Literature assignment Quiz and a short essay. Please read through and make sure you understand what is required before sending a proposal. thank you. The books for this class are: 1. The Golden Ass -

Chapter 2 Desire’s Hunger and Plato the Regulator 23 Plato’s ideas about human sexual desire ( §piyum¤a ) and sexual activity ( éfrod¤sia ) are a critical part of his social reforms in theRepublicandLaws.

Why is Plato (ca. 429 – 347 b.c.e.) interested in curbing what we loosely — and he not at all loosely — call our sex drive? Why does sexual desire seem far more problematic to him than do desires for less intense pleasures, such as the longing for a cool drink under a shady tree? What does he think un- restrained sexual activity puts at risk? Plato ﬁnds something signiﬁcant at stake, for he maintains that individual sexual conduct and collective sexual mores should undergo restrictive reform in order to create a better social order. The sexual principles that he offers are central to his ethics and po- litical philosophy.

Plato’s sexual reforms also have great signiﬁcance in the history of sex- ual morality in Western culture. In a transmuted form, his ideas inﬂuenced the sexual prescriptions of the Jewish Platonist Philo and Christian Platonist church fathers, such as Clement. Plato’s dream to break and bridle Greek sexual mores ﬁnally gained authoritative power in this Alexandrian reli- gious venue, which was itself undergoing a turbulent, and at times violent, transition between the times of Philo (ca. 30 b.c.e.– 45 c.e.) and Clement (ca. 150 – 216 c.e.), for this was when Christianity in Alexandria was devel- oping partly from, and partly in opposition to, Judaism in Alexandria. In this venue, however, Plato’s ideas succeeded only in a limited way and on re- ligious terms distant from his own. He would have needed an interpreter to understand how the problems that he associates with uncontrolled sexual desire were written into the Tenth Commandment that Philo and Clement produced. My concern in this chapter, however, is to elucidate Plato’s prin- ciples of sexual and reproductive conduct along with their underlying mo-Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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24part i 1. This is not to suggest that Plato’s reforms would deny the experience of Platonic love to the inhabitants of his model cities. In his view, the reforms would facilitate it, whereas sexual indulgence degrades it.

2. On the topic of attributing ideas to Plato from his dialogues, see, for example, T. Szlezák, Reading Plato(1999); J. Klagge and N. Smith, eds.,Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues (1992), 1–12, 73 – 92, 201–19, 221– 43; the divergent viewpoints in C. Griswold, ed.,Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings 2(2001), 171– 232; and G. Press, ed.,Who Speaks for Plato? Studies in Platonic Anonymity(2000), 15 – 26 and 201–10. tivations and ambitious social aims. The Jewish and Christian Platonist re- working of his principles is the subject of later chapters.

This chapter focuses on the features of human sexuality that Plato aims to regulate more closely, not on his full range of ideas about human erotic ex- perience. These features include the impulse for genital stimulation, which Plato thinks has a strong proclivity to become corrupt, the related impulse to reproduce, and the broader social practices a populace must follow to be- have with appropriate sexual and procreative decorum. Plato aims to min- imize and preferably to eliminate what he regards as ingrained customs of sexual unrestraint that have myriad harmful effects on the individual and society. In their place he seeks to install civic mores that are motivated by and consistent with the virtue of sexual moderation that he formulates in theRepublic, Laws,and other dialogues.

To Plato’s mind, of course, human erotic experience goes well beyond the irrational sexual appetite and the desire to reproduce. He appreciates that persons become aroused for reasons beyond the sexually appetitive, as shown in his explorations of the Platonic love for the beauty of the body, for the beauty of the soul, and for the form of Beauty itself (Symp201d1– 212a7, Phdr243e9 – 257b6). Though Plato is well disposed toward Platonic eros, he does not try to mandate its attainment among his prospective guardians and citizens. 1In theRepublicandLaws,he writes like a sex educator, legislator, and philosophical city founder, not, as in theSymposiumandPhaedrus,like a transcendental prose poet on ﬁre for Beauty. My study follows suit. I con- centrate on Plato’s sexual regulations, the conception of genital and repro- ductive urges that informs them, and the broader nexus of customs he would establish to control those urges. Platonic eros is relevant here mainly for the forceful distinctions he makes between it and the appetitive desire for genital pleasure and procreation. ATTRIBUTING IDEAS TO PL ATO Plato allows us access to his ideas in his middle and later writings, even though he wrote dialogues with many voices rather than treatises in his own voice. 2Here I am concerned strictly with the middle and later works, suchGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator25 3. T. Szlezák (Reading Plato,118) thoughtfully presents this point: “[O]nly one ﬁgure is competent [in the middle and later dialogues], namely, the representative of the philosophy of Ideas. . . . [T]he dialectician, as a man with a philosophical advantage which cannot be caught up, stands in opposition to people in the philosophical conversation . . . who can be very ungifted or very gifted but who in every case are still undeveloped. In view of this in- equality, the dialectician must make himself the leader in the conversation. . . . [W]hat ﬁnally appears . . . to be consolidated by agreement must be taken seriously by the author to be valid.” 4. For several reasons Plato did not regard the written version of his ideas as deﬁnitive. He found greater intellectual clarity, completeness, and seriousness of purpose in active dialogue, Phdr276a1– 9, 277e5 – 78b4, and he thought one would not gain certain knowledge of meta- physical principles through writing and reading, T. Szlezák,Reading Plato,118.

5. G. Vlastos,Socrates, Ironist and Moral Philosopher(1991), 45 –106, esp. 45 – 6. See too the contributions of Kraut, Irwin, Woodruff, and Dorter in C. Griswold, ed.,Platonic Writings, Pla- tonic Readings,171– 232. The locus classicus for this way of reading Plato’s middle and later di- alogues is Paul Shorey, “The Unity of Plato’s Thought” (1903; reprint 1980), section one of which is reprinted as “Plato’s Ethics” in G. Vlastos, ed. (1971), 7– 34.

6. It is important to distinguish between Aristotle’s statements that the main interlocutor in theRepublicandLawsreﬂects Plato’s views and Aristotle’s more questionable interpretations of what the interlocutor means by his arguments. I commit only to the former. “We are bound to believe Aristotle when he tells us that Platosaida particular thing but not when he tells us what Platomeant,” A. E. Taylor and J. Burnet, cited by H. Cherniss,Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato and the Academy(1944), xi – xii. T. Irwin brings the signiﬁcance of Aristotle’s testimony (Politics 1266b5, 1271b1, 1274b9 –10) to the fore inPlato’s Ethics(1995), 5 –11. Aristotle’s statement that the main interlocutors of theRepublicandLawsreﬂect Plato’s views is especially valuable for my purposes, because these dialogues are central sources for Plato’s sexual principles. as theRepublicandLaws,because these dialogues contain his ideas about sexual desire and sexual reform. In these writings, the primary dialectician offers a number of coherent ideas, including principles of sexual conduct, that Plato seriously maintained at the time he wrote them. 3This is not to sug- gest, however, that Plato doctrinally adhered in perpetuity to those ideas, used them to construct a grand system, or tried to contain the full compass of his thought in his writings. 4I mean only that Plato supported the favored dialectician’s ideas for some time and is to be held responsible, as author, for being their promulgator. This main ﬁgure in the drama, who is often, but not always, Socrates, presents a set of ideas that diverges greatly from the more Socratic set in Plato’s early dialogues, especially the aporetic writings.

Vlastos and other scholars have inferred that the later set is Plato’s and worth studying as such. 5Aristotle corroborates that this traditional herme- neutic of the middle and later writings is correct, and he explicitly states that Socrates in theRepublicand the Athenian stranger in theLawsreﬂect Plato’s views. To doubt Aristotle’s reliability about which ideas are Plato’s would be skepticism taken to an extreme, for he was a member of the Acad- emy for twenty years, during the middle period, and he was by and large an intelligent respondent to Plato’s thought. 6Since the favored dialectician inGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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26part i 7. J. Arieti succinctly presents the decentralized hermeneutic of Plato’s dialogues that I do not adopt. “I would like to toss out the premise of virtually all work on Plato: that he is writing the kind of philosophical work in which the philosopher writes as clearly, as straightforwardly, and as soundly as he can,” “How to Read a Platonic Dialogue” (1995), 121.

8.Rep580e2 – 4. Plato uses various terms for the sexual appetite: “appetite” ( §piyum¤a ) Phd81b3 – 4, 83b6 – 7,Rep329c7, 437d2 – 9, 439d6 – 8, 580e2 – 81a1,Tim91b3, 91b7; “innate compulsion” ( énãgkh ≤ ¶mfutow )Rep458d2 – 7; “sexual desire” ( ¶rvw ) and “sexual desires” ( ¶rvtew )Tim42a6 – 7, 69d4 – 5, 91a2,Rep573b6 – 7, 573d4 – 5,Laws782e3, 783a1, 836a6 – 7, 839a7 ( lÊtth §rvtikÆ ). He clearly distinguishes eros meaning “sexual appetite” from Pla- tonic eros. As explored further below, the sexual appetite is innate while Platonic eros is an ac- quired aspiration that one learns from Platonic philosophy and feels as a desire for the form of Beauty or the Good. See further T. Irwin,Plato’s Ethics,301– 6 and C. Osborne,Eros Unveiled:

Plato and the God of Love(1994), 86 –111, 226.

9.Rep425e5 – 26b2,Prot353c1– 8. This grouping of three main appetites also appears in works of disputed authorship whose provenance is certainly early Platonism, such asSeventh Letter326d1– 5, 335b2 – 6 andHipp Maior299a1– 6. the middle and later dialogues presents sexual principles that belong reli- ably enough to their author, I call them Plato’s here. 7 THE HUMAN DESIRE FOR SEXUAL ACTIVITY AND ITS PLEASURES Plato considers sexual desire to be a kind of physical appetite for sexual re- lations, just as hunger and thirst are physical appetites for food and drink.

