Wilde's Salome as Femme Fatale

  

Wilde wrote Salomé in French, then worked with Lord Alfred Douglas to produce an English translation.  Strauss's opera uses a German version by Hedwig Lachmann.  My comments apply equally to each of these dramas.

    Salomé has little in common with Wilde’s other plays, those drawing room comedies with witticisms and ironic inversions falling thick and fast.  Salomé is less a play than it is a sustained tone poem on the theme of erotic desire, ratcheted up to such an intensity that the sudden murder at the end seems the only way out.  Herod, of course, obsesses over Salomé’s charms, while the young Syrian captain is driven by her to suicide, and the incestuous Herodias grouses with sexual jealousy in the background.  Salomé herself exhibits perhaps the most perverse and ardent compulsion of all, with her  insistence on kissing Iokanaan against his will, whether he be alive or dead. 

     Even without the masterful illustrations by Beardsley and such fevered later re-imaginings as Ken Russell’s 1988 film, the focus of the play is unquestionably desire.  Salomé’s transgressive character was recognized by the censors, and the play was initially banned by the Lord Chamberlain and later performed in a modified version.  When Mahler sought to stage Strauss’s opera in Vienna at the Staatsoper, he was blocked by the censors.   Widely admired by musicians and composers though with a dubious reputation among others, the opera was chosen as the benefit show at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907, but the reaction of prudes on the opera’s Board of Directors led to the show’s cancellation. [1]

     But what is the meaning of all this pent-up desire?  Perhaps the core motive, underlying the harmonics and variations, is the archaic masculine fear of female sexuality expressed in the African practice of female genital mutilation, in the orthodox Jewish idea of a niddah, and in legendary figures such as Lamia, the sirens, Lilith, and Melusina.  In the neolithic period, fertility goddesses seem to have been at the center of religious activities, but later, under monarchies with pantheon headed by a male ruler, the sexual Other was revalued.  Men’s marvel at childbirth combined with helplessness in controlling lust, the predictable anxieties of courtship, and, in many cases, guilt for oppressing women to generate a fear of female supernatural power.  The gift of Eden’s fruit, which doubtless originally signified the good things of the earth, became the cause of a calamitous Fall.  The course of the Odyssey is basically a route around one dangerous female after another in search of the positive example of Penelope as the loyal wife.  Morgan le Fay, succubi, and the real-life persecutions of accused witches

     This archetype descends through myth and then legend into fiction over the centuries without losing popularity.  At the time of Wilde’s play, the mere choice of Salomé as theme was provocative.  By the late nineteenth century her story had become a favorite theme of Symbolist and Decadent authors, notably in Moreau’s paintings and Huysmans’ fiction, but also in works by Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Massenet.  Salomé provided a theme lurid enough to satisfy transgressive tastes, yet remaining largely within Biblical tradition. 

     This notoriety is, in fact, however, only half of the dialectic.  The story in the gospels of Mark and Matthew, though they do not name her, tell the tale of Herodias’ daughter asking for the head of John the Baptist in a narration clearly meant as a sort of lesser crucifixion, a contest of good against evil in which the saints’ martyrdom serves a Providential purpose.  Josephus mentions her as the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas [2], but does not relate the story about John.  Though the princess of Herod’s court is not named until centuries after her time, a certain Salomé, identified in the late Book of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, by Bartholomew the Apostle, and called “Salomé the temptress” is named among those visiting Christ’s empty tomb.

     Unsurprisingly, she is made a heroine even a sort of feminist by a good many recent critics.  The lead perhaps is taken by Kate Millet in her ground-breaking Sexual Politics (1970) when she notes Wiilde’s own identification with the temptress and characterizes the play as a whole as a drama of “homosexual guilt and rejection.”  Before long one critic declared "The Jewish Princess Was a New Woman" and another argued that the play was "a devastating fin-de-siecle attack on the conventions of patriarchal culture."  This attitude influenced views of the politics of the piece, and it became possible to redeem even the ethnocentric stereotypes by claiming that Wilde had written “an Orientalist play that questions the very premises of Oriental discourse.” [3]

     In fact, however, Salomé’’s actions are irredeemably reprehensible.  She is selfish and her passion perverse.  The aesthetic glow that lingers about her derives from sexual energy heightened by the late nineteenth century Romantic notion of the wicked that descended from the popular taste for the Gothic some decades earlier. [4]  Evident in Baudelaire’s title Fleurs du Mal, Verlaine’s poètes maudits, and the slightly later career of Aleister Crowley, the aesthetics are in fact not far distant from the fondness for Nazi imagery among outlaw bikers or for Satanist pentangles among heavy metal fans.  Thus, Salomé’’s behavior is first of all titillating with little or no moral implication. 

