Across the Isthmus of Cornith

Chapter Four

MEETING DIOTIMA

Love desires what it does not possess.
Diotima to Socrates, SYMPOSIUM 202d

DIOTIMA LIVED IN MANTINEA, DEEP IN ARCADIA, IN A VALLEY west of the mountain called Alesion and north of the wooded oaks of Pelagos. According to legend the people of Arcadia had lived here before the birth of the moon.

The mountains of Arcadia, the horse meadows of Argos, and the Isthmus of Corinth divided Arcadia from Athens. There were few roads. Some, and these were beautifully built, had been laid a thousand years earlier, before the fall of Troy. Most were bridle-tracks.

Searching for his father, Telemachus had traveled as far as Argos with Peisistratus, Nestor's son. They had come up from the south, traveling by chariot. "Peisistratus gathered the reins into his hands, and struck the horses with the whip: and these, glad to be loosed, flew down from the steep crag of the citadel of Pylos out on to the plain: which all day long they steadily traversed...Down sank the sun. The sun became blind." The two young men crossed Arcadia, and rested the night with Diocles. "At the first red pointers of dawn in the sky they were yoking their horses to the gay chariot for their next stage. Forth they drove through the court-yard gate past the echoing porch. Again the driver swung his whip: again the willing horses flew forward. Presently they entered the wheat-lands, sign that their journey drew towards its close; with such speed had the horses pressed on. Again the sun grew low and the roads were darkened."

In 440, when Diotima rode east to Athens, the Peloponnesians had not yet risen in war, and peace still lay on the lands of Arcadia and Argos. She traveled by horse rather than chariot, winding through the Arcadian mountains. Riding with her companions, she was unique among women because as a priestess she had respect and mobility. She might be married or a virgin; she might have inherited priesthood from her family or been called to priesthood by vocation. However she became a priestess, Diotima belonged not to men but to a god. Her responsibilities freed and constrained her.

She rode toward Athens in late spring, in time for the great religious festival of the Panathenaea. The Isthmus was the most difficult part of her journey. Here she and her companions climbed heavily faulted limestone terraces, leading their horses on foot, until they reached the bleak, windswept plateau, the dust of the thin soil swirling under their feet.

Diotima had come to warn the Athenians about the plague. After a series of meetings she fulfilled her mission, and on a lovely summer day on the date of the Panathenaea, joined the city-wide religious procession heading up to the Acropolis. Though she is considered a foreigner, or alien, and would not ordinarily be allowed on the Acropolis, she and her companion are here at the special invitation of the polis.

The Acropolis is still a building site, scattered with building blocks and dusty with the chippings of stonemasons working on the Parthenon. The festival of the Panathenaea includes a procession of Athenians walking on foot and a cattle drive. One hundred cattle are being driven uphill. Not surprisingly the procession hits some kind of snag.

With the procession delayed, Athenians stand impatiently in line, waiting for the barbecue that always accompanies festal sacrifices. Eleven-year-old Alcibiades, a precocious boy orphaned when his father was killed in battle, wriggles through the crowd, stammering hello to the men he knows. His guardian Pericles, a leader in Athens, is not here because he has been delayed by the siege of Samos.

In the way of strangers who start talking together when caught in the same public transportation slowdown, Socrates’ neighbor complains angrily about the delay. "And all our friends caught in the same mess," says Socrates, managing to sound both sympathetic and ironical at the same time. As far as the eye can see, Athenians are at a standstill on the great road that leads up through the Agora to the Acropolis.

"Don't talk to me about friends," growls his neighbor. "I've had my fill of no-good friends, thank you very much."

“You've been disappointed by your friends?" Socrates asks with interest. "I don't even know how people become friends. Exactly how does it happen?”

 The heavy-set man scowls. “You tell me,” he says.

Surprised by the invitation, but more than happy to oblige, Socrates thinks for a moment, then says, “Maybe the physicists have a point.“

"The physicists?"

"They say like is always attracted to like, and that this power of attraction is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. Are they right?” Surveying the crowd of Athenians as if he could see the forces that drew people together, Socrates' gaze falls on Diotima who stands within earshot, her face half turned away from him. He pauses.

She resembles the blonde and red-haired heroes of the Trojan War whom Homer describes – Odysseus, Achilles, and Menelaus. Her blonde-red hair is on fire in the sea light. Standing with her is a delicately-boned woman from Ethiopia, a companion like Memnon the Ethiopian king who fought beside the Greeks at Troy.

Socrates looks at Diotima, and has half an idea she has heard his question about friendship, and is thinking about it. Unless he is imagining things, a small, tender smile touches her lips.

He turns back to the man standing beside him, and says slowly, “Homer believes God brings friends together. The way he puts it is that ‘God draws like to like.’”

 “Bad luck for me,” said the man sulkily. “Worse luck for Philip.”