Sexual desire, hunger, and thirst are the three core appetites. “For human beings all things depend on a threefold need and appetite. . . . [T]hese are [appetites for] food and drink. . . . The third [is] sexual desire ( ¶rvw )” (Laws782d10 – 83a4). Plato makes a similar statement in theRepublic:“We call [the human soul’s] appetitive part ( §piyumhtikÒn ) by this name be- cause of the intensity of the appetites ( §piyum¤ai ) for food, drink, and sex- ual activity ( éfrod¤sia ).” 8He reiterates this position more informally else- where by grouping sexual desire into this trio of appetites. The body has its “appetites and pleasures,” which include “whatever one drinks, eats, and uses for sexual activity,” and philosophers give them low priority among their main concerns in life (Phd81b1– 6, see also 64d2 – 6). Persons who suffer from “appetitive licentiousness” ( ékolas¤a ) reveal this condition by “getting drunk, stufﬁng themselves, and indulging in sexual activity.” 9Plato in the middle and late dialogues thus both explicitly and implicitly indicates that he considers sexual desire to be a core physical appetite along with hunger and thirst.

The Platonic physical appetites aim for the speciﬁc pleasures that come from sating a bodily want. The appetitive aspect of the soul, given its crav- ing for sexual relations, food, and drink, is “comrade of satieties ( plhr≈- sevn ) and its pleasures” (Rep439d6 – 8). As Plato sees it, persons stimu- lated by the appetites more precisely want the replenishment provided by,Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator27 10. Plato’s linking of sexual desire with hunger and thirst is a good example of the incom- plete yet intriguing aspects of his thought, which both E. R. Dodds (“Plato and the Irrational” [1945], 16) and G. Grote (Plato and the Other Companions of Socrates,vol. 4 [1888], 290) elo- quently appreciate about Plato’s writings.

11.Rep458d2 – 3,Phdr237d7– 8.

12. Plato describes the cessation of the sexual appetite through a witty allusion to Homeric heroes grieving at a funeral. Most elderly men “lament” ( ÙlofÊrontai ) the loss, Cephalus notes, rather as though they were Achilles or Odysseus weeping for a dear but dead comrade, Rep329a5 – 8. Writers in the Greek erotic tradition are not quite as resolute as Plato that the sexual appetite declines in old age. Mimnermus (fr. 1) and Euripides (fr. 23) echo Plato’s view that old age is devoid of sexual desire, but for Longus (Daphnis and Chloe,2.5.2) the elderly re- tain erotic spark. As the god Eros tells the graybeard Philetas, “After just one kiss, old age will not help at all to stop you from pursuing me.” say, having recently ﬁnished a beverage (Phileb34d10 – 35b7) rather than wanting its other pleasant aspects, such as ﬁnding it enticing to look at and refreshing to drink in and swallow. Hence the physical appetites in human experience are inseparable from the pleasures that accompany replenish- ment. The pleasant feelings that occur from eating when one is hungry or drinking when one is thirsty are paradigmatic instances of such pleasures.

Plato similarly considers sexual activity to be sufﬁciently like eating and drinking to class it with them. To our minds the sexual appetite might seem a somewhat unusual member of the trio. Human beings do not die from sexual abstinence as they do from being deprived of water and food, and it is questionable whether lovers feel full from engaging in mutually stimulat- ing sexual relations, even though they may feel satisﬁed or spent and not want another immediate round of lovemaking. Plato, however, nowhere sees need to explain why his appetitive schema applies as readily to human sexual desire as it does to hunger and thirst. 10He clearly thinks that just as persons want and feel pleasure from consuming food or drink when hun- gry or thirsty, so too sexual pleasure is a genuinely consuming passion. Hu- man beings naturally want to sate this appetite on a regular basis when they become sexually depleted, and they enjoy doing so.

The desire for sexual replenishment and its pleasure is an inherent part of human nature in Plato’s view. He describes it as “innate” ( ¶mfutow ),11 though it manifests itself not at birth but later in life. Plato differentiates sexual desire in this respect from its counterpart appetites. “For human be- ings . . . [the appetites for] food and drink arise immediately once they are born. The third, . . . sexual desire, arises last” (Laws782d10 – 83a4). The sexual appetite starts to become active quite early in life as Plato sees it, for he would sternly regulate “the sexual behavior of male and female chil- dren ( pa›dew ), as well as that of women for men and men for women” (Laws 836a4 – b1). Once awakened, its periodic craving eventually diminishes, but not until persons are well advanced in years. 12Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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28part i 13. The demiurge instructed that “the human soul must have sexual desire mingled with pleasure and pain,”Tim42a6 – 7, see also 91a1– d5.

14. Plato attributes physical appetition in general to the liver,Tim70d7– 71b3, and he at- tributes sexual appetite to the genitals as well,Tim91b4 – 7.

15.Rep439c5 – d2, 580d3 – 81a1;Phdr246a3 – b4, 253c7– e5;Phileb35d1– 3;Tim69c3 – d6.

In theTimaeusthe appetitive part of the soul is mortal. The demiurge’s assistant gods “con- structed an additional kind of soul, a mortal one, in the body,” which is subject to “ﬁerce and compelling passions, pleasure ﬁrst of all,” 69c5 – d1. In thePhaedrus,however, “all soul is im- mortal,” including the appetitive part, 245c5 – 46b4.

16.Symp208e1– 3, 210a7– 8;Rep329b8 – c4;Phdr256c1– 7.

17.Tim91b7– c7. Here Plato adapts the idea of the wandering womb that goes back to the Hippocratic tradition, though M. Adair (“Plato’s View of the Wandering Uterus” [1996], 153 – 63) is perhaps right that for Plato it is more the reproductive urge than the womb itself that courses about the female body.

Plato has theological and physiological reasons for considering the sex- ual appetite to be inherent in human anatomy. First, the gods instilled the sexual appetite into human nature when they created mortals in accor- dance with the demiurge’s speciﬁcations. 13Second, sexual desire is a func- tion of speciﬁc bodily organs, such as the liver and genitals. 14Third, in the Republicand in later dialogues the three physical appetites also belong to the irrationally appetitive part ( §piyumhtikÒn ) of the embodied soul. 15The sexual appetite is accordingly an inherent part of the human body in Plato’s view, and the force of this embedded design of the gods is felt throughout most of one’s lifetime.

The sexual appetite has a wide-ranging palate according to Plato. It is “ready to try everything” of a sexually pleasurable sort (Tim69d4 – 5), be the pleasures homoerotic, heterosexual, or some other pattern. Men, for in- stance, sate this appetite with males as well as females. 16The sexual appetite, further, develops an elaborate taste for the illicit if it is not properly con- trolled. When it is particularly intense and left to its own devices, such as happens when people sleep, it stimulates them to dream with bold craving for sexual relations with any animate being, be it animal or human, mortal or immortal. All are on the fantasy menu, especially if the desired target is off limits, such as a god or goddess or a man’s own mother (Rep571b2 – 72d9). The main requirement of the sexual appetite, then, is an indiscrim- inate pleasurable friction from diverse sources, rather like a cat ready to rub up against any leg, be it a person’s, a table’s, or a chair’s. Most alluring to the undisciplined sexual appetite, however, is the leg that is forbidden.

Plato nonetheless maintains that the sexual appetite of most people is driven in turn by an urge for the pleasures of reproductive intercourse. In the human physiology of theTimaeus,the sexual appetite of women is ruled by a procreative imperative. Their wombs are “an inner animal with a yearn- ing for reproduction.” 17The sexual appetite of most men is also under theGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator29 18. 91a1– b6. To locate semen in the spinal marrow was a respectable Hippocratic theory in Plato’s time and later, J. Jouanna,Hippocrates(1999), 271– 2.

19. 91b2 – 3. Plato here provides an anatomical explanation of the normative Greek view that one central purpose of heterosexual copulation should be to reproduce offspring, e.g., [Dem] 59.122, Cicero,Fin3.62 = SVF 3.340.

20. In the creation myth in theTimaeus,however, Plato suggests that reproductive plea- sures are lower on the scale of nature than restrained male homoerotic sexual pleasures. As this myth would have it, procreative intercourse became part of human nature only after some of the originally all-male race of human beings failed the demiurge’s challenge to regulate their sexual and other appetites properly, 69c3 – d6, 70d7– 71a3. Due to this failure, the souls of the men who succumbed to sexual excess transmigrated into the bodies of women, who appear in the “second creation.” Only at this point do the gods instill the reproductive urge into human nature, 41d4 – 42e3, 90e1– 91a4. In terms of the Timaean creation myth, conse- quently, male homoerotic sexual relations are the primordial, and hence the ﬁrst natural kind, of shared human sexual experience. Plato, however, maintains the opposite position inLaws 636c1– 7, where he elevates the stature of reproductive sexual relations and marginalizes ho- moerotic practices, B. Brooten,Love between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homo- eroticism(1996), 41.

21. Though Philo, Clement, and Epiphanes are indebted to Plato’s conception of sexual desire, they do not maintain his distinction between the sexual appetite and reproductive urge.

