William Morris’s Revolutionary Narratives

Page references are to Three Works by William Morris, a paperback published by International Publishers with an introduction by A. L. Morton. I have included poem and chapter numbers for the convenience of those using different texts.


     A popular poet in his own day, William Morris is now more celebrated for his designs for wallpaper, textiles, and books as well as for his socialist activism. This political commitment shaped his three revolutionary narratives The Pilgrims of Hope (1885), A Dream of John Ball (1888), and News from Nowhere (1890), all of which foreground theme. As these works were meant to be agitprop weapons in service to radical social change, their persuasiveness is a reasonable focus for analysis, though not necessarily the primary criterion for judgement. As it happens, I have just read (or reread) the three in a 1968 edition from International Publishers with a very sympathetic introduction by the British historian A. L. Morton who approvingly quotes Morris’s choice of the word communism to describe his ideology. The political tendency of these books is thus generously overdetermined.
     Incongruous as the combination of his refined aestheticism and the cause of the working class may seem to some, Morris was, of course, far from alone in his day. Ruskin, Walter Crane, and Wilde were among others who sought to combine the love of beauty with that of justice, yet in each case tensions and incongruities lingered. Each naturally developed an idiosyncratic social vision in accordance with his own sensibility. Such variation is properly viewed not as a defect, but as an advantage, with every writer, indeed, in the broader sense, every citizen, adding, not assent to a predetermined party line, but an individual proposal that might, by respecting such differences, form a contribution to the construction of a socialism that approaches most closely to the goal of serving the needs of all.
     William Morris was born, like many radicals [1], into an affluent family, the scion of a wealthy bill broker, comparable perhaps to a Wall Street arbitrageur today. His emphasis on the beautiful as opposed to the practical and his fundamental lifelong distaste for industrialization might make him an unlikely militant; indeed, his own company made luxury goods, necessarily catering to the wealthy. Yet he was earnest and resolute in his writing, propagandizing while also organizing to bring about greater felicity for all. These three works provide views from different angles of his vision of that future and of the values that underlie the social and economic revolution Morris favored.
     The Pilgrims of Hope is transitional, Morris’s last verse narrative and his first major work in praise of socialism. In a modern pilgrimage, an idealized couple go not to Canterbury or Santiago de Compostela, but to Paris to join the short-lived 1871 Commune. To Morris the communards, while “they failed in conquering immediate material freedom for the people” nonetheless “quickened and strengthened the ideas of freedom by their courageous action and made our hope of to-day possible.” Their defeat was to him “the greatest tragedy of modern times.” [2] The French setting is a rare example of internationalism for Morris, for whom as for Blake the New Jerusalem was firmly set in “in England’s green and pleasant land.”
     The poem deals with events of the recent past and concludes with the protagonist and his son looking forward to the struggles of the future. Their devotion to change arises not so much from their own want as from their alienation from the avarice and ugliness of capitalism. While they are déclassé and must work for bread, their need for change arises from suffering that is not material, but rather psychological, or what some might call spiritual.
     Other significant patterns emerge as well that offset, undermine, or interrogate the poem’s forward-looking associations. Most fundamental is Morris’s pastoralism which recalls Blake as well as the entire romance tradition descending from Hellenistic times. The poem begins, repeatedly returns, and ends in an idyllic locus amoenus. One of these Edenic scenes occurs during the calm before the storm, prior to the party’s departure for France. [3] For all the narrator’s languorous delight in “a place of happy rest,” as he lies stretched out on the lawn, watching the haymakers, he is aware that his experience is reserved for those who “need not work.” In fact, as he gazes at the farm laborers, he muses, not on his solidarity with all productive workers, but rather on how “far from them have I drifted,” his radical consciousness severing his tie with the community rather than strengthening it. Similarly, even among the radicals at the meeting, the persona is pointedly said to be the “only one” to respond to the “Communist” speaker. “Bitter to many the message but sweet indeed unto me.” [4] Morris is apparently so strong a collectivist as to find himself isolated.
