The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [137]
They praise in such splendid fashion that … they bewitch our souls … [E]very time I listen fascinated [by their praise of me], I am exalted and imagine myself to have become all at once taller and nobler and more handsome … owing to the persuasive eloquence of the speaker.7
And so into the theatrical setting of the symposium enters a female character: the priestess Diotima.
Diotima is, I am sure, used to some extent as a mouthpiece for Platonic ideals – voicing ways to build the perfect society. (She is one character who is a free and equal participant in Plato’s Symposium, and, atypically, she is a woman.) It is useful to have a woman here in Socrates’ symposium because the discussion is so much about the male/female act of fertilisation and then the female business of gestation and parturition. There are complex discussions of how what we would describe as ‘heterosexuals’ and ‘homosexuals’ give ‘birth to beauty’, through children and through accounts of virtue, respectively – the former via pregnancy of the body, the latter via pregnancy of the soul. Relationships with beauty and beautiful things can lead to a bigger and better kind of beauty. You can see why Socrates lends himself so well to Judaeo-Christian and Islamic philosophy; positively seeking out good here on earth brings about the good of mankind and the good of the hereafter. Unfortunate, perhaps, that Socrates’ respect for the opinions and standing of this priestess character did not also prove tenacious within the later iterations of the monotheistic religions that supplanted paganism, nor unassailable within Golden Age Athens itself. Because the character of Diotima tells us much about the value of women both then and now.
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DIOTIMA – A VERY SOCIAL PRIESTESS
Naples and Athens, Fifth century BC and beyond
Look at what people usually do – all women in particular, they dedicate the first thing that comes to hand, they swear to offer sacrifice, and promise to found shrines for gods and spirits and children of god.
Plato, Laws, 909e–9101
This counterfeit coin, woman, to curse the human race.
Euripides, Hippolytus, 616–172
ONE OF THE FEW REMAINING IMAGES of Socrates and Diotima is lost in the vast Naples Archaeological Museum: literally. I turned up there one blisteringly wet October afternoon to examine the little bronze plaque (originally used to decorate furniture in some well-to-do household). It was not on show, so a curator took me backstage, to the fabulously functional, creaking, gargantuan storerooms where much of the finest art from an entire antiquity is kept under lock and key.
Past racks of frescoes from Pompeii, dulled with dust, past one-armed goddesses, downwards in stainless-steel lifts with mobster-manqué security guards and over to a padlocked metal locker. We peered into an old plastic crate, the bottom of which was scattered with metal objects, many wrapped in brown paper and string and simply labelled. But Diotima wasn’t there. Loaned to an exhibition, she was playing hide-and-seek somewhere with her philosopher-companion.
A stern bust of Socrates was on show in the public galleries, as was a finely tessellated mosaic – the pieces so numerous that no one has yet counted them. But the intricacy of the philosopher’s relationships, particularly with the women around him, was not obvious. Nor was this furniture-decoration, priestess-loving Socrates, a Socrates the public wanted to see. But in fact the character of Diotima is a close ally when it comes to trying to understand both what Socrates thought