They classify the Platonic sexual appetite and reproductive urge under the one rubric of sex- ual §piyum¤a , that is, the sexual appetite or appetitive sexual desire, as I indicate later in chap- ters seven, nine, and ten. sway of the procreative imperative. Semen, which Plato locates in the spinal marrow, wants to come to fruition in human form. 18Semen prior to emis- sion is willful in this manner because it is already partly alive and seeks to become a complete human animal. It “breathes” within the marrow and in- stigates a “life-giving” or “reproductive sexual appetite” ( zvtikØ §piyu- m¤a ).19 Thus, even though the sexual appetite seeks pleasurable rubbing quite apart from any reproductive goal, women’s wombs and the semen in the male spinal cord direct this appetite toward procreation for the vast ma- jority of human beings, male and female alike. 20 I refer to the combined force of the sexual appetite and the procreative urge as “sexual desire” hereafter in this chapter. 21 The procreative imperative is nonetheless not an absolute master. Some men and women have a more pronounced homoerotic directive than a re- productive one. The recognition that Plato gives to homoeroticism, how- ever, is limited to sexual love between males that eventually accords greater value to intellectual pursuits than to genital pleasures. The primary sexual directive that persons experience, as he puts it, depends on whether their inclination is motivated mainly by the immortal soul or the perishable body.

Some men, whose stimulus is the soul, turn toward like-minded younger males. Though they are sexually involved at ﬁrst, their intellectual engage- ment with each other gradually makes sexual pleasure less interesting and less frequent. Males in this relationship produce metaphorical progeny thatGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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30part i 22. As portrayed in theSymposium,this relationship begins in a sexually active way and pro- ceeds to more sublimated expressions of desire for beauty. The dominant lover initially “loves the body” of his more submissive partner in an intense way, 210a7, b5. (“Love of the body” is a circumlocution for sexual intimacy, cf. Xenophon,Oec10.4 – 5 and Antipater in Stobaeus, 4.508.16 –17.) Then the dominant partner moves toward a more disembodied love of beauty in which sexual activity plays a diminished role. At this point the lovers long to give metaphor- ical birth to great works, whereas women and their male lovers long to give birth to offspring, 208e1–10b3. See further A. W. Price,Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle(1989), 15 – 54 and E. E. Pender, “Spiritual Pregnancy in Plato’sSymposium” (1992), 72 – 86.

23. In theSymposium,it is the character Aristophanes who discusses female homoeroticism, 191d3 – 92a1.

24. R. Robinson, “Plato’s Separation of Reason from Desire” (1971), 38 – 48; J. Annas,An Introduction to Plato’sRepublic (1981), 109 – 52; T. Irwin,Plato’s Ethics,203 – 22; J. Annas,Pla- tonic Ethics, Old and New(1999), 134 – 6; J. Cooper, “Plato’s Theory of Human Motivation” (1984), 3 – 21; and C. Kahn, “Plato’s Theory of Desire” (1987), 95 –101.

25. Plato further supports his claim that the appetites are independent of reason by argu- ing that they give rise autonomously to lawless dreams and fantasies while reason sleeps,Tim 71a3 – 7,Rep571c3 – d4. Plato ﬁnds more worthy and enduring than children, such as poetry, phi- losophy, and law codes. 22Other men, the vast majority, have a stimulus that is more the body, and they turn toward women to reproduce children. Plato does not consider the male homoerotic drive that remains vigorously sex- ual and does not ﬁt his model of Platonic eros. He is also at best oblique in acknowledging that some women too have a homoerotic inclination, and he accords this relationship no intellectual honor whatsoever. 23 Plato’s thoughts about homoeroticism are useful, despite their obvious limitations, as they show that he ﬁnds the reproductive imperative to be far from uni- versally dominant.

Plato claims that the appetites for the pleasures of sexual activity, food, and drink are irrational. He defends this position through his much ques- tioned argument about distinct sources of motivation in the human soul, namely, physical appetition, spirit, and reason. 24Conﬂicting desires about whether to have a particular drink, for instance, indicate to him that there is a struggle between the appetitive and rational forces in the soul. Such conﬂict reveals “the presence in the soul of that which urges ( tÚ keleËon ) and that which restrains ( tÚ kvlËon ) from drinking. That which restrains is something different from that which urges.” The restraining force is “rea- son” ( logismÒw ) (Rep439b3 – e1). Physical appetition, by contrast, is “irra- tional” ( élÒgiston ) (439d7– 8), on the grounds that the conﬂict would not occur if the physical appetites were rational. Thus, for Plato the appetites are irrational given his conception of what happens in the human psyche when one both wants and does not want to have a drink, eat food, or engage in sexual activity. 25 Plato further maintains that the irrational physical appetites function inGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator31 26. J. Cooper gives a good explication of reason’s desire to rule, “Plato’s Theory of Human Motivation,” 6 – 7 and n. 9.

27.Phdr237d5 – b5. J. C. B. Gosling and C. C. W. Taylor (The Greeks on Pleasures[1982], 115 – 28, 137– 8) offer a valuable critique of Plato’s position that the appetites for pleasure are insatiable.

28. Wild animal imagery appears inTim70e4, 91b6;Rep439b4; and 572b4 – 5, while met- aphors of mob rule occur inRep444b1– 8, 571b5, 573b6 – 7, 573d4 – 5; andLaws689b1– c3.

29. The image of the citadel or acropolis is Plato’s. “The spirited part is placed nearer the head and between the neck and lungs in order that, being obedient to reason, it share forces with reason and hold back the clan of appetites when they refuse to compliantly obey the com- mand from the citadel,”Tim70a6 – 7. an antirational, and not merely arational, way. Since the appetites for food, drink, and sexual activity have no access to reason, they cannot know when enough is enough. They are aggressive in their ignorance, which leads them, contrary to reason, to strive always to exceed the limits of healthy appeti- tion, to provoke human agents to consume or indulge far more than they should. Hunger, for instance, inevitably leads to gluttony unless reason hems it in and controls it. Were it not for the wise restraining power of rea- son’s rule, human beings would end up in a ruinously excessive appetitive condition, rather like the legendary wine-drinking and pleasure-seeking Sardanapallus or the destructively voracious Erysichthon. 26 “The innate physical appetite for pleasures [of replenishment] . . . irrationally draws one toward [such] pleasures. If it prevails in us its name is licentious violence ( Ïbriw ). ‘Licentious violence’ is polyvalent. . . . [For example,] when the physical appetite prevails over better reason in relation to food and domi- nates among the appetites, it is gluttony [and the person is gluttonous] . . .

and as for the names of the sibling appetites, the appetite that gains sway is clearly the suitable term to apply to the person,” such as “drunkard” for persons with an excessive passion for wine. 27 Plato underscores the anti- rationality of the three sibling appetites with a number of natural and po- litical metaphors. The appetites are a wild animal or an unruly, lawless mob that is incorrigibly persistent in its desire to rebel against reason’s limits.

When they gain the upper hand, the soul experiences a kind of civil war or tyrannical overthrow, an appetitive coup. 28The appetites, then, inherently try to storm the citadel of reason because they really do want to eat cake, big slices of it. 29Although Plato’s metaphors are vivid, his position is not com- pelling. He does not justify why he shifts from arguing that the physical ap- petites are irrational to asserting that they are imperiously antirational, with the use of suggestive imagery displacing argument. Plato’s conception of the physical appetites seems more grotesque than plausible, for it suggests that a sex-mad version of the Monty Python glutton evinces the human appeti- tive condition its purest unregulated form. This seems dubious. Plato is nonetheless earnest — be careful to control your appetites, or the explosiveGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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32part i 30.Rep329c3 – 4, cf. Soph.Antig781, 790, 800 –1. M. Nussbaum (The Fragility of Goodness [1986; reprint, 2001], 152) also notes Plato’s conviction that the sexual appetite “is the most powerful among the appetites.” 31. Plato even likens the sexual appetite to ﬁgurative gluttony. When the dominant lover wants to make love to an attractive youth, he wants to devour him like a ripe fruit,Laws 837b8 – c3.

32.Rep458d5 – 7, 403a4 – 6. Plato’s point is that for every Euclid who is swayed by the in- tellectual pleasure of a well-executed theorem, countless others are swayed by the pleasure of sexual activity.

33.Phdr254d5 – e10. This image of subjection also appears at 256b2 – 3. glutton will be you. Human reason must remain vigilant to prevent the ap- petites from wreaking havoc and driving persons into destructive excess.

Among the three appetites, in Plato’s view, the sexual appetite has the strongest and most incorrigible propensity to excess. From later childhood through old age it stimulates the “greatest and sharpest need ( xre¤a )” and “the ﬁercest and most intense” feelings of appetitive pleasure. The sexual appetite is also especially “tyrannical” in its impulse to overthrow reason (Laws783a1– 2,Rep573b6 – d5). As Sophocles maintains, with Plato’s ap- proval, sexual eros is “a raving and ﬁerce master.” 30The sexual appetite is thus even hungrier than hunger for the greater part of one’s life. 31Its power “persuades and drags the majority” to seek out and venerate sexual activity and its pleasures, just as geometrical proofs persuade the mind to inquire into and admire the beautiful truths about Number that they demonstrate.

