Ancient History OTP

[elenchus]

Sometimes I worry that when I tell people that the Platonic canon is really really gay, they think I’m exaggerating.

 

What I worry people think:

Text – philosophy

Subtext – gay sex

 

What some of the dialogues (*cough*SYMPOSIUM*cough*) actually are:

Text – gay sex

Subtext – philosophy

 

No really – Plato scholars have the awesome task of analyzing the philosophical implications of Alcibiades’ drunken ranting about how Socrates won’t put out. We spent at least half an hour in my Charmides seminar discussing Socrates getting a hard-on when he sees inside a teenage boy’s cloak, including analyzing the Greek to be 100% sure it actually meant erection (it did) and connecting the language used to describe said hard-on to similar language elsewhere describing philosophy. MY AREA OF STUDY IS THE BEST AREA OF STUDY. Plato: he wrote a lot about penises. 

 

Anyways, I was thinking about all that today while considering whether to track down a biography of Alcibiades. I have this burning love for Alcibiades after reading the Symposium and skimming the two dialogues named for him, and it makes me sad that practically no one knows about him. He is crazy fierce! Total bitch and proud of it. General, statesman, orator, bad boy and occasional double-crosser (but only after he’d been kicked out of Athens for, um, purposefully prolonging the war with Sparta so he could stab some more dudes and win personal glory), Alcibiades was the renaissance badass. When he moved to Sparta, the actual Spartans thought he was a little too hardcore Spartan (he also had an affair with the queen. Presumably because he had no sense of self-preservation.) The Ancient world seems to have been split into roughly two camps on Alcibiades: one camp thought he was more or less what would happen if Achilles, Demosthenes and Alexander the Great were rolled up into one person and then made incredibly sexy, while the other camp thought he was more along the lines of Vlad the Impaler meets Paris Hilton. Modern interpreters seem to feel more or less the same actually, which doesn’t surprise me all the much. Alcibiades was an arrogant prick at times, but he was also rich, powerful, well-connected, smart and gorgeous. So ya know, he had a lot to be arrogant about. Oh, and by gorgeous, I mean that a city full of incredibly shallow people obsessed with beauty rated him #1. Just saying.

 

When I tell people about Alcibiades, if I don’t have time to go into explaining what a fierce bitch he was, I often introduce him as Socrates’ boyfriend. Which according to Plato, he was! All the ancient scholars I’ve read see his giant crush on Socrates as an important window into his personality – the pro-Alcibiades folks see it as further evidence of his greatness (he had no less a lover that Socrates himself! Socrates saw his true potential!), while the anti-Alcibiades crowd spin it their way (Socrates dumped him! Even the great philosopher couldn’t reform this philandering wastrel!). But I also call Watson Holmes’ boyfriend, and Marcus Esca’s boyfriend. I stand by those assessments, but with Alcibiades I actually mean that he had a planned campaign to get into Socrates’ toga that he shares in the actual text. And when I say get into Socrates’ toga, I mean that part C of the campaign was to get onto the couch with Socrates and tell him he would do aaaaaaaaaaaaaanything that Socrates wanted because Socrates was his only worthy lover. Part B of the campaign was naked wrestling btw, which cracks me up every time. How could such a brilliant plan fail?!?

 

In conclusion: Alcibiades is amazing and everyone should know about him, and when I say that he was doing his level best to bang Socrates I actually mean it.