“Is it true?” Socrates asks.  “Does God bring friends together?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe half of it is true,” Socrates said. “When an evil person approaches another evil person, the closer he gets, the more hateful he will become, since he’s likely to injure him. In that case, like does not appear to be drawn to like.”

“May Zeus blast him,” said the man, and looked hungrily up the slope.

“If we’re right Homer is only half right,” Socrates says, pursuing his idea.

Diotima gently shakes her head.

Socrates stares at her, but she does not look at him.

Social manners of the time dictated that a woman avert her eyes from a man’s gaze.   Those women who did seek a man’s gaze are street prostitutes or the more highly paid courtesans called hetaira.

He turns back to his neighbor. “Actually, I think Homer's line has a hidden meaning. I think Homer is saying that the good are like one another, and so are drawn to each other and become friends, while the evil are so unbalanced and unsteady they are never even like themselves, so they can hardly become like anyone else, much less a friend. Does that sound about right?”

“About time,” said the man hungrily. Up ahead the procession is moving.

“But there is one point that makes me uneasy,” Socrates admits. He is frowning.  “Something is not quite right with this argument.” His neighbor snorts, and pushes past him up the road.

Diotima turns her head, and gazes at Socrates.

Socrates stares back at her, his eyes widening, and blinking rapidly.

She does not, as so many do, comment inwardly on his appearance. Her clear look goes deep inside him.

How could he explain the beauty and meaning of that look opening inside him? She sees him. She knows him. She welcomes him. It is like the look Penelope gives Odysseus after he has finally returned home. They recognize each other “by certain private signs hidden from the rest of the world.” They hold each other in a double gaze that becomes one.

But as soon as he found her, he lost her. The procession, moving, moved on. He saw the back of her head, her hair blowing in the wind that had kicked up, and she was gone.

In his mind he sees her eyes, welcoming him, but he cannot recall the color of her eyes if he ever knew it, and he has no idea of her name. Still, a foreign priestess in Athens will not have passed unnoticed. Determined to find her, he learns she is Diotima of Mantinea. He catches sight of her at the theatre, but is unable to talk with her.

He is at home, back from the agora early one evening, when a messenger arrives to invite him to a symposium at Aspasia's and Pericles' house that night. The sun has just dropped below the horizon, and the diffused light of twilight fills the sky. The evening is hot, and the party is in full swing when he arrives.

Aspasia's house is perhaps the only house in Athens where men and women can be found together, though at first glance he sees only one woman. The torches gleaming on the cool marble walls and marble floors light Aspasia, a dark-haired fifteen-year-old hetaira when she met the forty-five-year old Pericles, and only twenty now, but astonishingly witty and self-possessed as she talks with her guests. Pericles has divorced his wife to be with her, and is said to treat Aspasia as an equal, which she is in mind, education, and character. Returning from the siege at Samos to report to the Assembly, Pericles is expected momentarily. Slaves are circulating trays of sweetmeats, and filling wine cups. The boy Alcibiades, dressed in a toga and sandals, darts between them, and slides to a stop in front of Socrates. "Have you come to s-s-see me?" he asks, stammering.

"No," Socrates says, since he finds it impossible to lie. The wounded look on the boy's face reminds him how painful boyhood can be. "However, I'm very glad to see you," he says.

Alcibiades grins, and dashes away.

"Socrates..." says Aspasia, "Oh hello, how are you?" she cries, turning away to meet another guest.

Socrates ponders the possibilities for conversation until Pericles arrives: banter socially, discuss the cost of the gold leaf on the Athene Parthenos with Phidias, shout in an old general's ear. He wishes he were home. I'm useless at parties, he thinks. I have no small talk. I'm a social idiot. He decides to circle the courtyard once before breaking for the door.

He is walking gloomily along the colonnade, glancing at the reflections of the torches in the pool, when he sees her standing, so still she could have been a caryatid, her face lit by the twilit sky above the courtyard. Beside her, smiling at him, was her Ethiopian companion.

"Socrates," Diotima said. Her voice was low and warm.

"What are you doing here?" he almost asked. Instead he said nothing at all.

"I was waiting for you," Diotima said simply.

Her companion said, "We heard you thought Eros was a god. We wanted you to explain why." She gave an amused laugh, and left them listening to the receding sibilance of her sandals.

They stood alone. He did not know where to look. He cleared his throat, preparatory to saying something, but he could not find a thought in his head.

Diotima appeared to have even less small talk than he did.

"Eros," he said lamely. He could not meet her eyes.

She said nothing.

"A great god," he added in desperation.

“Do you think so?” she asked gently. “I don’t think so.”

 “You don’t?"

“No." She made no attempt to explain why.

"But everyone says Eros is a good and beautiful god," he protested. "Do you think Eros is ugly and bad then?”

“Shhh,” she said, holding him with her eyes which seemed to speak to him. “Do you think whatever is not beautiful is ugly?"

“Sure.” 