In fact, “erotic compulsions are probably ﬁercer than geometrical proofs” among the populace at large given the crazed intensity of fricative pleasure. 32 The reproductive urge adds impetus to the sexual appetite (Tim91a1– d5), for this urge too is “autocratic, like an animal disobedient to reason,” and its “raging lusts” force most people to give in to the reproductive imperative (Tim91b5 – 7). Sexual desire thus never learns to cooperate with reason, given its double-barreled force. At most it can be controlled by a fear of punishment for going beyond reason’s limits. This is why the sexual appetite in thePhaedrusbears the brunt of a cruelty to which Plato never subjects hun- ger and thirst. “The charioteer, as though recoiling from the starting gate, yanks back more intensely the bit from the mouth of the wanton horse, thoroughly bloodies its jaws and evil-speaking tongue, and, making the horse sprawl to the ground on its limbs and hips, gives it a painful lashing.” The beatings do not stop until the sexual animal ﬁnally cowers in a corner, forced somewhat into compliance because it is hobbled by terror. 33Even in this condition, however, its swollen eyes retain a lascivious glimmer. The bad sexual horse still “has something to say to the charioteer and expects to enjoy some small treats for all its pains” (255e5 – 7). Human sexual desire thus poses the greatest challenge Plato sees to reason’s mastery over the rampant ways of appetitive pleasure. So relentless is it that it must be blud-Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator33 34. Plato’s position that the sexual appetite is incorrigible poses a difﬁculty for the com- mon modern view that he thinks each soul part properly learns to carry out its own limited function of its own accord, with this cooperative distribution of soul labor leading to soul jus- tice or temperance. T. Irwin (Plato’s Ethics,238) exempliﬁes this view: “temperance [according to Plato] involves . . . agreement by the non-rational parts that the rational part should rule; this agreement implies that each part does its own work, so that temperance requires justice.” While a number of Plato’s comments about the irrational part of the soul ( tÚ §piyumhtikÒn ) lend themselves to this interpretation, he does not allow that sexual desire ever learns to as- sent to reason’s rule and to conduct itself like a tamed horse by the rule of moderation. At best the wild sexual horse “is ruined with fear” (Phdr254e8) from reason’s repression until it weak- ens and fades away of its own accord in old age. Hence for Plato justice in the soul is temper- ance with a billy club, which reason wields to keep the sexual appetite in reluctant submission.

On this matter Plato differs from Posidonius, for instance, who maintains that human beings can and should train the irrational appetite in its entirety to obey reason, just as one trains a young colt to obey its master: by running it, tiring it, and by letting it have its ﬁll of “the desires suitable to its nature” ( oﬁke›ai §piyum¤ai ) until the irrational appetite shows its obedience to reason by proceeding of its own accord “in a more measured fashion” F166, Edelstein and Kidd. J. Cooper (“Posidonius on Emotions” [1998], 90 – 3) offers a worthwhile analysis of this aspect of Posidonius’s psychology and ethics.

35.Rep558d11– 59a1. Plato in thePhilebusfurther considers necessary pleasures to be “true” and unnecessary, “false.” This topic is carefully explicated by C. Hampton, “Pleasure, Truth, and Being in Plato’sPhilebus:A Reply to Professor Frede” (1987), 253 – 62. geoned into following reason’s command, and even then its rebellious spirit remains unbroken. 34 The continual struggle between the physical appetites and reason is cen- tral to Plato’s conception of ethical human conduct. Human beings are vir- tuous when they regulate their appetites in a manner conducive to their own and the city’s greater well-being. Conversely, they corrupt society and themselves when they give their appetites free rein. “ Virtue ( éretÆ ) is the outcome for those who conduct themselves well in relation to their three- fold need and appetite, and the opposite is true for those who conduct themselves badly in relation to them” (Laws782d10 – e3). Persons behave with appetitive virtue if they act only on what Plato calls “necessary and salu- tary appetites” (Rep558e1, 559c3 – 4). He considers appetition necessary and healthy to the extent that persons beneﬁt from it physically, and they so beneﬁt when the appetites cannot be avoided without inducing harm to bodily well-being. “The appetites that we cannot deﬂect and that are healthy for us when acted on are rightly called necessary.” 35 An ideal of nutritive simplicity also informs Plato’s conception of appetitive virtue. He imagines that the dietary aspect of a good appetitive regimen would be met with the humble fare of the Greek countryside: wine in small amounts, bread, greens, and cheese for the main meal, chickpeas and ﬁgs afterwards, and roasted acorns for the occasional snack (Rep372b1– c9). The sexual appetite is likewise beneﬁcial when its pleasures are kept to a salutary mini- mum (Laws784e5 – 85a1). People become wicked, however, when their ap-Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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34part i 36. For worthwhile criticisms of Plato on mixed pleasure, see J. C. B. Gosling and C. C. W.

Taylor,The Greeks on Pleasure,115 – 28, 137– 42 and M. Nussbaum,The Fragility of Goodness,141– 63. Like Gosling, Taylor, and Nussbaum, many people in Plato’s day would have resisted his negative assessment of mixed appetitive pleasures. As Plato states, people by and large actively liked to “assuage either hunger, thirst, or similar things that the emergent nature [of the plea- sure] fulﬁlls. They take joy in its emergent nature by regarding it as a true pleasure. And they say that they would not accept living without experiencing thirst, hunger, and all other things attendant upon such kinds of distress,”Phileb54e4 – 8.

37. Plato uses the adjectives “very piercing” and “most ﬁery” (Rep403a4,Laws783a1– 2) to describe the sharpness and burning that he associates with sexual desire and pleasure.

38. The preponderance of the pain that Plato ascribes to excessive pleasure is one likely reason why he calls it Ïbriw or “violence,”Phdr238a1– 2, 250e5, 253e3;Laws783a3, 837c5.

39. The sex-mad orgasm “makes one leap, causes all sorts of changes in skin color, bodily position, and breathing irregularities, . . . and it makes one shout in a crazed manner,”Phileb 47a3 – 9. It is a “sexual panic” and a “total blow” to the body,Laws783c10 – d1,Phileb47a8.

40. Persons given to sexual madness would be especially vociferous against Plato’s con- straining sexual reforms,Laws839b3 – 6. petites are “unnecessary and lavish.” In this condition they seek gratiﬁca- tion in elaborate kinds as well as quantities. Broad culinary diversity, for ex- ample, is “bad for the body, bad for the soul, especially for its intelligence and capacity to be moderate.” Persons who are wicked in their appetitive behavior are “stuffed on pleasures” (Rep559b8 – d10), be they gluttons, drunkards, sex maniacs, or some potent combination of the three. The ap- petites’ voracity therefore drives an ongoing contest between virtue and vice in human affairs. The appetites seek vicious excess, and reason tries to re- strain them within the limits of appetitive virtue. Showing proper restraint in dietary and sexual behavior is thus central to Plato’s conception of what it means to be morally responsible.

Excessive pleasures are unhealthy partly because they upset the balance of pleasure inherent in appetitive human experience. Appetitive pleasures, as Plato sees them, are not simply pleasurable, but a mix of pleasure and pain. 36When they are immoderate, the pain overwhelms the pleasure (Laws 733a6 – 34e2), such as groaning from the feast. Pain indicates a body in un- healthy distress, which is something “neither to choose nor desire” (Laws 733b1– 2). Persons given to overindulging thus behave contrary to their bodily well-being. Sexual pleasure best exempliﬁes this health concern, for it is an especially intense mix of pleasure and pain. 37By Plato’s diagnosis, then, excessive sexual pleasure is like the self-inﬂicting of wounds, because the pain far outstrips the pleasure. 38 The disease is sexual madness (Tim 86b1– e2,Laws783a2), and its symptoms are “a kind of panic” for sexual ac- tivity, burning with sexual desire, and becoming crazed during copulation and orgasm. 39Persons cannot be blamed for suffering this condition if they have not learned how to control their sexual desire, but they are blame- worthy to knowingly resist Plato’s treatment, as shown further below. 40Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator35 41.Rep559c3, 559d9 –10, 580e5.

42.Rep571d1– 2, 574e4. In another passage: “The majority are always looking down, bent toward the ground. They feast, stufﬁng themselves and copulating. Out of excessive desire for such things they kick and butt with horns and hoofs of iron, and kill one another due to their insatiability,”Rep586a6 – b6.

43. J. Annas (Plato’sRepublic, 130) and J. Cooper (“Plato’s Theory of Human Motivation,” 10) note this means-end aspect of proliferating desires.

44. G. Vlastos (“The Theory of Social Justice in thePolisin Plato’sRepublic” [1977], 3 – 25) thoughtfully elucidates Plato’s conviction that the populace in an ideal social order should make equally moderate use of material goods and physical necessities.

The contest posed by the sexual and other appetites goes far beyond the health concerns of the populace. In Plato’s view, if one or another of them goes unchecked — and sexual eros especially — they stimulate and com- mandeer numerous other desires of an acquisitive, extravagant, or violent sort.

41 On this topic too, though, Plato is more eloquent than cogent. At best he sketches how and why unchecked appetition provokes this prolifer- ation of desires by giving a quick guided tour of delinquent male character types who are afﬂicted and even criminal in their appetitively stimulated vices, such as the democratic man. The sexual appetite of Plato’s tyrannical man, for instance, not only produces and rules over his desires for love af- fairs and for drinking parties, it also provokes him to steal from his own par- ents and neighbors and to loot temples in order to indulge these desires in a spendthrift way (Rep573b6 – 75a7). Similarly, the man dominated by sex- ual passion is likely to commit any sort of murder as a crime of passion. 42 Uncontrolled sexual desire, hunger, and thirst stimulate other desires as a means to attain these core appetitive ends, such as the tyrannical man’s de- sire to have money for drinking parties so that he can seduce the drunken participants who stir his ardor. 43 Plato’s claim about proliferating desires, however, cannot adequately be explained as a means-end argument, for here he goes beyond such an argument without justifying why he does so.

“Murder of any sort” is in many instances not explicable as a means to fulﬁll uncontrolled sexual desire, hunger, or thirst. Plato is contending that all vi- cious desires are propagated from the unregulated core appetites, and from sexual desire especially. The unrestrained appetites bring about “injustice, licentiousness, cowardice, ignorance, folly, and in general, every vice ( sul- lÆbdhn pçsan kak¤an )” (Rep444a10 – b8). A tree of vices to illustrate this idea would have a three-pronged taproot, with the longest root at the cen- ter being uncontrolled sexual desire.

