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ONE SOCRATES MADE BEAUTIFUL If the starting point of the Republic’s inquiry into justice is the construction of the just city, the starting point of the Symposium’s inquiry into love is the portrayal of the city made beautiful through its love of the beautiful —Athens. At the beginning of the Republic Socrates recounts how he went down to the Piraeus with Glaucon to view a novel religious festival. Afterward Glaucon and Socrates were on their way back up to Athens when they were halted by Polemarchus and his friends and persuaded to go back down to the Pireaus. The incomplete ascent with which the Republic begins reflects the fact that at the peak of its argument, where the question of justice is superseded by that of the good—the “greatest thing to be learned,” as Socrates calls it—Socrates confesses to Glaucon that he is incapable of providing an account of the good, and offers instead an “ugly” image of the offspring of the good (506c–e). The Symposium begins as Apollodorus, a fanatical devotee of Socrates, is explaining to a nameless comrade how, just the other day, he was making his way from his home in Phaleron up to Athens when he was hailed by Glaucon who wished to question him about Agathon’s party and the erotic speeches given there. Together they ascended to Athens while Glaucon listened to the very account of the banquet that Apollodorus is now ready to repeat to another curious Athenian a few days later. At the apparent peak of the argument of the dialogue—precisely where we would expect to find an account of the good as the highest object of erotic desire—we are given instead a description of the beautiful itself as the final “thing to be learned.” In the Republic, however, Socrates had distinguished the good from both the just and the beautiful in his insistence that knowledge of anything else in the absence of knowledge of the good was incomplete and unprofitable and that, therefore, the good must be said to be the greatest thing to be learned (505a–506a). Taken together, the opening actions and culminating arguments of the Republic and the Symposium illustrate the character of what Socrates called 3 4 EROS AND THE INTOXICATIONS OF ENLIGHTENMENT his “second sailing.” In the course of his philosophizing, Socrates found it necessary to turn away from any attempt to comprehend the whole of things and the principle of the whole directly and instead examine the whole and the good in the speeches of men, wherein the good appears as either the just or the beautiful. The implication of the completion of the ascent at the opening of the Symposium that Glaucon was forced to break off at the opening of the Republic seems to be that the examination of the good in terms of the beautiful is somehow more revealing of the true character of the good than the examination of the just. This implication is lent some confirmation by the fact that the traditional subtitle of the Republic is “On the Just,” whereas that of the Symposium is “On the Good.” It was, above all else, the incorporation of the poets into the life of the city—the civic status allotted to tragedy and comedy—that proved to be the first cause of Athens’ love of the beautiful. The beautiful gods of the poets became, as it were, the beautiful gods of the city of Athens; more precisely, and in contrast to conditions prevailing in such law-abiding regimes as Sparta and Crete, the presence of the poets in Athens ensured that the gods of Homer and Hesiod were not reduced there to the status of civic deities, that is, to the punitive gods who are mere props for the law and its justice. The poets, then, through preserving the beauty of the gods, ensured that they are not simply objects of fear, but the possible objects of an erotic longing that set its sights beyond the horizon of the law. The public preeminence of the poets within Athens is alluded to at the very opening of the dialogue. The events and speeches about which both Glaucon and Apollodorus’ nameless comrade wish to be informed concern the poet Agathon’s party in celebration of the victory of his tragedy in the city’s dramatic contest. Glaucon said that he had heard about the party from a certain Phoinex, but that he had had nothing definite...

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