Socrates and Athenian Paiderastia

As a man who loves boys in an idiosyncratic, because elenctic, way, Socrates is placed in potential conflict with the norms of a peculiar Athenian social institution, that of paiderastia the socially regulated intercourse between an older Athenian male (erastês) and a teenage boy (erômenos, pais), through which the latter was supposed to learn virtue. The effect on Plato is palpable in his works, turning very many of them into defenses, not always uncritical of Socrates, and of what he represented for the young men he encountered. His account in the Symposium of one such relationship that with the brilliant and beautiful Alcibiades is an illuminating case in point.
Alcibiades was so in love with Socrates “it was obvious,” the Symposium tells us that when asked to speak of love, he speaks of his beloved. No general theories of love for him, just the vividly remembered story of the times he spent with a man so extraordinary there has never been anyone like him, a man so powerfully erotic he turned the conventional world of love upside down by “seeming to be a lover (erastês) while really establishing himself as a beloved boy (pais) instead”.

Love stories, however inadequate as theories of love, are nonetheless stories, logoi, items that admit of analysis. But because they are manifestations of our loves, not mere cool bits of theorizing, we our deepest feelings are invested in them. The love that expressed itself in his love story meets then another love: his rational desire for consistency and intelligibility; his desire to be able to tell and live a coherent story; his desire to put it the other way around not to be endlessly frustrated and conflicted, because he is repetitively trying to live out an incoherent love story.

Alcibiades' famous failed attempt to seduce Socrates shows that this is so in his case too. For Alcibiades doesn't try to win Socrates' love by undertaking the difficult task of selftransformation required to become a more virtuous, and so more truly beautiful and lovable, person. Instead, he takes the easy, familiar path of offering the physical attractions he already has the ones that have earned him the approval of the crowd. When these fail him, it is to the crowd (in the form of the Bacchic revelers we meet at the end of the Symposium) he will regressively return, having never really succeeded in turning away.

The origins of this fantasy though, no doubt, partly personal are predominantly social. It is the complex ideology of Athenian paiderasteia that has shaped Alcibiades' own desires. For, according to it, love is really “two things”: good Uranian love, whose object is the soul, and whose aim is to instill virtue in the younger male; and bad Pandemotic love, whose object is the body and whose aim is sexual pleasure for the older lover.

A major cost of preserving this split, however, is that the older male's body-focused, sexual intercourse must itself be masked as intercourse of a more respectable sort. Alcibiades' later re-description of Socrates' inner figures shows him succumbing to the double-vision that inevitably results:
“If you were to listen to his arguments, at first they'd strike you as totally ridiculous; they're clothed in words as coarse as the hides worn by the most vulgar satyrs. He's always going on about pack asses, or blacksmiths, or cobblers, or tanners… But if the arguments are opened and one sees them from the inside, he will find first that they are the only arguments with any sense in them, and next that they contain within themselves utterly divine and multitudinous figures of virtue (agalmat' aretês)”.

For Alcibiades, then, Socrates' body is identical to his words; the virtues that are in him are in them; talking philosophy is having sexual intercourse, and vice versa.