Plato further contends that on a broader social scale the proliferation of desires goes beyond individual vices and leads to chronic wars of conquest and famine (Rep373d7– 74a2, 372b8 – c1), with the greedy in power rapa- ciously consuming resources at the expense of the weaker in need. 44As he would have it, then, sexual eros and the other two core appetites, unlessGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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36part i 45.Phdr254a2 – 7, b5 – c3. Note, for example, the frequency of the verb “pull in an op- posing direction” ( éntite¤nein ) in the description of the soul as chariot, with the charioteer and the spirited part straining toward Beauty in opposition to the sexual appetite, which pulls against them toward sexual pleasure, 254a7, 254c3, 256a6.

46.Phdr237d8 – 9. This contrast between the innate sexual appetite and the acquired Pla- tonic yearning remains valid for both speeches, even though the contrast appears in Socrates’ ﬁrst speech about eros in thePhaedrus,not in the second or palinode speech. The palinode speech reafﬁrms that there is an innate drive for sexual pleasures, as opposed to an acquired Platonic taste for Beauty. In the palinode, Socrates recants only that the concept of eros applies strictly to the innate sexual appetite, which is the argument of the ﬁrst speech, 238b7– c4. In- stead, Socrates maintains in the palinode, eros has two very different senses — the innate sex- ual appetite as opposed to Platonic eros to behold Beauty.

47. The sexual appetite’s inability to comprehend Beauty is also clear inPhdr247c6 – 7:

“The colorless, shapeless, and intangible being that truly is, is visible solely to mind, the pilot of the soul.” The sexual appetite remains down in the bilge, blind to what the pilot or mind alone sees. Here I concur with C. Kahn (“Plato’s Theory of Desire,” 98 –101) and support what A. W. Price (Love and Friendship,83 – 4) regards as the “the less attractive” but more accurate interpretation of Plato’s conception of the appetite for sexual pleasure: The “erotic appetite can be inhibited but not civilized.” The charioteer’s violent beating of the sexual horse sup- ports this interpretation, for the aggression leaves the horse shaken but not subdued. held in check by reason, are the origin of human-motivated social ills be- cause they stimulate all vices from avarice to zealotry. If only we minded the necessary limits of sexual activity and ate and drank moderately, the society of peace and justice would be ours for the taking.

Plato sharply differentiates the sexual appetite from Platonic eros for bod- ily and transcendent beauty. The sexual appetite is inherently and dumbly drawn toward the fricative “pleasure of sexual activity,” while Platonic eros is stimulated by a cognizant awareness of beauty in a beloved person and it recoils from the rub-a-dub-dub of sexual activity. Contrary to the straining of the sexual appetite toward pleasure, it strains with an opposing erotic in- tensity to perceive the nature of Beauty itself. 45Unlike the innate sexual ap- petite, Platonic eros is acquired, a learned taste for Beauty or the Good, which one gains through becoming enlightened by Platonic metaphysics. 46 The sexual appetite cannot acquire or sublimate into developing this taste. 47Its satisfaction requires heated friction of the genitals. By contrast, Platonic eros ﬁnds its ecstasy in the “sweetest” pleasure of seeing visible and transcendent beauty (Phdr251e5 – 2a1). This pleasure is as sweet as sweet can be because it is free of the pain that accompanies genital pleasure.

Sweet pleasure is experienced in its purest unmixed way through the study of geometry, when persons envision “the straight and the round, . . .

[which] are always beautiful in themselves and have their own pleasures.

These are not at all like the pleasures of scratching” (Phileb51c3 – d1). Sex- ual pleasure, by contrast, is a deep-seated scratching that involves “intenselyGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator37 48. Plato seems not at his most perceptive to describe sexual pleasure in terms more suit- able for a poison ivy rash, where the desire to scratch is ferociously intense and the pain pre- dominates over pleasure once an afﬂicted person gives in and scratches.

49. G. Vlastos (Platonic Studies[1981] 39 – 40) is thus mistaken to characterize Platonic eros as “a peculiar mix of sensuality, sentiment, and intellect,” and to emphasize that this deﬁ- nition “should count as the original and always primary sense of ‘Platonic love.’” What he re- gards as the original and primary sense Plato regards as a tertiary and muddled sense that leads to “puzzlement and opacity” about what he means by Platonic eros,Laws837b6 – d2. Vlastos here overcorrects the misguided scholarly view in his day that persons stimulated by Platonic eros remain completely unrufﬂed by any sexual ardor.

50. Plato especially draws on erotic tropes atPhdr251c5 – 52a1, such as the outﬂow of eros from the eyes and the inability to sleep when the beloved is absent. The consummation of Pla- tonic eros proper, however, occurs from “seeing the [beloved],” which is accompanied by a quasi-orgasm of dammed-up waters being released once eye contact is made. By contrast, the consummation of eros in Sappho and other erotic literature is sexual — eros requires, as Lon- gus states, “kisses, embracing, and lying down together with naked bodies,”Daphnis and Chloe, 2.5.7. Platonic eros reaches its climax by “looking rather than sexually interacting” ( ır«n mçl lon μ §r«n ),Laws837c4 – 6. When Platonic eros temporarily prevails in the aroused soul of the lover, he regards the “sexual satiating of a body with a body” ( tØn per‹ tÚ s«ma toË s≈matow plhsmonÆn ) as a “violent outrage” ( Ïbrin ). sharp, piercing, and burning” sensations (Rep403a4,Laws783a1– 2). 48 Therefore, the sexual appetite is point for point the unregenerate opposite of Platonic eros.

Unlike the pleasure of studying geometry, however, the overall human experience of falling or being in love with another person combines the conﬂicting impulses of the sexual appetite and Platonic eros. This heady ex- perience of being in love is a mixture of the two, not pure Platonic eros, and should never be confused with Platonic eros alone. Plato noticed such con- fusion brewing in his own day and attempted to clarify matters. As he ex- plains inLaws837b6 – d2, Platonic eros remains unconditionally antisexual in its desire and end. It absolutely “forbids one from plucking the bloom” of sexual activity. Instead it thrills the soul with a desire to behold the form of Beauty itself, partly through the stimulus of seeing the bodily beauty of beloved persons. The experience of being in love is a “third sense” of eros, the “mix of [the two kinds of ] eros.” Platonic eros proper refers to the anti- sexual component, while the sexual appetite is the intensely sexual compo- nent. 49Even though Plato deploys erotic imagery rivaling that in Sappho’s poetry to describe the desire of Platonic eros to view Beauty, 50eros in this sense has a pronounced aversion to sexual contact, contrary to sexually ap- petitive eros. The motive of Platonic eros is a longing to behold “the nature of beauty seated on a pure throne,” not, as eros does for Sappho (fr. 1.1), to sexually worship Aphrodite seated on her “exquisite throne.” To Plato, consequently, the sexual appetite as “wicked horse” is like an inﬂamed sa-Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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38part i 51. As A. W. Price aptly notes (Love and Friendship,79), the bad horse in the palinode speech (Phdr242d11– 57b6) is “horrid.” It is a “horse of wickedness” ( ı t∞w kak∞w ·ppow ) (Phdr251d6 – 52a1), for it stands for the incorrigible sexual appetite in particular rather than for the physical appetites in general. The bad horse in the metaphor of the soul as chariot is sexual because it illustrates the ﬁrst of the two kinds of eros in the palinode speech, namely, the irrational sexual appetite.

52. The verb Plato uses is xremet¤zein , which refers to the loud neighing or whinnying of horses,Phdr254d4.

53. D. Halperin and M. Nussbaum diminish the opposition that Plato makes between the two. In fact, they meld the two together. Halperin’s underlying premise in “Plato and Erotic Reciprocity” (1986), 80, is that “Plato refuses to separate — he actually identiﬁes and fuses — the erotics of sexuality . . . and the erotics of philosophical inquiry.” In “PlatonicEro¯sand What Men Call Love” (1985), 171, he similarly states that “My assumption throughout this paper . . .

is that Platonic eros [is not reducible to sexual desire] but does indeedalsomake sense as an analysis of the intentionality of sexual desire and demands to be taken seriously as such.” Nuss- baum (The Fragility of Goodness,220, 216) likewise maintains that in thePhaedrus,“sexuality broadly interpreted . . . permeates the whole of [the lovers’] madness.” This is a sexuality in which sexual desire and intellectual aspirations “ﬂow together so that the person feels no gap between thought and passion, but, instead, a melting unity of the entire personality.” Interest- ing as their thoughts are about the fusion of erotic arousal and stimulated intelligence in hu- man beings, they leave Plato far behind, for he allows no fusing or melting unity of the sexual appetite and Platonic eros. Their position that he not only allows but “refuses to separate” the two kinds of eroticism is an exaggeration that has likely been facilitated by Vlastos’s erroneous position (see above, n. 49) that Platonic love in the “original and primary sense” is mixed (viz., both sexual appetite and Platonic eros straining in opposite directions), which Plato in the Lawsexpressly denies is his original and primary sense of eros.

54.Phdr248a1– 5 indicates that the sexual appetite precludes even the most disciplined person from being aroused only by Platonic eros. “The human soul that follows and best re- sembles the god lifts the head of the charioteer into the outer region . . . but is disturbed by the horses and is hardly able to look at the things that really are ( tå ˆnta ).” tyr’s groin in the soul’s irrational faculty, 51while Platonic eros is an ecstatic rapture that makes the soul’s rational faculty ﬂutter and throb with longing for the unadulterated pleasure of viewing Beauty in and of itself.