     The contemporary readings of Wilde’s protagonist derive from two new complementary innovations he had introduced into the old story.  On the one hand, Wilde emphasizes Salomé’’s agency by stressing her independence from her mother who in the gospels is responsible for asking for John the Baptist’s death.  In the play Salomé acts like a willful teen-ager and ignores her mother (who does ultimately endorse her plan).  This strengthening of her character allows some to see her as an admirable heroine, yet it is decisively undercut by her sudden and violent death at the end ordered by Herod who had earlier seemed quite under her control.  Thus the prerogatives of the patriarchy are reasserted, and the possibility emerges of treating the princess as a tragic hero.

     Such a treatment, though, is unlikely to occur to the viewer whose appreciation of the play more likely resembles that of the listener to a formal concert piece setting forth a theme followed by variations, all charged with emotional electricity.  The image clusters occur and revur like leitmotifs; mentions of the moon, doves, flowers, and the gaze that fixes the other come and go like the corridors and the verbal phrases in Last Year at Marienbad.  The play as a whole may arise, as some have said, from Wilde’s own “forbidden” loves, seen as vicious by the homophobic, but in the end it is a sustained meditation on the dynamo of erotic power itself, whatever the origin or object, here so dramatically explosive as to ruin the protagonist.  Plato himself, to whose loves Wilde appealed so ingenuously in court, would have recognized the “madness” in which the characters are caught. [5]  In the end Wilde’s Salomé is a sensual and emotional experience far more than an intellectual one.  It is less a cautionary parable of a femme fatale than it is a dramatic simulation of sexual excitement, no less powerful for the fact that it is all but universal.

 

 

 

1.  Among those shocked at Strauss’s opera was J. P. Morgan’s daughter Louisa.  The work finally came to the Wiener Staatsoper in 1918 but the Metropolitan did not stage it again until 1934.  Apart from wealthy board members, reaction in New York included the reviewer from the Musical News to whom the “conception of the story is repugnant to Anglo-Saxon minds (“Comments on Events: Salome in New York,” 32 [March 9, 1907]).  This article also quotes several other opinions, among them a writer in the New York Musical Courier who supported the play and feared that its cancellation would make New York a “laughing-stock” in Europe.

2.  Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews (Book XVIII, Chapter 5, 4).

3.  See Jane Marcus’ essay in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library 78 (1974).  The next quotation is from Elliot I. Gilbert, “’Tumult of Image’: Wilde, Beardsley, and Salome,” Victorian Studies 26 (1983) and the last from Yeeyon Im “Oscar Wilde's "Salomé": Disorienting Orientalism,” Comparative Drama, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter 2011).   For a more subtle reading see Helen Tookey, “’The Fiend that Smites with a Look’: the Monstrous/Menstruous Woman and the Danger of the Gaze in Oscar Wilde’s Salome,” Literature and Theology Vol. 18, No. 1 (March 2004).

4.  Wilde was far from alone in finding the theme attractive.  There was in fact a bit of a vogue for Salomé during the period, expressed in poetry by Heinrich Heine, Stephane Mallarmé and William Butler Yeats, fiction from Joris-Karl Huysmans, Gustave Flaubert, and Jules Laforgue, and visual art by Gustave Moreau, Lovis Corinth, and Henry Ossawa Tanner.

5.  In the Phaedrus Plato explicitly says that love is madness, yet he adds that it may nonetheless bring the greatest of blessings (sec. 244).

The Meaning of Art for Art’s Sake

 

Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes; those in parentheses refer to page numbers or other divisions of quoted texts.

