secondary sources Flashcards
Waterfield @ Plato
Love saves us from the “bestial side of our nature” (Plato)
Plato on the dangers of desire
Desire is when one has “substituted the body of his beloved for the beauty in it that attracts him” and so has enslaved himself/ trapped himself i.e. plato warns of the dangers of desire -Halperin
Plato on the pursuit of virtue
Plato gives no compelling reason for the pursuit of wisdom to be the most desirable way of life - Singer
Plato and selfless love
Plato fails to do justice to what it means to love a person i.e. being selfless and loving the whole person not just their admirable qualities -Vlastos
female voice in Plato
in Diotima’s speech the female voice uses maternal language of pregnancy and birth to exclude women from having intellectual dimension -Cavarero
Sappho on female Symposia
Sappho reveals the symposia culture of the age of Tyrants and unique insight into female homosexuality -Edith Hall
Bettany Hughes
describes Sappho as a “big space”
Sappho as a woman
“Because women are emotionally disturbed, their poems are psychological outpourings, that is, not intellectual but ingenious, artless, concerned with their inner emotional lives” -M. Lefkowitz
Sappho on marriage
“tempting to see the emphasis on bridal virginity as simply a form of masculine oppression against younger women, lest they dare to enjoy their own sexuality and thus reduce their value as a commodity to a future husband” - Freeman
Sappho rewriting history
“world of Sappho…valued urbanity as much as militarism”
“powerful challenge to… an untroubled history of heterosexuality triumphant through all of western culture”
“full consciousness of… her place as a woman aristocrat” -Page Dubois
Longinus
fragment 31 as perfect description of desire
Sappho on marriage
“female anxiety towards marriage, marriage that did not operate in any romantic terms”
Sappho on sex
her poetry serves a “social purpose and public function… sexually segregated society” - Hallett
Sappho on desire
“male assumption about competition and about dominance and submission”
“mutual desire… can be explored as female experience”
Sappho on homoerotic relationships
“pratice without a name” - Goldhill
“Sappho’s homoerotic stance… was unremarkable” - Hall
Plato on marriage
“abolition of the family would improve the cohesion of the society” - Brown
Plato on love
“we may be attracted towards beauty, but our real goal is happiness” - Waterfield
Plato on sex
“love that enslaves us”
Socrates cares about Alcibides enough to “re channel his love away from bodily lust and towards philosophy”
-Waterfield
Plato on homoerotic relationships
just because it was acceptable does not mean that everyone accepted it
Socrates seemed to have “disapproved of the sexual side of homoerotic love”
-Waterfield
Plato and Diotima
“cold and heartless” - Waterfield
Plato and realism
“does not wholly condemn couples who occasionally give in to their sexual urges” - Dodds
Seneca on marriage
“learnt much about the virtues of love from members of his own family” - Motto
Seneca on love
“true love is analogous to an ideal friendship” - Motto
“neither good no bad; it’s how you use it that matters” - Gloyn
Seneca on homosexuality
“not inherently heterosexual, or indeed inherently sexual at all”
“mutual appreciation of each other’s virtue” - Gloyn
Seneca on affectus
“where being in love becomes more important than the pursuit of virtue”
“reason has been lost” - Gloyn
Seneca on friendship
“only once you detach from all desires can you build a genuinely selfless connection with another person” - Kreitner
Stoics on sex
“sexual intercourse is the very antithesis of reason” - Kreitner
Seneca vs stoicism
“they rejected or suppressed the emotions, certainly does not apply to Seneca”
“regulation of emotions rather than their denial” - Motto
Augustan reforms 18BC
aim to “revive morality” - D’Ambra
“recover the forgotten values, traditions and rites of the past” - Wallace-Hadrill
Ovid on marriage
“married three times and divorced twice before he was 30” - Hornblower
Ovid on love
Is subervise and humourous when on topics of love –> hard to pin down his serious opinion
“lack sincerity” - Bishop
Ovid on sex
“sexual pleasure must be enjoyed equally by the man and the woman” - Verstraete
Ovid on homoerotic relationships
“a few scholars have credited him with a strong aversion and hostility to homosexual love” - Verstraete
“one partner is no more than a victim to the others desire” - D’Elia
the issue is more to do with age “can not be sexually satisfying to both partners” - Verstraete
Peter Green on Ovid
“general contempt” for women
“over riding concern” for his own fame