Human beings, insofar as they are embodied agents, do not experience Platonic eros on its own. Lovers are in a two-fold — and to Plato conﬂict- ing — state of agitation. Through reason they seethe with Platonic eros for Beauty, but through the sexual appetite they whinny for sexual pleasure. 52 Neither impulse comprehends or has any share in the other’s longing, at least as Plato construes them. 53Platonic eros, further, is no rariﬁed substi- tute for sexual desire. On his view it is the more authentic eros, though it is not humanly possible to experience it in an unmixed form given the per- sistence of the sexual appetite.

54Plato accords little or no beauty to sexual pleasure, even though he accords considerable beauty to the human body.

Such pleasure, far from having aesthetic merit, is at worst a violent outrage and at best a grotesque comedy with its contorted bodies, panting, and shouting. Not least among its unattractive qualities is sexual desire’s oblivi-Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator39 55. C. de Vogel provides a sound explication of Plato’s dualism inRethinking Plato and Pla- tonism(1986), 171– 9, and see too G. Vlastos, “The Theory of Social Justice,” 30 – 4 and J. C. B.

Gosling and C. C. W. Taylor,The Greeks on Pleasure,83 – 7.

56.Laws743c5 – e6, 731c5 – 6. Plato presents this position more fully atRep443c9 – 44a2.

57. Though Plato’s soul-body dualism comes to the fore especially in thePhaedo,he re- afﬁrms this view in thePhaedrusandTimaeus,albeit with a tripartite construct of the soul. In thePhaedrus,excessive sexual appetition distracts the soul from recollecting its immortal na- ture and the soul does not ascend toward Beauty,Phdr248c2 – e5, 250e1– 51a1, 253d1– 55a1, 256b7– d3, cf.Phdr238a6 – b3. In theTimaeus,Plato portrays the human condition as a con- test in the soul between the appetites and reason; and reason must win the struggle. Souls in which reason loses are drawn into hedonism and sink lower on the scale of nature, 41d4 – 42e4, 91d5 – 92c3. ousness to beauty and its capacity to transmit this insensibility to the person as a whole.

Plato extends the harmful repercussions of excessive desire beyond the body and society and into the afterlife of the immortal soul. This afterlife concern is no ancillary matter, for his thought is permeated with the Py- thagorean dualism of body and soul and with a cosmic dualism between the realms of being and becoming. 55As his primary aim in ethics and politics, Plato strives to enlighten embodied souls through social and political change, and his sociopolitical reforms are a means to this end. “Not only once have we said . . . that tending the soul comes ﬁrst, of the three things that properly matter to human beings [namely, soul, body, and material goods],” for “the soul is truly the most honorable concern for all.” 56 The immortal soul, when embodied, is at great risk of being lured into myriad vicious and painful pleasures by the appetites. Appetite-driven concerns entice the soul and person as a whole into thinking that only the physical world of ﬂux exists (Phd81b1– 5), and that pure being is a Platonic ﬁction.

The soul, once beguiled, loses its ability to recollect its immortal nature and becomes burdened with bodily and earthly qualities (83a1– e3), buried alive with clods of proliferating vices (81e5 – 6). Souls that fail to recollect their nature cannot ascend to the Good or Beauty after they depart from the body at death (Phd80d5 – 84b8). Instead they remain unenlightened, banished from their birthright in pure being, and from there descend into lower animal forms, encased in fur or ﬁns, and never gazing upward again. 57 Excessive sexual and other appetitive behavior thus must be curbed for pressing reasons of concern to the soul that go beyond bodily health and the good society, important though these are. Plato in theRepublicandLaws is eager to do whatever it takes to restrict appetitive behavior individually, socially, and politically in order to facilitate the philosophical quest of im- mortal souls for the intelligible world. The clampdown begins with sexual desire.

Even though sexual desire is the most recalcitrant troublemaker of theGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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40part i 58. Plato thus does not grant the position seen in Epicurus, that sexual desire is a natural but unnecessary appetite, fr. 456 (Usener).

59. See further G. Klosko,The Development of Plato’s Political Theor y(1986), 103 –13.

60.Tim91b7– c7. For similar reasons Plato inLaws930c2 – 6 states that it is inadvisable for a young widow to remain without a second husband.

61.Laws841b4 – 5, cf. 784e5 – 85a1 (and note Euripides, fr. 428, for a very similar view).

Thus even the model ascetic philosopher in thePhaedowould be sexually active within reason.

His soul should refrain from the physical appetites, 82c2 – 4, but only “as far as possible,” 64e4 – 6, 83b7, that is, in compliance with the moderate and necessary use of the appetites for sexual activity, food, and drink,Phd64d2 – 6, 81b1– 6. Nussbaum is not persuasive that “thePhaedo’s true philosopher can completely dissociate himself from it [the sexual appetite] with no dan- ger,”The Fragility of Goodness,152. The model philosopher should engage in sexual activity even by Plato’s austere version of the golden mean. core appetites, Plato argues that it is both harmful and unfeasible to starve or deny it altogether. The sexual horse should be given its requisite carrots now and then, for a strict regimen of moderation exempliﬁes Plato’s notion of sexually appetitive virtue. Like hunger and thirst, sexual desire is un- avoidable and beneﬁcial to a degree (Rep559c3 – 7). To this degree, per- sons ought to be sexually active for health reasons, because a “great com- pulsion” ( énãgkh ) drives human nature to fulﬁll the necessary appetites (Phd64e4 – 6). 58Plato’s more precise plans for reproductive reform are ex- plored in the following section. Sufﬁce it here to say that he allows moderate sexual hedonism for persons who have completed their procreative service for the good of the city. He does not try to restrict necessary and beneﬁcial sexual activity throughout the human life span to the purpose of reproduc- tion because he thinks sexual desire is far too compelling for so restrictive a limit. Complete sexual abstinence, further, would be unfeasible and inad- visably extreme even if some individuals were to prove able to emaciate their sexual desire. Moderation exempliﬁes Plato’s conception of virtuous sexual conduct.

59 Plato underscores his position that sexual renunciation would be un- healthy by associating diseases with the total deprivation of sexual pleasure.

If, for instance, women refuse to sate their urge for reproduction, their wombs precipitate respiratory ailments and other signs of ill health. 60Men too undergo a suffering on par with Io’s if they leave their sexual appetite unfed (Tim91b4 – 7). They become maddened from the stings and bites in- ﬂicted by their inner sexual horseﬂy. This physiological torture is especially unbearable if a man has more than the usual abundance of seed teeming in his spinal marrow (Tim86c3 – d2). In order to avoid such diseases, persons should regard a law-abiding sexual moderation and “not complete sexual ab- stinence” as proper. 61To live by this standard would admittedly be about as exciting as a steady diet of chickpeas and acorns, brightened by the occa- sional ﬁg. This is exactly how Plato thinks we should live, with the gift to beGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator41 62.Laws836a8 – b2. I interpret the word “countless” ( mur¤a ) in 836b1 as an allusion to “countless woes” ( mur¤a êlgea ) atIliad1.2, for which note E. B. England’s commentary on theLawsat 836b1.

63. Plato attributes this viewpoint to his contemporaries in a number of passages, such as Laws840b6 – 7,Phdr256c3 – 5, andPhileb47b2 – 7, 65c1– e1. simple in the sexual and sibling appetites and the ensuing gift to be free from vicious desires, social inequity, and widespread indifference to the Good. PL ATO’S PROCREATIVE ETHICS AND COMMUNAL SOCIAL IDEAL Plato ﬁrmly believed that uncontrolled sexual desire had been allowed to run wild and plague the human condition. As far as he was concerned, its potential to run rampant was fully realized in Athens and elsewhere, with his fellow Greeks being afﬂicted with chronic sexual madness and yet deny- ing that they were sick in the slightest. “Human sexual desires are the source of countless woes for people individually and for entire cities.” 62As far as Plato’s contemporaries were concerned, though, nothing made them hap- pier than sexual pleasures — and the more intense and frequent the expe- rience, the better. 63 What they called happiness Plato regarded as a wide- spread addiction to the leader of the hedonistic pack, sexual desire, and to its spawn of other violent desires waging gleeful despotism over reason and moderation. To his mind sexual desire held the lead because of its com- posite make-up, the ferocious sexual appetite with the equally wild repro- ductive urge riding on it bareback. Given this magnitude of the woes and their ostensible origin, Plato put reproductive and other sexual reforms ﬁrst on his agenda to ameliorate the embodied conditions of the soul in society.