 

     The phrase “art for art’s sake” is so familiar that one may fail to notice that its accepted meaning is not explicit but rather is conveyed by indirect implication.  Art, after all, can scarcely be altogether autotelic since without human beings art can have no value or meaning whatever. [1]  It is absurd to imagine that a score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony would serve any end at all were there no people to hear and appreciate it.  When a critical statement maintains the worth of “art for art’s sake,” it really means that art is justified, not for some abstract theoretical inherent worth, but because it provides pleasure to people. [2]  The very evasion of this direct statement looks like a kind of residual puritanical euphemism masking hedonism [3], though pleasure, of course, has many varieties, from simple entertainment through sensuality to experiences of the sublime.  The phrase implies as well a criterion for evaluating works of art that foregrounds form and style rather than content or theme. 

     The original occurrences of the expression, though, bore a rather different meaning.  Apparently, the phrase first appears in Benjamin Constant’s account of a visit with Schiller and English expatriate Henry Crabb Robinson (a student of Schelling) [4] whom he recorded as declaring directly that art could have no function or end outside itself without being deformed.  Constant specifically mentions the roots of the concept extending through Schelling to Kant.  Though pleasure does play a role in determinations of beauty, the German Idealist lineage would be unsatisfied with either pleasure alone as the raison d'être of art or the pursuit of purely abstract formal value.   Kant and Schelling would claim for art a truth, indeed a truth more profoundly true than most.  The phrase, once forged, was developed and mutated in subsequent authors.

    The phrase next appeared in print in an 1818 essay by Victor Cousin that insisted “We must have religion for religion’s sake, morality for morality’s sake, as with art for art’s sake...the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.” [5]   Cousin’s  commonsense “Eclecticism” began from a material base.  “Man is sensible to pleasure and pain: he shuns the one and seeks the other.” (lecture 12)  He declared that “art is the free reproduction of the beautiful” with no other end in mind.  “The sole object of art is the beautiful.  Art abandons itself as soon as it shuns this.” (lec. 9)   While he recognized the autonomy of aesthetics in statements like these, his philosophy continued to link the beautiful to the good, the true, and the divine, so, unsurprisingly, ulterior considerations of morality and spirituality linger in spite of his formula “l’art pour l’art.”  

     Causin emphatically denies that beauty entails desire.  For his belated neo-Platonism aesthetic the experience of beauty is not limited to pleasure (which he trivializes by calling it “the agreeable”) or indeed to sensation or to sensual imagination at all.  It is rather based in reason and indeed for him ethics are likewise aesthetic, because the good, the true, and the beautiful are, on the most sublime level, all one. (lec. 6)

     It is in the cheeky preface of Gautier to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin that the line blossoms into its principal role as a controversialist slogan of the aesthetic party.  It is as a cri de coeur that it has survived to the present.  Its advocates have energetically opposed the traditional role of art in teaching morality (and the more subtle claims of humanists that art is uplifting or ennobling) and the complementary claims of reformers that art must subserve the goal of social justice. 

     Gautier there maintains categorically that “there is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use.” (9) With the bohemian impudence that endeared him to Pound, Gautier ridicules attention to “virtue,” calling her “a very pleasant grandmother, but a grandmother.” [10]  He would prefer to gaze with pleasure on Dorinne’s bosom (47) and in general recommends a hedonistic life devoted to the bottle, the pipe, and Pantagruel (48).  The contrast with Cousin’s discomfort around desire and pleasure could hardly be more marked.  He seeks to êpater la bourgeoisie as he cheerfully identifies himself as “the most enormously immoral individual in Europe or elsewhere.” (53)  He muses on the progress possible were a “large reward” provided for anyone who could invent a new pleasure.”  In sum, he declares, “to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful thing on this earth.” (83)

    Whistler’s lecture “Ten O’Clock,” for which he sent formal invitations as though for a dinner party at an unusual hour, declared his artistic notions with similar high spirits.  For him art is “selfishly occupied with her own perfection only” (4), having nothing whatever to do with a benefit of any kind (5).  He will have nothing to do with any literary or narrative reading of paintings (16) or an educational end (21).  While he does pause to ridicule Oscar Wilde as a clotheshorse (23), for him the value of art is formal.  “The painter’s poetry,” for Whistler, consists of his arranging “form and colour into such perfect harmony, that exquisiteness is the result.”  With such creativity, or “invention,” and not from profound ideas or novel insights, the artist’s work gains a “dignity” and “nobility of thought.” (17)  He maintained in “The Red Rag” (reprinted in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies) “Art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies.’”

