Selected Myths by Plato; Partenie Catalin;

Author:Plato; Partenie, Catalin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, UK
Published: 2004-04-23T16:00:00+00:00

He is the winged one that mortals call “Eros”,

But since he must grow wings the gods call him “Pteros”.*

c You can believe this or not, as you wish. But at any rate the background to and experience of being in love are as I have said.

‘Now, if the captive is one of the attendants of Zeus, he can endure the burden of the Winged One with some dignity. But things are different when the servants of Ares, who made the circuitous journey in his company, are captured by Love. If they have the slightest inkling that they have been wronged by their beloved, they become murderous: they are quite ready to immolate both themselves and their beloveds. And so it goes for every single god: as long as he has not yet been corrupted and is living the first of his lives here on earth, an individual spends his life honouring and imitating to the best of his ability the god to whose chorus he belongs, and in all his

d dealings and relations, including his love-affairs, he conforms to this mode of behaviour. So which good-looking boy an individual chooses as his beloved depends on his disposition, and he treats the boy as if he were that very god: he constructs for himself an image, so to speak, and decorates it in order to worship his god and celebrate his rites.

‘The followers of Zeus, then, want someone with a Zeus-like

soul as their beloved. They look for someone with the potential to be a philosopher and a leader, and when they find him and have fallen in love with him, they do all they can to develop this potential in him. If they have not undertaken such a task before, they set about it now, by learning from any available sources and searching by themselves. In hunting on

253a their own for the nature of their god, they are helped by the intense compulsion they are under of gazing on the god.* Since they are in contact with the god in their memories, they are inspired by him and, in so far as it is possible for a mortal man to partake of a god, they derive their way of life and the things they do from him. And because they hold their beloved responsible for this, they feel even more affection for him, and as if Zeus were a well from which they draw water, Bacchant-like* they pour it over their beloved’s soul and make him as similar to their own god as they can.

‘Those who were in Hera’s company, on the other hand,

b look for a boy with kingly qualities, and when they find him they behave in exactly the same way with him. And the followers of Apollo and each of the other gods proceed in the same way, in accordance with the nature of their god, and look for a boy for themselves who has the same qualities as themselves.* When they find him, they not only imitate

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