The reproductive regulations in theRepublicandLawsare pragmatic in intent and motivated by Plato’s aim to rationally patrol sexual desire for the duration of its power, from early youth through old age. To accomplish this project, “an audacious lone man,” he declares, must fearlessly intervene in the appetitive status quo, “guided only by reason and having no backers to support him” (Laws835c2 – 8). Plato as maverick philosopher takes matters into his own hands through political philosophy, rather than directly on the political scene in Athens, for he fears that his ideas toward sexual and social reform would be unanimously voted down. Young adult males would pro- test the loudest, he thinks, for by his understanding young men are over- sexed, “teeming with semen” in their spinal marrow (Laws839b3 – 6). Rather than submit his proposals to a democratic vote, Plato started to teach young men philosophy, and as a recurrent theme in his ethics and political theory, he strove to reverse the conventional Greek measures of virility and happi- ness: Sexual restraint is the mark of a real man and genuine happiness,Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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42part i 64. There are several interesting illustrations of this new convention. In theLawsboys must abstain from all unnecessary sexual relations in order to become men. They are to regard this effort as a true male athleticism, following the ancient practice of athletes refraining from sex prior to a contest in order to ensure a more potent performance. The triumph of Plato’s stu- dents, though, is better than winning in the Olympics, for they win immortal “victory over sex- ual pleasures,”Laws839e5 – 40c10. Plato also teaches that boys in a democratic society (a group that would have included all of Plato’s Athenian students) are almost certain to lose this contest unless they mend their ways. The son of a democratic father “is led into all kinds of law- lessness” by the appetites and will be seduced to transform into the dread tyrannical man,Rep 572d5 – e1. TheTimaeusteaches that unless young men moderate their appetites, they will be reincarnated as girls, 41d4 – 42d2, 90e1– 91a4. These teachings are hardly Plato at his most ad- mirable or convincing. His inversion of male sexual prowess nonetheless had considerable suc- cess in later Greek philosophy, where it takes on an intensiﬁed machismo. In the late Cynic epistles, for instance, Plato’s athletic theme becomes a “war” ( pÒlemow ) against sexual plea- sures, Epistles 5, 12, 46 of ps.-Diogenes in A. Malherbe,The Cynic Epistles(1977). For Plato’s disparagement of women as an inferior type of human being and the tension between this and his relatively enlightened proposals for female guardians inRepublic5, see J. Annas, “Plato’sRe- publicand Feminism” (1979), 24 – 33; E. Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contempo- rary Views” (1982), 109 – 31 and “Hairy Cobblers and Philosopher Queens” (1988), 19 – 36; M. Buchan,Women in Plato’s Political Theor y(1999), 91– 4; and G. Vlastos, “Was Plato a Femi- nist?” (1989), 288 – 9.

65. Plato states that his reforms are no fantasy or “dream” pertaining only to a hypothetical populace,Rep450d1, which J. Annas notes,Plato’sRepublic, 185 – 6, as does A. Gouldner,En- ter Plato: Classical Greece and the Origins of Social Theor y(1965), 171, 197– 8. Nonetheless, Plato’s reforms are frequently regarded today as “a pipe-dream [and] thought-experiment,” J. Wink- ler,The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece(1990), 18, and see too P. Vander Waerdt, “Politics and Philosophy in Stoicism” (1991), 196. M. F. Burnyeat (“Utopia and Fantasy: The Practicability of Plato’s Ideally Just City” [1992], 175 – 87), however, refutes this view. As C. Kahn (in his 1993 foreword to G. Morrow,Plato’s Cretan City,xxvii) aptly puts it, “Plato . . . had aspired to a public career of political reform. He ultimately chose the life of philosophy as a continuation of politics by other means,” and by writing theRepublicand Lawsforemost. See also C. Bobonich,Plato’s Utopia Recast(2002), 374 – 479. while sexual pleasure is for sissies. 64 And in a more long-term investment beyond his immediate students, Plato wrote theRepublicandLaws,not as bookish utopias, but as plans for real social change toward a future of ap- petitive restraint. 65 Plato presumes the ancient Greek norm that the persons to target for procreative regulations are the central enfranchised group in a city, the guardians in theRepublicand the citizens at large in theLaws.The regula- tions serve partly to perpetuate the group and the distribution of labor within it. As in Greek society, Plato does not offer other possibilities, such as requiring a slave class to perform reproductive labor on a surrogate basis, or employing other social outsiders as procreative laborers to do the job. He has eugenic reasons for requiring the citizens and good guardians to re- produce their own social kind. In theRepublic,city ofﬁcials regulate the guardians in a preferential system that gives the best and most restrainedGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator43 guardians the greatest opportunity to procreate; the worst guardians, the least; and only the offspring of the best are to be raised once they pass in- spection (Rep459d4 – 60b5). The guardians have no choice but to comply.

In theLaws,however, all the citizens must reproduce their fair share and regard it as unholy to do otherwise (783d8 – 84e1, 721c2 – 8). They too, though, are to aspire toward moderation themselves and to reproduce re- strained offspring. Male citizens face stiff penalties if they do not marry fe- male citizens (721d1– 6, 774a1– c2). Once married, the bridegrooms and brides must direct their attention toward procreation. Female overseers po- lice the married couples to make sure that they obey (783e4 – 84c4). The obligation to procreate therefore applies to the guardians on a preferential scale in theRepublic,and to the citizens without exceptions or preferential system in theLaws.In both plans, however, Plato’s regulations aim to create a more purebred strain of human beings in control of their appetites.

Due to his assessment of the appetites, Plato regards society as a mixed blessing. On the one hand, human beings are not self-sufﬁcient and require things to meet their basic needs or “necessary desires.” People have rightly gathered into a city or polis to cooperate, share, and fulﬁll the needs of one another (Rep369b5 – d12). Reproduction, for example, is one such civic need, for without a symbiotic populace, there are no persons to work and sus- tain the division of labor. Plato deems society good to the extent that it sat- isﬁes the necessary desires that lead to individual and collective well-being.

The physical appetites, however, relentlessly push human beings as political animals to transgress the limit of necessary desires, and sexual desire is the strongest culprit. Civic mores should impede this corruption by encourag- ing the enlightened rule of reason in the person of the philosopher king.

According to Plato, the customs of private property and the free market inevitably breed appetitive excess and violence. Society becomes inﬂamed with vices when men have too much wealth in persons, goods, and resources at their disposal on which their own appetites and those of their families may feed and proliferate. Even if a city begins with material simplicity and restraint, it is only a matter of time until it ends up frenetically unrestrained when its inhabitants “buy and sell, [using] the marketplace and coinage as a means of exchange” (Rep371b4 – 8, 372e2 – 3). As Plato sees it, in a free market there are no checks on what people may want to acquire, own, and consume for themselves and their kin. Excess is encouraged as though it were economic prosperity, and this unleashes the mob of appetites and re- lated desires rather than keeping them subdued. As a result, an initially re- strained city “will not satisfy.” Its inhabitants will demand more luxury goods, and thereby make their once healthy community feverish (373a1– 8). In such a diseased city, “men think they will be happy by owning land, big ﬁne houses, ﬁne furnishings, . . . gold, silver, and all other such things . . . and they spend money as they wish, such as giving it to mistresses”Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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44part i 66.Rep424a1– 2, 423e6 – 24b1, 449c4 – 5.

67. Iamblichus,vit Pyth209 –10.

68.Rep449d1– 6. Plato supports this position through the main dialectician inLaws 720e10 – 21a8, even though Adeimantus rather than Socrates is the one who voices it in the Republic.Plato accordingly gives very careful attention to reproductive sexual mores in theRe- publicandLaws, Rep423e6 – 24b1, 449c2 – 73e5;Laws631d6 – 32a2, 720e10 – 21d6, 771c7– 76b4, 782d10 – 85b9, 835d3 – 42a3, 925a2 – c3, 929e9 – 30e2. G. Grote appreciates the import of Plato’s emphasis on regulating procreation,Plato,vol. 4, 169 – 80, 342 – 7.

69.The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State(1972, originally published 1884). (419a4 – 9, 420a4 – 6). To rehabilitate the city from acquisitive license, Plato would prohibit private ownership, unrestricted consumption, and the free market. Given his diagnosis, a communal social order is the cure.

In theRepublicPlato ﬁnds a Pythagorean-inspired communalism the most attractive option to implement for his envisioned city of Kallipolis. This so- cial order works in the voluntary cooperative spirit that “friends should hold goods in common ( koinå tå f¤lvn ),” 66though the social pattern is also mandated administratively by enlightened philosophical rule. Plato works from a Pythagorean model partly because he and the Pythagoreans alike sought to institute “as many impediments as possible on the exercise of human sexual activity ( éfrod¤sia )” for the good of the city, 67 as ex- plored further in chapter four. Plato thus approaches his plans for com- munal sexual reform in a Pythagorean spirit, for he too aims to help friends help one another keep their sexual and other desires in beneﬁcial check, with guidance from the wise king. He is utterly serious in this endeavor, given all that he sees at stake.

The ﬁrst kinds of property that Plato would free from the ownership of men are women and their capacities for reproduction and nurture. Women gain ﬁrst priority because the principles by which members of a society re- produce offspring are his fundamental law of social order. Procreative cus- toms, he states, play a pivotal role in determining whether social customs in general are restrained or dissolute. “The beginning of [human] generation is the ﬁrst law that the lawgiver would establish by regulating marriage cus- toms,” because the patterns of “marriage, procreation, and raising children . . . have a great and complete bearing on whether the social order proceeds rightly or wrongly.” 68If this primary law mandates, as Athenian society did in his day, that men own wives and daughters — wives as household manag- ers and mothers of their children, and daughters to be exchanged in mar- riage to other men — then the society is bound to be disorderly and fever- ish. Plato thus long ago had the basic insight for which Engels is better known. 69 He appreciates that the work of reproduction and childrearing sets the pattern of society itself, and with it the quality of life that the people have, female and male members alike. Plato too advocates a kind of social- ism, albeit on a city, rather than nation, basis. What brings him to this in-Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator45 70. E. Barker (Greek Political Theor y: Plato and His Predecessors 3[1947], 211– 7) explicates the salient differences and similarities between Platonic and modern socialism. His explanation gets right to the heart of the matter and antedates the heated and largely anachronistic con- troversy provoked by K. Popper inThe Open Society and Its Enemies 5(1971, ﬁrst published 1945, under the duress of World War II). Barker senses and tries to defuse the reading of totalitari- anism into Plato’sRepublicin his 1947 preface, x.

71. M. O’Brien,The Politics of Reproduction(1981), 123 – 5. This is not to deny that Plato had a desire to emancipate Athenian women. He states that he would like to free them from the “sunken and shadowy life” (Laws781c6) to which they were relegated.