     Whistler’s lecture, like Gautier’s preface is lit with high spirits and fleering if dry remarks.  He expresses discomfort at having to “appear in the role of the Preacher” (3) and imagines a scene in which “the Gods stand by and marvel, and perceive how far away more beautiful is the Venus of Melos was their own Eve.” (15)  Unabashedly elitist, he deplores that art has become of late “a sort of common topic for the tea-table” useful for signaling one’s “culture and refinement.” (3)  Yet he mocks art historians as well who “frequent museums and burrow in crypts,” seeking to “establish with due weight” unimportant reputations” and in the process reduce Art to statistics (18-19).  Far from hoping like William Morris to bring art to everyone, he wishes to “lift from their [the public’s] shoulders this incubus of Art.” (22) 

     In both Gautier and Whistler, the formal pleasures of art are its sole reward.  Their sassy tone is merely the seasoning indicating their dissent from the age-old formula naming delight and instruction as art’s goals.  That many thought this belief arose from an artistic milieu that not only considered immorality irrelevant to aesthetics, but was suspected of actually cultivating sin only attracted more attention to these writers.  Indeed, the poses of many among the decadents and aesthetes of the time often encouraged this view.

     So, far from being claiming that art is entirely autotelic, the phrase “art for art’s sake” was used to assert the value of the pleasure beauty inspires and the primacy of form over content.  What the expression most often signifies is that pleasure, whatever form it may take -- whether simple entertainment, inspiration, or spiritual afflatus, is the only “final cause” of art and that this value consists arises from purely abstract formal patterning.  An examination of nineteenth century uses of the phrase indicates that the line was employed as a provocation to the bourgeoisie by counter-cultural artists eager to disassociate themselves from conventional respectability.  Strong reactions condemned the notion.  For instance, an unsigned editorial in The Art World was titled “Art for Art's Sake: Its Fallacy and Viciousness.” [8]  This, of course, is precisely the reaction the artists were seeking. 

 

 

 

 

1.  Originally “l’art pour l’art,” in Stefan George “Kunst für die Kunst.”  The use of “ars gratia artis” in the MGM logo must strike the viewer as ironic in light of Hollywood cinema’s undisputed profit motives.  I ignore here a certain generic truth in the proposition in the sense that not only every creative or intellectual field, but indeed every technical skill, can be judged only by its own standards, applied by practitioners.  Thus only a carpenter may fully appreciate the skill of another carpenter and only a highly trained practicing musician can best evaluate another’s performance.

2.  In The Sense of Beauty Santayana defines beauty as “objectified pleasure.”

3.  In a seminar, with five or six other graduate students, all of whom had presumably pursued literary study because they love to read, I once ventured to suggest that pleasure was a motive for consuming art.  The professor drily responded, “Mr. Seaton, we don’t talk about our personal lives here.”

4.  Benjamin Constant, Journal intime, Jan. 1804.  “Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own.”  (‘L'art pour l'art, sans but, car tout but dénature l'art. Mais l'art atteint au but qu'il n'a pas.”)  The same sentiment is recorded in Robinson’s own journals. 

5. Du Vrai, du beau, et du bien [Sorbonne lectures, 1818] (1853) pt. 2.   These talks had originally appeared as Cours de philosophie professé à la faculté des lettres pendant l'année 1818.

6.  Mademoiselle de Maupin, translated  by C. T.Brainard (1900), p. 82.

7.  James A. McNeil Whistler, Ten O’Clock, a Lecture, 1916, p. 4.

8.  Vol. 2, No. 2 (May, 1917).

The Radical Aesthete: Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism

 

     Though only ten years have passed, some will recall already with nostalgia the iconic poster for Occupy Wall Street depicting a poised dancer, a leg raised in an arabesque atop Arturo Di Modica’s charging bull in bronze representing the fierce voracity of the capitalist class. [1]  The charm of the image arose from its play with structural oppositions: female/male, beauty/power, aesthetic/mercenary, in form sinuous/blocky, in attitude poised and elegant/aggressive and angry.  Such a dramatic contrast between art and money finds acceptance both among philistines to whom only wealth-seeking is a worthy activity and intellectuals and artists uninterested, even scornful, of economic activity.  For the former the arts at best are an optional taste and for the latter business could occupy only mediocre minds.  Friction between these attitudes periodically emerges, for instance, in the twentieth-century tensions between the Surrealists and the Communists in Europe or the Yippies and, say, Progressive Labor activists in the U. S.  

