A SCIENCE OF EROTICS: PLATO, (SYMPOSIUM)

Eryximachus, a speaker at Plato’s drinking party and a contemporary of the author of The Sacred Disease, practised medicine in Athens and was a friend of Socrates. This speech of his about Eros, Urania and Polyhymnia – or Love, Celeste and the Songstress, to give them English names – is about gods but also about cosmic forces, the sympathy and antipathy that energize the world and pull it together. Since this energy is life, the universe is more like an organism than a machine for Eryximachus: the biological metaphor explains how cosmic forces work together (like organs in a living body) to act across astronomical distances and propagate magical powers. Since the organic metaphor accommodates musical notions of harmony and discord, the musician’s art also underwrites the art of magic. Musical resonance, like living cosmic sympathy, accounts for magical action.

‘Since Pausanias has got the conversation going well but has not ended it effectively, I suppose I must bring the discussion to a conclusion. I think he is right to divide love into two kinds. I’ve noticed that this is not just for human souls and about beautiful things, however, but about much else and also in other things – in the bodies of everything that lives, in those that grow in the earth and in all that exists, if I may say so, since from practising my art of medicine I’ve learned how great and wonderful that god is who reaches through the whole universe to things divine as well as human. So let me start with medicine in order to honour my art.

‘Bodies in their nature have these two loves that admittedly are different and dissimilar. Being dissimilar, they long for and love dissimilars, and in the healthy body the love is one thing, another thing when the body is diseased. And to indulge good men is honourable, as Pausanias was just saying, though with debauched people it is shameful, and likewise for bodies: we do well to indulge each body in good and healthy things, and so one should – this is what we call being a physician – while the shame of bad and sickly things must be discouraged, by anyone who wants to excel at this art.

‘For medicine can be summed up as the science of the body’s loves as we fill and empty it, as the best physician separates good love from bad and converts one into the other, knowing how – if he is a skilled practitioner – to introduce the love that’s absent and remove what’s present. For he must turn the body’s most antagonistic forces into friends and make them love one another. These antagonists are entirely opposed, like hot and cold, bitter and sweet, moist and dry and all the rest. Understanding how to put love and concord into them, my ancestor Asclepius established this art of mine – as the poets here tell us, and I believe them.’

‘So all of medicine is ruled by this god, just like training the body and farming, and anyone who gives this a moment’s thought will clearly see the same thing going on in music – probably what Heraclitus wanted to say too, though his words are not quite right: “like a well-tuned lyre or bow,” the One (he says), “clashes agreeably with itself”. But claiming that harmony clashes or is still produced from clashing is absurd. What he probably meant to say is that harmony comes from treble and bass notes that once clashed but were then made to agree by the art of music, though if bass and treble kept clashing, there would be no harmony. For harmony is unison, and unison is agreement: you can’t get agreement when things are clashing, as long as they keep clashing, and things that clash can’t be harmonized unless they come into agreement.

‘In rhythm the same thing happens with long and short beats, which clash at first and are then made to agree. The agreement in all these cases – as with medicine – comes from music, which introduces love and concord, since music too is a science of erotics but regarding harmony and rhythm. And it isn’t hard to see the erotics in this alliance of harmony and rhythm, when the love hasn’t yet been divided. But if you need to produce rhythm and harmony to help people – whether by writing new songs or by teaching songs and measures correctly after they are already made – it then becomes hard, and you need a good artist. Here the same reasoning applies: in well-behaved people and those who might become better-behaved, we must indulge and protect the love of such things.

‘And this is the good love – the heavenly one – the Love born of the Celeste who is a Muse. But then from the Songstress comes the common Love of the streets, whom if we are to befriend we must befriend carefully so that enjoying his pleasure doesn’t turn into dissipation, just as in my work a great task is to handle the appetites carefully in the art of eating in order to enjoy the pleasure without illness. In music as in medicine and in all other arts human and divine, each Love must be preserved, as much as can be, since both are involved.

‘Even the course of the seasons through the year is full of them both. When hot, cold, wet and dry are well-behaved in their love for one another, mixing and harmonizing temperately – as I was just saying – they bring health and plenty to mankind and all other animals and plants, doing them no harm. But when the Love arrives who brings Wantonness along, he is more overpowering for the seasons of the year, ruining everything and causing damage, for plagues also like to be born from those parents, along with many other diseases of animals and plants. Frost, hail and blight come from the excesses and bad behaviour of those forces when they are in love: the science of them – with the movements of the stars and the seasons of the year – is called astronomy.

‘Notice also that for all sacrifices and the whole business of divination – dealing with the relations between humans and gods – the only issue is preserving Love and caring for him since impiety likes to appear only when someone fails to indulge the Love who is well-behaved, honouring not that Love but the other god and putting him first in every action when it comes to one’s ancestors, both living and dead, and the gods. The job of divination, then, is to watch over the two Loves and take care of them, and the diviner is the craftsman who makes peace between gods and humans – for humans the science of erotics applied to law and piety.

‘Such is the great and mighty or rather universal power possessed by Love – in short, by Love as a whole. But the one who has the greatest power cares for the good and is fulfilled along with temperance and justice, whether for gods or men, and this is what provides all our happiness and makes us friends with the gods who are above us and with one another.’

Text selected and translated by Brian Copenhaver in "The Book of Magic: From Aniquity to the Enlightenment", Random House UK, 2014, chapter 4.4. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.