     While his opposition to industrialism and individualism may seem in tension with his devotion to socialism, he also introduces elements with little direct relation to social justice. This is hardly the place for a general consideration of the association of left-wing factions with such non-political beliefs and practices such as yoga, vegetarianism, and esotericism. Many have been drawn to the cause of socialism whom a ‘thirties Stalinist might condemn as “bourgeois individualists.” [5] While advancing the people’s movement was clearly the primary motive, the plot of The Pilgrims of Hope contains idiosyncratic elements such as the couple’s transformation into a ménage à trois, inevitably reminding the reader of Morris own domestic arrangements.
     The verse form is a long, loose, and mostly anapestic line with some iambs and, in general, six beats per line recalls Homer while retaining the caesurae and some of the alliteration of Old English verse. [6] While many have found the form cumbersome and particularly unfit for prosaic passages, the impression arises in part because we are today unaccustomed to lengthy verse narratives in any meter while such books could be bestsellers in Morris’s day. Morris is one of the last English poets who could write narrative in poetic lines as naturally as in prose, but of course the elder portion of his readership was the last broad audience with a taste for such things as Browning’s The Ring and the Book.
     The poem employs a good many familiar conventions of romance apart from rural idylls. The pattern of thwarted love ending in felicity is one, though here the conclusion is merely peaceful, with a decisive conflict (to be followed by presumably unending peace) projected into the future. The main character’s wise advisors, first the aged Frenchman, then the Communist speaker have seemed to many to be variants on the wizards or seers of legend. The device of making the hero a bastard who is descended from a ruling class father is similar to the many legendary lost princes and princesses, brought up in obscurity.
     Calling the trip to Paris a pilgrimage recalls the Middle Ages, and the goals of the lovers indeed seem more spiritual than political. The poem proceeds with sustained echoes of religious language, such as “tonight I am born again” or “How long, O Lord! how long?” [7] The most significant Christian theme, however, and one with a conflicted relation to revolutionary secularism, is the theme of redemptive suffering and self-sacrifice. Many passages indicate that the three comradely pilgrims each expects to find a Christ-like martyr’s end in the Commune. The hero is determined “in Paris to do my utmost, and there in Paris to die.” Though as it happens he survives, he had expected all three “there to die like men.” [8] Morris lauds “the lovers of earth” for having paradoxically exchanged the good things of life for the “bitter pain” of a transfiguring death in combat. “The day of the deeds and the day of deliverance is nigh." Nature itself is voluptuously entangled with this impending love-death. “Earth kindled to spring-tide with the blood that her lovers have shed.” [9]
     Their reward is in the intensity of their feelings, not the advances secured by their actions. It is only in accepting what he regards as his own “foredoomed” end that he can say, “at last of all days I knew what life was worth.” Like a religious convert, he exults, “yea the life had we attained to could never be unlearned.” [10] The revolutionaries in Paris exhibit sublime elation: “Such joy and peace and pleasure!” [11] Acting in solidarity provides a feeling of love that provides a motive markedly stronger than the recovery of a worker’s surplus value.
     The fourteenth century peasants in A Dream of John Ball (1888) are likewise heading into slaughter and betrayal, though here Ball’s status as a priest makes the religious coloration of motive natural. Speaking with the narrator, a visitor from the future, he mirrors Christ’s view, looking beyond crucifixion to resurrection and the second coming, and finds his own approaching end acceptable in view of the eventual victory of his followers’ cause. Ball’s resolute fortitude with full foreknowledge of his own impending doom (the historic Ball was in fact hanged, drawn, and quartered, and his head displayed on a pike) remind the reader of Achilles as well as Christ. Morris assimilates medieval piety to nineteenth century socialism by displacing the Christian emphasis on Christ’s divinity with a concept of all-embracing “fellowship” [12], a word that generally translates the Greek κοινωνία, familiar from the New Testament.