     One could scarcely imagine a more passionate advocate for the aesthetic than Oscar Wilde.  His flaunted hedonism and transgressive wit as well as his own class background and his place in society might suggest that he would be likely to be a defender of aristocratic privilege, but Wilde manages to turn this expectation, like so many others, on its head.  His “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” [2] succeeds as a novel and effective polemic for economic revolution without abandoning the characteristic epigrams and ironies familiar from his plays.  Moreover, he was able to construct a coherent argument for socialism while maintaining his provocative aestheticism. [3]  In a quite Wildean inversion, in his most important points he is on the mark when out of his field in politics, while his notions about art which he had made central to his value system, are neither reliable nor consistent.  

    He makes the essential point with appropriate broadness.  As capitalism is the source of poverty and other social ills, it must be overturned to make a real change. Wilde aims to “reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.” The first principle of the new society must be socialized ownership of the means of production.  “Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community.”  This alone is crucial; all else may be settled by democratic means. 

     His motive is to beautify his country, but this requires an alteration in the economic system.  The state of the urban slums in Wilde’s time was horrific.  Reader of not only Marx but also Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell will know the desperate straits in which many ordinary people found themselves.  Even for those with employment, workers are “compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want.”  The result of these savage conditions is a poverty-stricken class possessing “no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilisation, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life.”  One can not avoid seeing such wretches, “tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night’s unclean lodging.”  To him it is nearly incredible that “a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.”  If they do, it is surely because “misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering.”

     The affluent, on the other hand, due to their leisure, are “the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation.”  Yet at the same time, the system is profoundly unsatisfying even to the ruling class.  “The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralizing.”  Among its deleterious effects is to make the rich man tiresome.  “Property not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore.”  For Wilde’s posing persona, nothing could be worse.  Yet, like most of the essay, it is not in the end a joke, for who could really be interested in enriching the boss, or in the financial concerns of another at all?  Display of wealth or designs on wealth are virtually always in poor taste.   Apart from requiring the exploitation of others the pursuit of money is ultimately disappointing even when successful, as it is based on a fundamental error.  “It has made gain not growth its aim.  So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.”

    Though quite willing to sound like a genteel snob, Wilde’s motive is in fact that of all reformers whether they consider themselves aesthetes or not, a distaste for the sheer ugliness of capitalism which is, after all, centered in a repellant selfishness.  Yet at the same time he realizes that the game is in earnest and recognizes that such progress as the end of feudalism has come only through armed struggle, going so far as to say in his consistently aesthetic rhetoric, that “The very violence of a revolution may make the public grand and splendid for a moment.”  All force is not equivalent: “To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendée voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism.”  Apart from the suggestion that revolution is likely to arrive only through armed struggle (in contrast the programmatically gradualist Fabians [4]), though, Wilde says nothing about how the change in economic system is to arrive.   

     He quite properly attacks even the most well-meaning charity for prolonging rather than ending the system that produced the suffering the philanthropist seeks to ameliorate.  To him such efforts are “ridiculously inadequate” if not “impertinent.”  Reformers who call for anything less than social ownership of the means of production are displaying self-righteous vanity.  “It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.”  In the ringing tones of the soapbox, Wilde asks, “Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table?  They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it.”  For Wilde what is ugly is therefore “immoral” and the Victorian slums offered plenty of nastiness, both aesthetic and ethical.

     If Wilde’s militance is explicit, so is his libertarianism.  He states categorically that “No Authoritarian Socialism will do.”  He adds “Authority and compulsion are out of the question.  All association must be quite voluntary.  It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.”  (The reader notices the similarity of the use here of “fine,” with the earlier cited “grand and splendid.”)  Any authoritarian system would result, he says, in “Industrial Tyranny” as oppressive as that of the robber barons.  The twenty-first century readers may consider Wilde’s warnings well-considered, having witnessed Leninist “democratic centralism,” Stalinist and Maoist cults of personality, and even more extreme “ultra-left” manifestations such as the Khmer Rouge or the Sendero Luminoso. 