He heard his answer echo in the tender silence of her listening, and knew he was wrong, though his own homeliness was the best evidence he had that lack of beauty was ugly.

She looked at him attentively. “So whatever is not skilled is ignorant?” she asked softly. “I thought you had noticed there is something halfway between expertise and ignorance.”

He blinked, flabbergasted at her question. She was using elenchus to challenge him.  “Of course there's something between expertise and ignorance,” he said. "Sure."

Again she listened to his answer, as if she held his sure in her hands like a fruit, and felt its shape and weight and skin. Then, as if the unripe answer he had given her had ripened, Diotima said, "Often we have a correct opinion, but we don’t have a reason for it. We're certain we're right, but not why, so while what we know isn’t knowledge, it isn’t ignorance, either, because what describes the truth can’t be ignorance. In the same way we can’t compel what is not beautiful to be ugly or what is not good to be bad.”

“Sure,” he repeated, feeling extremely uncomfortable at being on the receiving end of his logical method.

An unseen breeze was flowing around her shoulders and stirring the fluted folds of her chiton. She gazed at the floor, and said, “So if we say that Eros is not good or beautiful, we are not necessarily saying he is ugly and bad, but something between the two?” She looked up at him.

“Say whatever you like,” he said. “Everyone thinks Eros is a great god.”

Again she listened patiently to his answer. He heard his "everyone" echo in the silence.

“Everyone?” she asked sweetly. “Do you mean people who don’t know or people who know?”

Again she had demolished his reply using elenchus. Irritated he snapped, “I mean everyone in the world.”

She laughed. Her laugh was lovely, as if she were sharing a private joke with him and he had said something brilliant rather than utterly idiotic. “Socrates,” she said joyfully, “how can everyone agree he is a great god when some people say he isn’t a god at all?”

“Exactly who says that?”

““You for one,” she answered. “And I for another.”

“You and me?” He was enchanted and exasperated. “Prove it,” he said.

She gave him a radiant smile, and responded so swiftly he was taken aback. “Tell me about Eros,” she said. “Does he love nothing or does he love something?”

At that moment Alcibiades skidded to a stop beside them. "W-w-what are you talking about?" he asked with a boy's curiosity.

“Eros," Socrates said tersely. The boy looked from him to Diotima.

"Socrates is going to tell us whether Eros loves nothing or something,” Diotima explained softly.

"Obviously Eros loves something," Socrates said.

“And does Eros desire the object of his love?” Diotima asked.

“Of course,“ he answered, wondering where on earth she had learned to use elenchus with such skill.

“Then does he or does he not have the object of his desire before he desires and loves it?”

“Clearly he doesn’t have it,” he said.

The boy was following their exchange, turning his head from Socrates to Diotima. He stared at her now, waiting for her response. Socrates waited, too.

“Clearly he doesn't have it," Diotima repeated lightly. "We do not desire what we already have. We desire what we do not have.”

And Socrates suddenly saw exactly where she was going with this line of thought, and the problem with it.

Diotima searched his eyes, and then, as if she were speaking his thought aloud, said, “Even if we already had what we wanted we probably would want it not just now but in the future. We would want to keep what we have.” She gazed at him, and he nodded, feeling dizzy and fascinated. She had seen the problem, and knew how to handle it. To his relief, the boy suddenly became bored, and ran off to find sweetmeats.

Diotima said, “Eros loves and desires beauty; he desires it because he lacks it.” She paused, her eyes smiling, and he knew she had already reached the next logical conclusion, and hoped he had reached it with her. 

For a moment her generosity made him speechless. Then holding her eyes with his, he said slowly, “If Eros lacks beauty (and perhaps also good things, if we believe that good things are beautiful), then Eros cannot by the definition of a god be a god."

She nodded, and he felt suddenly light and free. He had long suspected the stories about the gods. He would like to review the whole pantheon with her god by god and goddess by goddess. But he had a question. "If Eros isn't a god, what is he, Diotima?”

She answered swiftly, “He is a great spirit, Socrates.”

 “A spirit?” He could hardly speak for disappointment. She had just casually abandoned reason for the unseeable and unverifiable world of spirit. He was angry. “I try to arrive at the truth through reason,” he said brusquely.

“I know you do,” she answered, smiling, but he resisted her smile. He would not be cozzened by her.  

“What power does this so-called spirit possess?” he asked rudely. “Who are its mother and father? How do you account for it?”

She gazed at him as if she could see deep inside him, but he did not want her to see. He wanted to slam a door in her face. Whatever he had imagined about her was wrong. There was no real bond between them.

 “How do you account for your daimonion?” Diotima asked quietly. “How do you account for the inner voice that is your daimonion advising you there is something you shouldn’t do though you don’t at that moment have a reason for it?”

If she had suddenly lashed him with a whip, he could not have been more startled. She knew of his daimonion. He stepped back, blinking, and stared at her. NEXT »

©2006 CATHERINE GLASS