     A more convincingly integrated Christian socialism had, of course existed for many years, arguably since apostolic times. Morris’s rhetoric, however, does not guide his readers to Christ but rather uses Christian language to gild his politics with a numinous glow satisfying to readers, at least to those whose enthusiasms resemble his own. A contemporary reviewer thanked Morris for celebrating a nearly forgotten people’s hero and said with confidence that the poem provided “an earnest of the near triumph of the true cause.” The critic managed to praise even the qualities that might have given some revolutionaries pause, noting that, while most people come to conclusions only after “research and ratiocination,” Morris’s poetic inspiration amounts to a “spiritual insight that guides him straight to a truth.” Readers of many of Morris’s non-political romances might with some justice complain of the fact that a “vague illusive atmosphere of dream-land surrounds us all throughout the story,” but to the reviewer “this is just as it should be when the narrator is a poet telling his dream.” [13]
     News from Nowhere is so tendentious it is scarcely a novel at all. The sensational “news,” that all might live in harmonious plenty, so dominates the description of settings and of characters as to leave little room for surprise or subtlety. Yet Morris’s vision is sufficiently sweet, especially for readers who share his sensibility, to lend his utopia a specific charm. There is such a poignant hope in his insistence that beauty belongs to all people and to every day and that all work might be pleasure and all people brothers and sisters that the reader becomes as indulgent of the book’s vulnerabilities as the citizens of the new England are of the peculiarities of their time-traveling guest.
     Yes, Ellen seems a manufactured love interest, oddly insubstantial and disinterested as though she might be a creature of virtual reality. The book’s thematics can seem something of an apparition as well, particularly to readers less disposed to be friendly to Morris’s vision. Whatever is the mysterious source of power that seems to support industry and transportation with no apparent human effort? The book’s account of the transition to socialism is fairly detailed, yet no satisfactory explanation of the economic or political organization ever appears. How is production governed? Does anyone assign people their tasks? Does a magic Quakerly consensus seize hold once we are all on the same side?
     The role of the story as agitprop is nonetheless clear. It was published in Commonweal, the journal of the Socialist League, and, in fact Morris’s semi-pastoral ideals bore fruit in the Garden Cities Movement of Ebenezer Howard and others. [14] The year before News from Nowhere appeared, Morris published a story of its origin as “Under an Elm-tree.” [15] In this lyrical piece, none the less moving for its free hand with history, [16] Morris constructs the loveliest idyllic scene as he observes the hay-making that for him represented the glorious collective work of the countryside. The details of flora and fauna are so accurate, the enthusiasm clearly heart-felt, such that the author’s delight in nature convincingly becomes a motive for action, a conviction that he views “a country-side worth fighting for.” From imagining the valor of the Anglo-Saxons he turns to the oppression of the farm laborers before his eyes, dramatically conveyed in a few brief conversational exchanges.
     The germ of News from Nowhere stands out. “Suppose the haymakers were friends working for friends on land which was theirs, as many as were needed, with leisure and hope ahead of them instead of hopeless toil and anxiety . . .” Apart from this positive motive, Morris’s book was a polemic response to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887) which projects a bureaucratized, technocratic utopia, a sort of state capitalism in which society becomes the alpha monopoly. [17] To the twenty-first century about which he wrote, Bellamy's scheme savors at its best of Walden Two and at worst of paternalistic authoritarianism, but Morris was most of all outraged by Bellamy’s philistinism. Bellamy was an enthusiastic admirer of industrialization and vast, anonymous production. To him just as “the machine is truer than the hand, so the system . . .turns out more accurate results.” [18] The cash nexus that led to alienated labor in Marx’s analysis is invisible, and all are paid alike, but the human element so important to Morris, in the mark of the maker on the finished product and the affectionate linkage of fellow citizens, has no significance for Bellamy. It is hardly a surprise that Morris’s prose is lyrical and, on occasion, grandly rhetorical, and that his work bears a gilded margin of pure fancy, while Bellamy is practical, utilitarian and flat with an excess of common sense. His Dr. Leete in the future may be solicitous and polite, but he sometimes sounds arrogant and self-righteous.
     Morris, on the other hand, who thought beauty should be everywhere, enjoyed his French edition of Karl Marx's Das Kapital hand bound by Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson in turquoise goatskin with gilt tooling. And why not? Morris may have idealized his farm laborers, but he listened to their real complaints and based his socialism on the economic realities of his day. If he can detail an aesthetic paradise, and Bellamy a technocratic one, let a hundred others likewise add voices that each may contribute to a more fully human future for all.