     He aligned himself with Kropotkin’s anarchism, calling the Russian "a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia.” [5]  The keynote of the essay, the identification of individualism with socialism, while yielding insight with its provocative novelty generates weaknesses as well.  Some might worry that there is a contradiction in his definition: “The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour.”  This goal, so casually tossed off, ignores the tension (at best) between centralized planning and personal liberty.  Yet the reader does not notice in Wilde’s succeeding phrases, so balanced as to seem inevitable.  “The State is to make what is useful.  The individual is to make what is beautiful.”

     In general Wilde is little concerned with either the mechanisms that might bring a socialist revolution or the governing principles he would find ideal thereafter.  Much of his dreamier utopian rhetoric arises from his newfound anarchist loyalties.  It is all very well to say “Nothing should be able to rob a man at all” or “all authority is quite degrading,” but such absoluteness is elusive in practice.  It may be that best government for artists is none at all when it comes to encouragement of propaganda and discouragement of criticism, but many might find it a different matter if the issue were regulation of copyright and even outright social support of the arts as for other industries.  Wilde is surely willfully ignoring his own knowledge of human nature when he declares with confidence, “When each member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is not interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any interest to him to interfere with anyone else.”  Perhaps having recently read Engels on The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, he tells us that “in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.”  Not just jealousy, it seems, will die out under socialism, but with it all forms of authority and of punishment.  As a part of ending coercion, “marriage in its present form must disappear” when women cease to be a commodity. 

     Wilde sounds something like an anarcho-syndicalist; he would have been sympathetic to the program of the I.W.W. which likewise envisioned a sort of voluntary organization of labor.  Considering the sensational success of his lecture to the miners in Leadville, Colorado [5], he might in fact have found a comrade in Big Bill Haywood.  Wilde’s program, however, unlike the Wobblies’, can only be workable with the assumption that unpleasant tasks can be all but eliminated by automation, a circumstance that would certainly be liberating were it possible.   Wilde claims that all “pleasureless activities” are “mentally and morally injurious to man.”  “Man,” he argues, “is made for something better than disturbing dirt.  All work of that kind should be done by a machine.” 

     Wilde maintains that the condition of the workers in the industrial age is paradoxically even worse than in times of less technology.   “As soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve.”  The root of the problem is capitalism.  “The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants.”  This analysis is quite accurate; the flaw is in the expectation that automation can render labor entirely optional and allow every individual to do as he or she pleases. 

     Fanciful as it sounds, this presumption is not peculiar to Wilde.    William Morris’s News from Nowhere, which had appeared the year before Wilde’s essay, likewise envisioned an end to marriage, schools, and coercion.  He, too, thought the magic of technology could undo the condemnation to labor laid upon Adam in the third book of Genesis, and his imagined future, as beautiful as Wilde’s, exhibits a similar dubious optimism. 

     While it may be true that modern people in developed countries spend more hours in work than hunter-gatherers, these utopian hopes are not wholly unfounded.  The mere fact that at the time of the Revolution over 90% of Americans were farmers whereas today the figure is only 1.3% indicates that our basic needs are today being met by the labor of a very few.  In the present inefficient system, another 12% are industrial workers.  Many of the rest are producing nothing but rather simply manipulating symbols on computer screens. 

     Prominent economists during the twentieth century shared portions of this happy vision of the of work’s coming obsolescence.  John Maynard Keynes in the ‘thirties predicted a fifteen-hour work week [6] and in the ‘fifties John Kenneth Galbraith said that automation was likely to “eliminate toil as a required economic institution.” [7]  During the ‘sixties, no shortage of prophets proclaimed the end of work, and, in more recent years, concepts such as the guaranteed annual income suggest that it is no longer necessary for everyone to have a job at all. [8]  Still, even a sympathetic reader must be troubled by Wilde’s easy progress from acknowledging that “civilisation requires slaves” to the prediction, vague and grand, that “there will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs.”   

     If Wilde may be faulted for a failure to explain either how socialism might come to Britain or how production would then be organized, he must as well be credited with the novel insight fundamental to his essay: that socialism offers freedom and individualism in contrast to the slavish conformity required by capitalism.  Though Wilde will at times toss off whimsical throw-away paradoxes that bear little scrutiny, the equation of socialism and individualism is at once the most striking witty inversion of the essay and the heart of Wilde’s argument, the notion on which the practical value of Wilde’s ideas must stand or fall.

