An Essay On How Plato's - Symposium - Begins

Shoes: An Essay on How Plato's "Symposium" Begins
Author(s): Anne Carson

Source: The Iowa Review, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 1995), pp. 47-51
Published by: University of Iowa
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20153663 .
Accessed: 17/05/2011 17:56
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uiowa. .
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Iowa Review.
http://www.jstor.org
Shoes: An Essay on How Plato's Symposium
Begins Anne Carson
The beginning has as its purpose to set us on the road

that leads to the end.
It directs our attention
to our feet
and asks us to remember
the art of stepping along.
The Symposium, for example, begins with Apollodoros

going up the road to town (172a).
He is stopped by a voice from behind
and the story of the Symposium unfolds.

Stories and roads have something in common,
an delusion:
important
that this is the only way to get there.

But what story is inevitable?
Does a road make itself?
"It was and it was not the case" is how a

good story begins.
Plato begins the Symposium with an anecdote about feet.
"For he said that he met Sokrates coming from the bath
and wearing shoes?

which is something that man did very infrequently" (174a).
So Apollodoros begins. Now it is a notorious feature
of Platonic narrative to map its own roads well.

to unnamed
companions, is
Apollodoros, speaking
a story he told the before to Glaukos,
retelling day yesterday
47
who had already heard it from someone who heard it from Phoenix,
but which Apollodoros heard from the one who told it to Phoenix,
who had been an eyewitness.
Why does Apollodoros emphasize that Sokrates had shoes on?
Perhaps because Aristodemos emphasized it in his telling.
Why does Aristodemos notice shoes? Perhaps
because Aristodemos himself was someone

"who went always barefoot" (173b).
A narrator out details that are to himself
picks important
and shape his tale.

Some of these are as obvious as shoes.
Others may escape our notice although their effect on the telling
is powerful?like for example the fact that,

at the time the Symposium took place,
Aristodemos was himself "one of the chief among Sokrates' lovers"
(173b).What difference does itmake to the Symposium

that we witness it entirely through the eyes of a lover?
It is a consideration of at least historical importance,
insofar as the universal erotic experience of the Greek tradition
up to Plato was witnessed in this way.

It is a lover's experience seen from a lover's point of view.
Consider the Greek lyric poets of the 6th and 5th centuries BC,
who first named,
defined
and venerated erotic love as an all powerful divinity:

they consistently identify Eros with the lover and represent him
as a external force or incontestable eriemy.
damaging
48
This Eros victimizes the lover in exactly the same way the lover
victimizes his beloved.
He represents compulsion
and pain and loss of soul's integrity.

Plato seems concerned to rethink this concept
and to move beyond traditional typologies of
lover,
beloved
and erotic use. He uses
Sokrates himself as a main mechanism of rethinking.

Part of Sokrates' dramatic function in the Symposium,
therefore,
is to invert and confuse the traditional roles of lover and beloved,

a behaviour about which we hear Alkibiades complain
in the latter part of the dialogue:
". . .Andlet me tell you Vm not the only one he handles in this way?
Charmides and Glaukon and Euthydemos and any number of others
are so seduced by his love tricks
that he ends up being treated as the boy toy not the man!" (222b)
His unique erotic fluidity permits Sokrates to impersonate
a radically untraditional concept of love;
later in the dialogue

Diotima will describe Eros as a force metaxu?
"
"moving between
lover and beloved,
moving between human beings and God,

bound by no convention or definition (202c).
49
is hikanos amphotera ?
Just like Eros, Sokrates (176c)
?
"fit either way"
capable of being lover or beloved,
drunk and sober,

mortal and immortal,
well shod or barefoot,
all at the same Symposium.

But then it is a radically untraditional symposium.
Plato makes it clear from the beginning that no one at this party
has his own shoes on.
Just as the guests recline for dinner, the host (Agathon)

says something bizarre:
"Come boys?it's your turn to rule us.

Set out whatever you like, you are under no orders
must ?
from anyone (I be crazy!)
imagine that Imyself and these gentlemen here

have come to dinner at your invitation: feast us!
Earn our praise!" (175b)
Role reversal is the order of the evening.
Agathon's order is addressed to his servants

but the Greek word he uses for "boy slave" (pais)
is also the conventional term for "beloved boy"

in a homoerotic relationship.
Agathon's light liberation of his boys
predicts Sokrates' attitude to erotic role-playing in general

and also Plato's specific revision of erotic values in the Symposium.
Itmarks the beginning
50
of a conversation in which Sokrates will tell
how we can set love free
from all enslavement
to personal desire or
private narrative.
It sets us on the road to a new story of Eros?
an Eros who,
incidentally,
"wears no shoes" (anupodetos 202e)

or so we hear from Apollodoros
who heard it from Aristodemos
who heard it from Sokrates

who heard it from Diotima
whose feet remain a mystery.
51

An Essay On How Plato's - Symposium - Begins

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

An Essay On How Plato's - Symposium - Begins

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

An Essay On How Plato's - Symposium - Begins

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Shoes: An Essay on How Plato's "Symposium" Begins

Author(s): Anne Carson

The beginning has as its purpose to set us on the road

The Symposium, for example, begins with Apollodoros

and the story of the Symposium unfolds.

that this is the only way to get there.

"It was and it was not the case" is how a

and wearing shoes?

of Platonic narrative to map its own roads well.

Why does Apollodoros emphasize that Sokrates had shoes on?

Perhaps because Aristodemos emphasized it in his telling.

Why does Aristodemos notice shoes? Perhaps

because Aristodemos himself was someone

and shape his tale.

is powerful?like for example the fact that,

(173b).What difference does itmake to the Symposium

insofar as the universal erotic experience of the Greek tradition

up to Plato was witnessed in this way.

and venerated erotic love as an all powerful divinity:

and pain and loss of soul's integrity.

Sokrates himself as a main mechanism of rethinking.

is to invert and confuse the traditional roles of lover and beloved,

later in the dialogue

lover and beloved,

moving between human beings and God,

capable of being lover or beloved,

drunk and sober,

all at the same Symposium.

has his own shoes on.

Just as the guests recline for dinner, the host (Agathon)

"Come boys?it's your turn to rule us.

imagine that Imyself and these gentlemen here

Role reversal is the order of the evening.

Agathon's order is addressed to his servants

is also the conventional term for "beloved boy"

predicts Sokrates' attitude to erotic role-playing in general

"wears no shoes" (anupodetos 202e)

who heard it from Sokrates

You might also like