1. Marx himself was the son of an upper middle class lawyer. The fathers of Trotsky, Mao and Castro were wealthy farmers, members of the class that might in Russia have been called kulaks. Those of us who participated in the movement of the sixties did not need the studies of Kenneth Kenniston to tell us that most of the young radicals, even the “red diaper babies,” enjoyed similarly privileged backgrounds.

2. These quotations from “Why We Celebrate the Commune of Paris,” Commonweal III, 62 (March 19, 1887).

3. Page 151, Poem VIII, “The Half of Life Gone.” The rural British variety of Paradise is briefly recalled in Poem XI “A Glimpse of the Coming Day.”

4. Page 138, Poem V “New Birth.” A capitalization in most of the twentieth century would indicate membership in an explicitly “Communist” party. For Morris did it indicate acceptance The Communist Manifesto or of Marx in general?

5. I will mention here only the emergence of the Fabian Society, the moderate socialist organization whose members were typically affluent and well-educated. Many shared such non-economic concerns as spiritualism and vegetarianism. The Theosophist Annie Besant was an early member and the Fabians themselves had evolved out of a group called the Fellowship of the New Life which declared its first principle to be “the subordination of material things to spiritual things.” Its founder Thomas Davidson advocated a philosophy he called apeirotheism, which had, of course, nothing to do with the Second International or any other political organization. Closer to the present, the potent countercultural strains of ‘sixties radicalism were and are obvious to all.

6. Morris was a translator, of course, from Old Norse, Old English, and Ancient Greek.

7. In page 138, Poem V “New Birth” and page 151, Poem VII “In Prison – And at Home.” Compare, among other passages, John 3:3, 1 Peter 1:3, Psalm 13, and Habakkuk 1:2.

8. From page 163 and 165, Poem X “Ready to Depart.”

9. Page 170, Poem XII, “Meeting the War Machine.”

10. Page 172, Poem XII “Meeting the War Machine.”

11. Page 170, Poem XII “Meeting the War Machine.”

12. Morris’s universal fellowship resembles the I. W. W.’s exalted concept of “One Big Union” (regularly so capitalized).

13. In To-Day No. 55, for June 1888. While this journal called itself the “Monthly Magazine of Scientific Socialism,” oddly, the very same year of its founding Jerome K. Jerome began publishing a journal with the same name (including the dash and the capital D). Unsurprisingly, Jerome’s proved the longer-lived.

14. When actually built, Howard’s developments encountered an obstacle. His clientele (like that for Morris’s design workshops) was necessarily affluent and jealous of their prerogatives, leading the planner to drop the most progressive aspects of his plans, most significantly cooperative ownership.

15. Commonweal, Vol 5, No. 182, 6 July 1889.

16. As did others of his time, Morris associates the Iron Age White Horse of Uffington with the time of King Alfred and the Viking invasions. He claims of an era that had not only lords and peasants, but masters and slaves as well, that “there was more equality amongst them than we are used to now.”

17. However it may strike us now, Looking Backward struck an American chord, leading to a nationwide organization and newspaper. With the rise of the Populist Party and Bellamy’s failing health, the movement, socialists who eschewed the term socialist, declined. It was a rare example of a radical organization that had little to do with the industrial working class.

18. Looking Backward, Ch 5, p. 43 in the Modern Library edition introduced by Robert L. Shurter.

Notes on Recent Reading 41 (McCarthy, Priestley, Ehirim)

The Stones of Florence (McCarthy)

     McCarthy provides a pleasantly idiosyncratic account not only of the art that makes the city such a popular destination and of the city’s history, but also of the Florentine character in the mid-twentieth century. Offsetting the oh-so-aesthetic sensibility Tuscany often inspires, she makes a point of the region’s practicality, business sense, and even plainness in contrast to the sensualism of Venice. She creates a vivid sense of fifties Florence, still under the war’s shadow, bustling with Vespas and equal measures of pride and irony.
     Her freshness and vinegar are physic to the viewer who has ever felt that Botticelli, Fra Angelico, and Filippo Lippi can be a bit sweet. In a certain mood Pater’s enthusiasm can be off-putting. It is then that McCarthy’s acerbic comments are particularly welcome. Florence attracts enthusiasts; it is refreshing to have this account by a cynical and sharp-eyed intellectual.
     The Stones of Florence reads as though it was a weaker sequel to her excellent Venice Observed. Nonetheless, the book deserves a place in the libraries even of those who are not travelers.