     This theme, announced with a bang in the first sentence which labels “living for others” as “sordid,” is repeated throughout.  “Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism.”  Under capitalism the individual has “absolutely of no importance.”  The promise offered by change is as clear as the current defect: “With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism.”  “Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to.”  This individualism will have nothing in common with exploitation; rather, it seems to Wilde to be altogether benevolent, allowing one to “freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him,” and thus to experience the true pleasure and joy of living.”

     Wilde’s paean to evolutionary individualism, though using the new and “scientific” language of evolution, in fact betrays his enthusiasm more than it provides evidence. 

“It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage mutilation.  In fact, it does not come to man with any claims upon him at all.  It comes naturally and inevitably out of man.  It is the point to which all development tends.  It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow.  It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life quickens.  And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man.  On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him.  It does not try to force people to be good.  It knows that people are good when they are let alone.  Man will develop Individualism out of himself.  Man is now so developing Individualism.  To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical.  Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism.  Where this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or of death.”

     Wilde’s strongest confirmation of this marvelous individualism is to cite artists as individualists who “have been able to realise their personality more or less completely.”  Absurdly claiming that “not one of these men ever did a single day’s work for hire,” he imagines that freedom from wage slavery will similarly illuminate the life of everyman, unleashing “the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally.”  The process is self-enforcing, since becoming oneself will also give a person pleasure.   “It is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop itself.”  This will entail as well a flowering of loving actions since “when man has realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously.” 

     The reader may relish the wit of formulations like those in this passage.

 

A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress.  But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner.  Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one’s neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid. 

 

Wilde claims that under this new order everyone will realize the greatest and most natural potential possible.  Consumerism will come to an end since “Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things.  One will live.  To live is the rarest thing in the world.”  One can hardly avoid concurring with Wilde’s regret “that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating and delightful in him. —in which, in fact, he misses”

     Wilde’s concluding line hints in a way at his willful impracticality.  “The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.”  He may have in mind such lines as these from the well-known speech of Pericles during the Peloponnesian War.

The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. [9]

     Wilde is well aware that he is propounding unlikely claims.  To his sensibility that fact simply provides evidence of his imagination.  Utopianism, far from useless fantasy, is the motive for every step forward.  “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.  And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.  Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”

     A further defect of Wilde’s essay deforms its structure without affecting his central points.  Much of the latter half of “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” is devoted to a lengthy and polemical treatment of art with little relevance the socioeconomic topic under discussion.  In addition Wilde’s primary contention here, which he goes out of his way to demonstrate, is simply wrong.  Wilde characterizes art as the idiosyncratic product of a wholly individual vision, “the unique result of a unique temperament.  Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is.  It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.”  Wilde is quite emphatic on this point: “if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.” [10]  In his view readers and viewers must become more like writers and painters.  They need only be receptive.  “Now Art should never try to be popular.  The public should try to make itself artistic.”  To him popular taste is regularly lack of taste.

     His assumptions ignore the fact that art always confirms as well as criticizes presuppositions; it abides by some conventions while twisting or ignoring others.  All art is at once derivative and innovative, just as every verbal expression is based on what the speaker has heard before while not exactly reproducing the earlier utterance, even if the words are unchanged.  Yet works and genres of art vary tremendously in their place on the continuum that stretches from predictability to novelty.  Oral literature and folk materials in earlier times and works produced as commodities for a mass audience will tend toward the familiar side of the spectrum, while works of “high art,” produced for a sophisticated elite, are more likely to be transgressive in both form and content.  Wilde ignores the very real function of art to confirm and reinforce social norms, insisting that every individual vision is inherently beautiful and worthy and novel as well.  He goes further yet, finding the artist’s individualism a summum bonum, and yet condemning as “egotism” any criticism from a member of the public with little regard for the individuality of the consumer of art.  By insisting on making novelty and self-expression the criteria for excellence, he ignores the value of a good deal of human artworks and a portion of the rest.

