἐραστῇ χαρίσασθαι, ἄλλοθι δὲ οὐδαμοῦ.
"Only in these conditions does it come about that a boy obliging a lover is a good thing, and otherwise never."
Note that the article τὸ goes with the entire phrase καλὸν εἶναι παιδικὰ ἐραστῇ χαρίσασθαι, "a boy obliging a lover being a good thing", "the [situation/occurence] that a boy obliging a lover is a good thing".

In case someone didn't notice, παιδικά refers to a single boy, although it is plural. Probably you did, but it gave me some food for thought, so I thought I should bring it up :)

I haven't read this dialogue. What does νόμος "principle" exactly mean? The principle upon which person acts?

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Re: Pausanias' speech in Plato's Symposium

Post by jeidsath »

I haven't read this dialogue. What does νόμος "principle" exactly mean? The principle upon which person acts?
Pausanias starts the speech by talking about the laws concerning man-boy love in various parts of Greece. In Elis and Boeotia it is allowed, in Athens and Lacedaemonia it's complicated, and in places ruled by barbarians, it's banned. But νόμος seems to veer back and forth between law and custom in the speech, and here it describes an idealized standard for personal conduct, so it's easy to see why Dover suggests "principle."

In 183c-d the discussion shifts heavily to custom, where Pausanias speaks about the opponents of these relationships in Athens (apparently everybody). It is a difficult section to settle with the conception of Greek pederasty that Dover describes in Greek Homosexuality. There is a real sense of "the normals don't understand us sophisticated types" to that passage, one that would be completely at home in Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. It just doesn't seem to line up with the idea of nearly complete cultural acceptance of these relations for a large proportion of the male youth and adult population.
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Paul Derouda
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Re: Pausanias' speech in Plato's Symposium

Post by Paul Derouda »

Dover's idea, if I understood and remember correctly, was that Athenian pederasty was a sort of flirting game between elite males with a lot of free time. As marriages were arranged affairs, women of their own class were not available for flirting - women hardly ever came out of house, and if they ever did, they were always veiled and never alone. If a man seduced a married woman, that was serious business with serious consequences, not a matter for laughing or bragging. One of the best known speeches of Lysias is a defense for a man who killed another he caught having sex with his wife – the defender claims that it was lawful to kill the adulterer as long as the man didn't have the time to reach the hearth of the house as a supplicant. As for women of lower classes, they were freely available to buy either as prostitutes or as slaves, so that wasn't much of a conquest. In this context, the only possibility to show one's prowess as a seducer was seducing elite young boys. However, if you had your way too freely with the young boys, (i.e. had anal sex with them - this is why some think that "Bend Over" Dover was obsessed with anal sex) you destroyed the boy's reputation for good, and that wasn't considered a good thing to do either. As far as I understand, that's also the part that Plato was opposed to; he does take a sort of "Platonic" ideal of pederastic love as example of love, but that's because that sort of thing was going on in the circles he frequented. Poorer people who had full-time jobs didn't have time for such "nonsense", so they were naturally wary of it like they were wary of many other upper class pursuits.

What does εἰς τὸ αὐτὸ ἔλθωσιν exactly mean? I suppose it's not a euphemism, that it just means "meet/come together".

I've read Dover's book but only a small part of the relevant source material (part of Plato's Phaedrus, for instance), so I can only try to refer the fist of Dover's argument, which I don't necessarily fully endorse.

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Re: Pausanias' speech in Plato's Symposium

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The most convincing part of Dover's argument, to me, was the evidence from vase paintings. I'm not sure that Dover was obsessed with the sex act, so much as arguing with theories that tried to explain away Greek pederasty/homosexuality as literary affectation. But Dover still paints a view that's too simplistic for any real society. Symp. 183c-d proves that very many other people in Athens held some very different opinions from Agathon's guests, and there is no evidence to indicate that it was only the country bumpkins under discussion.

Years ago, I remember watching Ben Anderson's "This Is What Winning Looks Like" about the aftermath of the Afghan War. It was partly documentary video of an American military advisor trying to convince an Afghan police commander to stop his soldiers from kidnapping young boys from the surrounding villages for sex slaves. The police commander countered that it was the boys who were the aggressors (despite all the suicides, kidnapping, etc.). I will never forget his response. You can highlight the text below to see it. (Taken from this transcript.)
The police chief first said that the boys had chosen to live on the patrol bases: "They like being there and giving their asses at night." He also claimed that the practice of soldiers sexually abusing them was necessary. "If my commanders don't f*** these boys, who will they f***? Their own grandmothers?"
I imagine that the 5th century Athenians were much closer to the Afghans in these behaviors than they are to some of the modern academic notions about them. The utopian wish fulfillment that makes the Greeks into models of sexual tolerance is a non-starter. But so are the feminist critiques of their male-dominated, slave-owning, patriarchal society that could just as well be written about 18th and 19th century Americans (who are really the main target anyway). These are wrong because they fall well short of the mark.
“One might get one’s Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato." "In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The German scholars have improved Greek so much.”

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Re: Pausanias' speech in Plato's Symposium

Post by Hylander »

I don't think Pausanias' speech in the Symposium is intended to be entirely satisfying intellectually (still less so Agathon's). Perhaps it's somewhat like the silly essay of Lysias that Socrates demolishes in Phaedrus. All of the speeches in the Symposium except Socrates' are to some extent foils to set the (fictional) Socrates up for his exposition of Platonic idealism, and I think they are all (except for Aristophanes') parodies of conventional attitudes from different perspectives. Pausanias' speech reflects Plato's projection of Pausanias' thinking as Agathon's erastes, and shouldn't necessarily be taken as typical of Athenian attitudes.

But Aristophanes' speech is the best--better even than Socrates' to my mind, and a more accurate reflection of human nature. The Symposium is a comic dialogue.

In Protagoras, Plato portrays Pausanias and Agathon in unflattering, sarcastic terms; in the Symposium they're portrayed somewhat more sympathetically. Their relationship seems to have been closer to that of a "modern" gay couple than to a Greek pederastic relationship, as they apparently stayed together for life.
Bill Walderman

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