An Inspector Calls (Priestley)

     J. B. Priestley practiced a profession virtually obsolete today; he was a man of letters, the author of at least twenty-eight novels, as well as books of short stories, and a good many plays and films and four books of literary criticism aimed not at specialists, but the general reader. He wrote English Journey, a road book worthy of being placed next to Jack London’s The Road, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Responsible in addition for a number of works on history and politics, autobiography, and essays, he was an exemplary hard-working professional writer.
     He is most remembered today for one play of enduring popularity, a favorite of community theater, An Inspector Calls, written rapidly as a bit of agitprop as WWII ended and first performed in Moscow. The play’s success in repeated revivals by companies of all sorts is not due to its tendentious theme, however, but rather to its disguise as a conventional mystery story.
     The genres are not mixed without hazard. The trajectory of the unfolding of the inspector’s indictment is so clear that the viewer has little doubt what will happen by the end of the first scene. Lacking opportunity to surprise expectations in the main line of the story, he resorts to a switcheroo or two at the end instead.
     When Mr. Burling wonders why he put up with the inspector’s accusatory behavior and his independence from any legal forms, the audience is likely to wonder with him. Having been simply enough amused to watch the working out of a pattern clear from the start, they may have neglected to worry about realism. By the end of the play we are to accept the supernatural when it appears the inspector is not a regular police agent at all. Unconcerned with making arrests, he is nonetheless devoted to tending to the moral order. Once the resemblance to Everyman emerges, realism is no longer relevant. When the Burlings realize that it is possible that the various incidents for which they feel culpable may have involved not one woman, but many, this cleverly mirrors the thematic implication that they play is not about a single egregious case of persecution, but about the capitalist system.
     All very well, but why, then, does the final telephone call occur, letting them know that an inspector is on his way. Is what they had just experienced happening again? Is it happening now for real whereas it was before a phantom summoned up by a family full of guilty consciences? Is it all of a sudden about one woman again? What is going on? But before one can think, the curtain has fallen.


Prince of Monkeys (Ehirim)

     Nnamdi Ehirim’s first novel provides an overview of Nigerian life during the nineties, and the picture is disturbing, even tragic. The plot concerns the emergence into adulthood of his protagonist Ihechi and his circle of school friends in a profoundly corrupt society. The bleak depiction of Nigeria is intensified by the older characters’ memories of the Nigerian Civil War.
     The middle class Ihechi is anti-colonialist, yearning for a distinctly African form of communalism, leading him and his set to idolize Fela. Yet he is as scornful of the Ifa orisas to which his mother is devoted as he is to the Anglican Jesus. Given the political theme, the horrifying ending is perhaps inevitable, as each individual comes to grief, doomed simply for having independent judgment and conscience.
     The lurid character of the final scene is of a piece with the over-striving of some of the prose. Ornamental alliteration or figures of speech that seem to be for show alone occasionally distract the reader, but it is in a way exhilarating to see style and rhetoric for their own sake. Very likely West African fancy for oratory in the days before literacy influences even this young writer. The ample use of proverbs is without a doubt traditional (and European ones sneak in as well).

Platonic Love

After touching on the history of the concept of Platonic love, I present new translations of a selection of the lyrics traditionally attributed to Plato along with a few unsystematic comments.