     He is motivated in part by the appealingly decadent reputation of art for art’s sake, but also by his counter-culture instincts.  He liked to épater la bourgeoisie when that very idea was more or less fresh [11] and gamely tossed back the suggestions that some works (such as his own) were “immoral,” “morbid,” and “unhealthy.”  The essay was published five days after he was imprisoned.  Wilde’s “Sonnet to Liberty” notes that the “roar” of the masses, even their “reigns of Terror” and “great Anarchies” “mirror my wildest passions like the sea.”  For Wilde there can be little doubt that the personal was indeed unavoidably political.

     The contribution of Wilde’s essay is twofold: by a sort of rhetorical jiu-jitsu he reverses the widespread misconception that collectivism restricts freedom and he ties the pursuit of socialism which some may question to the pursuit of pleasure from which dissent is less likely.  And he is quite right.  The effete writer agrees with the Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 that socialism offers liberation not only from want but from alienation as well.  If liberty means anything, it requires an end to exploitation.  One cannot be happy while another is constantly picking his pocket.  Even if labor fell short of being the fulfilling joy that Wilde thinks possible, it would at least no longer be wage slavery. 

     The essay has lasting value for both philosophy and politics as well as for literature.  The fact that it is most wise when speaking of politics and most mistaken when treating art is a contradiction Wilde himself might have relished.  “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” sketches out how art and the individual could be the ally of ethics and the masses.  In the ‘sixties I liked to say that I was not agitating for the benefit of Blacks or the poor, but for my own.  I like to imagine Wilde, in all his lace and velvet, demonstrating for Black Lives Matter.  He surely would have found our recent president unspeakably vulgar.  His élan is enough to excuse his rosy hopes.  If some epigrams fall with a bit of a thud, others generate new knowledge.  Here, in particular, Wilde’s clear-sighted recognition that social ownership if the means of production is a precondition for individual liberty emerges from his inversions of his readers’ expectations.

     Wilde is an entertainer.  His writing is animated with charm and wit, ornamented with figures of speech, and gilded by a gleaming utopianism.  Let there be many socialisms, and among them the great-hearted self-interest advocated by Wilde. 

 

1.  Further tropes include a number of satiric variations of the original Adbusters image: one replaced the poster’s advice “bring tents” with “bring deodorant,” while others substituted different figures for the dancer: Bernie Sanders, an executive with an attaché case.  The trope that attracted the most attention was Kristen Visbal’s 2017 Fearless Girl bronze facing the bull, which, though it had been produced as part of an advertising campaign for an investment management firm, was considered feminist and progressive by many.

2.  The essay was published first in the Fortnightly Review for February of 1891 as “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”  When it was issued as a book in 1895 the title was simply The Soul of Man, but the longer version has been preferred in most reprintings since.

3.  Aesthetic and political concerns were combined by other Victorians.  Among the first to come to mind are John Ruskin and Bernard Shaw.  Perhaps apart from Wilde the best example is William Morris.

4.  Wilde wrote this piece shortly after hearing Shaw lecture.  Shaw reportedly reacted, commenting “it was very witty and entertaining, but had nothing whatever to do with socialism.”

5.  In De profundis.  Kropotkin expressed in return a sympathetic interest in Wilde’s work. 

6.  Leadville was a boom town at the time, full of bars, brothels, and firearms.  Wilde provides an entertaining account in Impressions of America which includes the supposed barroom sign “Please do not shoot the pianist.  He is doing his best.”  As a gag about America, this line had already been circulating in Britain at least since 1879, first described as posted by a church organist in Arkansas, but then relocated west to California but still in a church in another English paper, and in 1882 in the Washington Post it is placed in a Leadville church.  Wilde simply adaptedz the proven joke to his uses. 

7.  Keynes, ”Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930) and Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958).

8.  Among many more recent works exploring the idea are Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (1995) and Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015) by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.

9.  This is Richard Crawley’s translation.

10.  The passage is really quite harsh.  “They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.”

11.  The phrase has been used by a number of authors including Dumas père (in Le père la ruine).  The earliest usage seems to be in Alexandre Privat d'Anglemont’ Paris Anecdote (1855), p. 85.  In 1854 the phrase “il faut épater le public" appeared in Aristippe Felix Bernier de Maligny’s Nouveau Manuel Théatral: Théorique et Pratique.

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.