     In popular usage we all know that Platonic love means love without sensual indulgence, love conceived as spiritual or intellectual rather than physical. Yet, without venturing on the seas of defining what Plato in fact thought about love, any reader of the Symposium or, indeed, most of Plato’s dialogues will surely notice that their scenes are lit with a warm erotic glow. His circles of Athenian men who congregate to enjoy each other’s mental play in conversation were doubtless at the same time enjoying each other’s bodies in and out of the local gymnasium. According to Diogenes Laertius the philosopher’s birth name was Aristocles, and he was given the sobriquet Plato (“broad”) by his trainer, Ariston the Argive wrestler, in tribute to his physique. [1] As the centuries passed, the notion of sexless, so-called Platonic love is repeatedly presented as an ideal, but also regularly ridiculed as absurd or impossible.
     In Lucian the residents of the Isles of the Blessed enjoy corporeal pleasures in spite of being deceased. They “see nothing indecent in sexual intercourse, whether heterosexual or homosexual, and indulge in it quite openly, in full view of everyone. The only exception was Socrates, who was always swearing that his relations with young men were purely Platonic, but nobody believed him for a moment, and Hyacinthus and Narcissus gave first-hand evidence to the contrary.” [2] Here Socrates sounds as though he is playfully coy, a gentleman offering a discreet if inaccurate disclaimer.
     The collocation “platonic love” (albeit in Latin) was first used by Marsilio Ficino in 1469 in his commentary on the Symposium to describe an ideal love of the type he enjoyed the poet Giovanni Cavalcanti whom he regularly addressed as “amico mio perfettisimo.” [3] For centuries scholars assumed that, due to Ficino’s Roman Catholicism, he could not have been a “sodomite,” though the tables have turned and more recent writers often treat his homosexuality as an established fact. In late fifteenth century Florence same sex relationships among men, though illegal, were exceedingly common. [4]
     In the first half of the seventeenth century, Plato was much à la mode in the court of Henrietta Maria, the consort of Charles I. An observer described the vogue: “The Court affords little News at present, but that there is a love call’d Platonick Love, which much sways there of late; it is a Love abstracted from all corporeal gross impressions and sensual Appetite, but consists in Contemplations and Ideas of Mind, not in any carnal Fruition. This love sets the Wits of the Town on work; and they say there will be a Mask shortly of it, whereof her Majesty and her Maids of Honour, will be part.”
     In this intellectual climate, phrase “platonic love” enters English usage in William Davenant’s The Platonick Lovers (1636). The play mercilessly satirizes Theander and Eurithea’s wholly spiritualized love as absurd, contrasting it to the natural love of their siblings, Phylomont and Ariola. A medicine eventually cures Theander who awakens then to the physical side of love, replacing his erstwhile courtliness with a conventional male chauvinist marriage, telling his beloved “Your charter's out of date, and mine/ Begins to rule.”
     At the end of the nineteenth century Oscar Wilde made a brave and spirited speech at his first trial defending “the Love that dare not speak its name" as “such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy.” (His admirers recall that later his pride caused him to give up, as Socrates had done, his chance for exile.) Wilde speaks of a “spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect,” but whether that spiritual purity precluded carnal relations the reader of the testimony at the writer’s trials may judge.
     If one is to believe Aelian’s Varia Historia [6] Plato had written epic and tragic poetry and was about to enter a tetralogy in the competition at the Dionysia when he happened to hear Socrates speak, whereupon he immediately abandoned literature for philosophy (though many would say he continued to write a sort of poetry during his entire career). None of his youthful works has been preserved for certain, but his name has been attached to a group of lyrics in Diogenes Laertius, Athenaeus, and in the Greek Anthology. The authorship of these poems was long treated with considerable suspicion by scholars but Plato the lyricist has, in the last fifty years, found more defenders, though most still date the lyrics considerably later than Plato’s time. [7] Whoever may have been the author, the fact that a group of love poems are attributed to Plato indicates that readers in later antiquity were quite willing to accept Plato as a romantic and sensualist, enjoying physical relations with both men and women.
     The simple existence of deep friendships among same-sex heterosexuals is enough to demonstrate the possibility of passionate attachments in which sexuality plays no clear part, and many would see a broadened sort of eroticism in virtually all affectionate relations. Some feel so faint a physical desire as to be almost asexual, while others may experience an actual aversion to physical love. The issue will not be here resolved. For my part it is sufficient to have a new look at these poems, so ardent, so selfish and generous, so direct and yet sophisticated, so very human. Whether Plato had anything whatever to do with them, in my fancy they enhance his reputation.



Poetry attributed to Plato

i.

᾿Αστέρας εἰσαθρεῖς, ᾿Αστὴρ ἐμός· εἴθε γενοίμην
οὐρανός, ὡς πολλοῖς ὄμμασιν εἰς σὲ βλέπω.

Greek Anthology VII.669, Diogenes Laertius (Plato)

You see the stars, my star. I wish I were
the sky that you might fill my many eyes.


     What grand sensual greediness! Heavenly bodies possess an extravagant but rather abstract beauty, and this compliment employs a well worked vein of convention, extending it in a novel and dramatic image. I think of the earthier Catullus 13 in which the poet confesses his lack of most resources for hospitality and asks Fabullus to bring supplies for a party, but assures him that it will be worth his while, because Catullus will contribute the scent lent his lover by “the Venuses and Cupids,” so intoxicating that his friend will wish to be “all nose.”


ii.

᾿Αστὴρ πρὶν μὲν ἔλαμπες ἐνὶ ζωοῖσιν ῾Εῷος·
νῦν δὲ θανὼν λάμπεις ῞Εσπερος ἐν φθιμένοις.

Greek Anthology VII.670, Diogenes Laertius (Plato)

You shone then like the star of dawn, alive,
among the wasted dead you’re Hesperus.


     This bit is paradigmatic of the Greek lyric pairing of pleasure and pain, circling every joy with a sense of loss. Well before Plato, Sappho had called love sweet-bitter (γλυκύπικρον). The coming-into-being and the passing away of the beloved is here assimilated to the grand procession of the heavens, known to be cyclical and apparently eternal. The poet borrows a bit of that cosmological glow to compliment the deceased. The word I translate “wasted” is derived from φθίω, meaning not so much completely gone as “wasted away,” “decayed,” “dwindling,” “fading,” suggesting the specifically Greek horror at becoming in Hades a weak and spectral shade. Achilles in the most memorable anti-heroic moment of the Odyssey (XI.488) cannot be consoled.  There is, however, a redemptive enthusiasm in the couplet above as well as a reassuring structural dualism. If death is to life as the evening star to the morning (which are in fact identical), where then is its bite? Only in an individual's loss of a dearly beloved.


iii.

τὴν ψυχὴν Ἀγάθωνα φιλῶν ἐπὶ χείλεσιν εἶχον·
ἦλθε γὰρ ἡ τλήμων ὡς διαβησομένη.

Greek Anthology V.78, Diogenes Laertius (Plato)

Kissing Agathon, my heart (the wretch)
came to my lips to try to pass to him.


     This was a familiar topos, appearing, for instance, in Rufinus who says that his lover in a kiss “draws out his soul from his very fingernails” (V, 14) and Meleagar (V, 171) whose lover “drinks up his soul” with a draft of wine. The imagery resembles Donne's describes in “The Extasie” in which the lovers’ souls are said to have emerged and “hung twixt her and me,” though here used more strictly as a witty compliment, suggesting that the poet’s disloyal soul would prefer to be housed in the more attractive Agathon. The name of the beloved, of course, signifies simply “the good,” allowing the verse to remain conveniently open to a metaphysical reading. Though I use the word “heart” since the issue is love, the word ψυχή is often translated as spirit or soul.


iv.

νῦν ὅτε μηδέν, Ἄλεξις, ὅσον μόνον εἶφ᾽, ὅτι καλός,
ὦπται, καὶ πάντῃ πᾶσι περιβλέπεται.
θυμέ, τί μηνύεις κυσὶν ὀστέον, εἶτ᾽ ἀνιήσει
ὕστερον; οὐχ οὕτω Φαῖδρον ἀπωλέσαμεν;

Greek Anthology V, 100 and Diogenes Laertius (Plato)

I only just said that Alexis is fair;
now everyone everywhere ogles that youth.
O heart, you toss to the dogs a bone
and then regret. I lost my Phaedrus so.


     This verse provides a glimpse into the competitive homoerotic arena of ancient Greece. In a tradition familiar in the blues in, for instance, “Woman be Wise,” which advises “don’t advertise your man,” the lover finds that his praise for the beloved has only brought him rivals. The implication that the intruders are “dogs” is properly vituperative, perhaps, but it entails the unfortunate suggestion that the lovely Alexis is a “bone.” With the mention of Phaedrus it becomes a four line soap opera.


v.

δάκρυα μὲν Ἑκάβῃ τε καὶ Ἰλιάδεσσι γυναιξὶ
Μοῖραι ἐπέκλωσαν δή ποτε γεινομέναις:
σοὶ δέ, Δίων, ῥέξαντι καλῶν ἐπινίκον ἔργων
δαίμονες εὐρείας ἐλπίδας ἐξέχεαν: [p. 60]
κεῖσαι δ᾽ εὐρυχόρῳ ἐν πατρίδι τίμιος ἀστοῖς,
ὦ ἐμὸν ἐκμήνας θυμὸν ἔρωτι Δίων.

Greek Anthology VII. 99 and D. L. (Plato)

Queen Hecabe and Trojan women wept,
The fates had ruled at birth that they should weep.
And after you had done great works and won,
Dion, the gods spilt all your grandest hopes.
You lie now honored in your airy town,
you who drove my heart so mad with love.


     The poet begins with what one might call an aerial view, surveying the legendary era to stress the inexorable workings of fate. Then the perspective moves to his own time in which the inscrutable turning of the wheel of fortune is illustrated by the passing of Dion who had been so victorious in life.


vi.

Ἀρχεάνασσαν ἔχω τὴν ἐκ Κολοφῶνος ἑταίραν,
ἧς καὶ ἐπὶ ῥυτίδων ἕζετο δριμὺς ἔρως.
ἆ δειλοὶ νεότητος ἀπαντήσαντες ἐκείνης
πρωτοπλόου, δι᾿ ὅσης ἤλθετε πυρκαϊῆς.
    

Greek Anthology VII, 217; Diogenes Laertius (Plato 31); and Athenaeus 589e

My love is Kolophon’s Arkheanasse,
O love lurks even in her wrinkled skin!
O fools who sailed her boat when she was young,
what flaming blazes you passed through with her!


     Here Plato appreciates the skills of a mature courtesan. His connoisseurship may be more literary than experiential, though Diogenes Laertius calls Arkheanasse his mistress. The woman’s name had already erotic associations, having earlier appeared in Sappho as well as later being used by Asklepiades to whom is attributed a very similar quatrain. Metaphors for sex using the language of both sailing and fire were commonplace, suggesting passion, intensity, danger, and excitement. [9]


vii.

μῆλον ἐγώ: βάλλει με φιλῶν σέ τις. ἀλλ᾽ ἐπίνευσον,
Ξανθίππη: κἀγὼ καὶ σὺ μαραινόμεθα.
    

Greek Anthology V.80.

An apple me -- and thrown to you for love!
Say yes,
o Xanthippe, both you and I will die.

     As both these lyrics indicate, the Greeks formalized the apple’s erotic significance in social ritual as well as in poetry. As a flirtation, one might toss an apple in the direction of a prospective lover; to accept the apple meant acceptance of its donor.  The current expression “the apple of my eye” preserves the usage.  One knows that apples, while beautiful and tasty, will in the end decay, heightening the urgency of seeking love in youth.

     The coincidence of the name with Socrates’ wife is accidental. Xanthippe was a vaguely aristocratic-sounding name, not uncommon. The theme would fit anyone.

viii.

ἡ σοβαρὸν γελάσασα καθ᾽ Ἑλλάδος, ἥ ποτ᾽ ἐραστῶν
ἑσμὸν ἐπὶ προθύροις Λαῒς ἔχουσα νέων,
τῇ Παφίῃ τὸ κάτοπτρον: ἐπεὶ τοίη μὲν ὁρᾶσθαι
οὐκ ἐθέλω, οἵη δ᾽ ἦν πάρος οὐ δύναμαι.

Greek Anthology VI, 1

I’m Lais the proud who laughed at Greece, when crowds
of young men thronged about my door. I give
my mirror to Love’s goddess. I cannot use it
now nor can it show me yesterday.


     One of the host of Greek lyrics lamenting the passing of youth, of beauty, ultimately of life, a loss that is the greater for lovers. The reader is reminded of Villon’s “Ballade Des Dames Du Temps Jadis” or Whitman’s more brutal “A Hand-Mirror.” A good many of the dedicatory epigrams in the Anthology carry similarly elegiac themes.
     Lais, perhaps the most celebrated hetaera of the Classical era is memorialized in a number of Anthology epigrams. [10]







1. III, 1. ἐγυμνάσατο δὲ παρὰ Ἀρίστωνι τῷ Ἀργείῳ παλαιστῇ: ἀφ᾽ οὗ καὶ Πλάτων διὰ τὴν εὐεξίαν μετωνομάσθη, Socrates himself clearly cared about keeping his body fit and criticized those who did not.

2. Chapter 2, A True Story (Ἀληθῶν Διηγημάτων) in Paul Turner’s translation.

3. De Amore. Ficino’s words are “amor platonicus.” His lover is not to be confused with the Troubadour Guido Cavalcanti who lived two centuries earlier.

4. According to Michael Rocke in Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence during the late fifteenth century homosexual and bisexual behavior was the norm in Florence though technically forbidden. He claims that the Office of the Night, charged with prosecuting homosexuals, over a period of two generations punished 17,000 Florentines out of a population of 40,000. The Florentines renewed ancient attitudes, endorsing primarily an older/younger couple while frowning on the effeminate and the pathic.

5. James Howell, Familiar Letters or Epistolae Ho-Eliana, 255.

6. 2.30.

7. As my topic more nearly concerns Plato’s reputation than Plato himself, I need not trouble myself about this question.

8. XI.488.

9. Dozens of examples from comedy are catalogued in Jeffrey Henderson’s essential The Maculate Muse (161 for nautical images, 177 for fire).

10. See Antipater Sidonius 7.218, Pompeius 7.219, Agathias 7.220, Julian 6.18-20, Paul Silentiarius 6.71, and Secundus 9.260.