72. Reproduction of kin also leads to divided loyalty between family and city. If, for ex- ample, a city goes to war, male citizens face conﬂicting obligations — to ﬁght, and risk death, or to do whatever possible to remain alive so as to support their aging kin. Plato recognizes the sight, however, sets him apart from Engels and makes his socialism puritan- ical. 70Because disorderly sexual desire and its progeny of vices are to blame for social and psychological corruption, he gives top priority to reining it in.

In so doing Plato strives for a two-in-one efﬁciency. By regulating procre- ation as the ﬁrst law of social order, he constrains the sexual appetite as well.

The two-fold control mechanism that he devises works rather like a twisted leash that conﬁnes a dog by its neck and leg at the same time, though Plato’s double leashing is deliberate. His communal rallying cry thus is not the Marxist-feminist “Workers of the world unite!” with a driving concern for female solidarity and freedom from male-mandated reproductive norms. 71 Rather, he is the ﬁrst voice of the Platonist Temperance Union. “Citizens, rein in your sexual desire! The reproductive urge ﬁrst and the rest will stay in tow!” A Pythagorean communalism of the women best facilitates this aim because it severs sexual desire from possessiveness and consumerism, helps restrict sexual activity to the beneﬁcial degree, and in other ways encour- ages an appetitively subdued society.

First, the communal pooling of women and reproductive labor removes kinship-based factionalism and the related competition for wealth in the city. Plato thinks “there is no greater evil than the fragmented city” (Rep 462a9 – b3). A city must strive to be politically uniﬁed and psychologically holistic, so that it responds quickly to suffering in its parts, just as the human body responds to a sharp blow to a ﬁnger (Rep462b4 – 6, 462c10 – d3). Tra- ditional procreation within marriage, however, hinders civic unity because it motivates families and clans to rival one another to acquire more for their own households at each other’s expense (Rep462b8 – c5, 464c5 – e2). Fam- ilies, preoccupied with their own material prosperity, tend to neglect and even contribute to suffering in the city outside of the kinship circle that claims their primary loyalty and identity (Rep462a9 – e3). Alcmaeonid pain is likely to give pleasure to the rival Pisistratid clan. Both groups are ready to dishonor their rivals and put them at a disadvantage, even though they are all fellow Athenian citizens. 72 Plato’s communal reforms in reproductionGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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46part i force of this ghrobosk¤a obligation inLaws930e3 – 32d8. His communal procreative reform would unify the city by eliminating such conﬂicting allegiance.

73. As J. Annas (Plato’sRepublic, 183) states, Plato is dissatisﬁed that “half the citizens [are] sitting at home wasting effort doing identical trivial jobs!” and childrearing would dismantle the acquisitive bastions of kinship groups so as to produce a genuinely collective civic body committed to moderation.

Second, the communal pooling of women is of great beneﬁt to women themselves. It frees them from the burden of running the domestic side of family-oriented acquisitiveness, such as purchasing goods for the house- hold and maintaining it. Through this freedom they are much better posi- tioned to help shape a holistic and uniﬁed city. When women are privately managed as wives, mothers, and daughters, the ensuing social order as- sumes that a married couple’s desires to have their own children, house, and household goods are basic subsistence needs rather than acquisitive wants. A wife in this system belongs to a particular man and is the mother of his children. She is habituated to want her family’s comforts foremost even if the cost, including her energy, would be better spent on a community project that matters to everyone. Her daily tasks inefﬁciently replicate the so-called women’s work being done by neighboring wives and mothers in a house-by-house choreography that leaves them all with less time and initia- tive for more collective social pursuits. 73Their energy would not be drained in a society that shared the raising of children and other domestic work.

Women ﬁnd their opportunities to work for the collective good curtailed in societies where men and their families sharply distinguish among them- selves between “my property and not my property” (Rep462c4 – 5, 464c5 – e2). The problem becomes even more apparent the more consumer- oriented the society becomes, which Plato thinks is inevitable in a society that extols the family, property, and mercantilism. The women have bigger houses, more furnishings, and so on, whose upkeep is a their responsibility regardless of whether they own female slaves, or, in the modern day, ma- chines. Plato explains this argument by analogy with female guard dogs. If the dogs, like Athenian women, were restricted to feminine roles such as tending the pups and cleaning the den, then the pack as a whole would suf- fer. The female dogs would not go hunting as they do along with the male dogs to help meet the entire pack’s need for sustenance (Rep451d4 – 52a1).

This would be especially true if the den kept getting needlessly bigger and more elaborate due to covetous canine visions of the good life. Plato’s com- munal reforms do away with the separate households that lead to unneces- sary replication and proliferation of appetitive demands. Women are then freed along with the men to shape a holistic and uniﬁed city, rather than re- maining pawns to the passions to have and to own.

Plato remains true to his conviction that the communal city ideally shouldGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator47 74. E. Barker (Greek Political Theor y,219 – 20) eloquently conveys Plato’s misgivings about the family as a social unit in his day: “‘Every Englishman’s house is his castle,’ we say. ‘Pull down the walls,’ Plato would reply, ‘they shelter at best a narrow family affection; they harbour at the worst selﬁsh instincts and stunted capacities. Pull down the walls and let the fresh air of a com- mon life blow over the place where they have been.’ . . . [The home] is condemned again as a place of wasted talents, dwarfed powers, where the mind of the wife is wasted on the service of tables (460D), and ‘little meannesses’ abound.” 75. Plato vitiates the idea of communalism inRepublic5 by describing the male guardians alone as “friends” ( f¤loi ) and grouping the female guardians and children as part of the com- munal resources that the friends have in common, 449c4 – 5, 457c10 – d3; M. Buchan,Women in Plato’s Political Theor y(1999), 121; M. Foucault,Use of Pleasure,53 n. 2. A genuinely commu- nal society would regard all morally mature agents as friends and treat children as friends in the making. The early Stoics formulate this idea, as shown in the next chapter.

76.Rep450c1– 5, 451b9 – c7, 457b7– c1, 457c10 – d3. As noted, however, by R. Mayhew (Aristotle’s Criticism of Plato’sRepublic [1997], 130 – 7), even theRepubliccontains several inti- mations toward universalizing communalism to all the city dwellers.

77. The image of the ﬂood is Plato’s,Rep457b7– d5. Aristotle’s arguments against Plato’s communal society appear inPo l1261b16 – 64b24, the uneven quality of which R. Mayhew studies,Aristotle’s Criticism,59 –122, and see too A. W. Price,Love and Friendship,179 – 205. A prominent lampoon of communal sexual mores appears in Aristophanes, R. Ussher, ed.,Aris- tophanes:Ecclesiazusae, xiv – xx. The precise relationship betweenRepublic5 and Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusaecannot be securely determined from available evidence, though Plato’s communal theory might be reworking Aristophanes’, M. F. Burnyeat, “Utopia and Fantasy,” 180 – 5. More reactionary scholars, such as A. Bloom, have tended to dismiss or distort the reforms inRepub- lic5, as explored succinctly by C. Pierce, “Equality:RepublicV” (1973), 1–11 and in greater de- tail by N. Bluestone,Women and the Ideal Society: Plato’sRepublicand Modern Myths of Gender supplant the society that privileges private ownership, favors the family, and encourages consumption. 74In theRepubliche is optimistic that his propos- als are feasible and practical. This reform would work successfully, so long as philosophers become kings and their subjects are collectively raised and educated according to the principle that friends should hold goods in com- mon. 75Sexual communalism remains an elite practice in theRepublic,how- ever, restricted to the guardian class. 76In theLawsPlato reafﬁrms and broad- ens his conviction that communal reproduction and childrearing are the best way to ground a society. If he could, he would extend these reforms to all citizens, not only to an elite guardian class. “No one will ever posit a more correct or better deﬁnition [of the ideal city] in its preeminence toward hu- man virtue than one in which the private ownership of women, children, and all other goods is everywhere and by every means eliminated from hu- man life” (739b8 – e3). Nonetheless, Plato by this time is resigned to think- ing that such reform is not possible on a pragmatic level. Only “gods or chil- dren of gods dwell happily in the fully communal city” (Laws739d6 – e1), but mere mortals seem incapable of such enlightenment. Plato surrenders to the apparent inevitability of familial norms in theLawsbecause of the ﬂood of reactionary responses that his communal sexual proposals elicited, an onrush that has only recently abated.

77The citizens of his envisioned cityGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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48part i (1987) 22 – 73, 154 – 62. Since the 1970s,Republic5 has rightly been taken not as a comic in- terlude but as an earnest proposal. In addition to Pierce, see J. Annas, “Plato’sRepublicand Feminism,” 24 – 33; S. Okin, “Philosopher Queens and Private Wives: Plato on Women and the Family” (1977), 345 – 69; N. Bluestone,Women and the Ideal Society,77–154; G. Vlastos, “ Was Plato a Feminist?” (1989); and M. Buchan,Women in Plato’s Political Theor y,114 – 23, 135 – 48.

78. As P. A. Brunt observes (“The Model City of Plato’sLaws” [1993], 263 – 8) a central moral aim of Magnesia is to restrain the love of money and reduce the gulf between “the Haves and the Have-nots,” so much so that the citizens should not even trade with outside peoples.

of Magnesia must make do with the given conditions of family and mar- riage, but still try to be moderate in all respects. For example, the rich and powerful should marry persons of modest means so that the ensuing gen- erations of families are at most moderately afﬂuent and roughly on par with one another (Laws772e7– 73e4). Here Plato is trying to deploy marriage to do what he knows a communal city would accomplish more effectively: to prevent social cliques of the wealthy from producing more of their own social kind, at the expense of shaping a more holistic and egalitarian city of moderation and justice for all. 78In theLaws,however, he shrinks from en- forcing even this method of severing the reproductive urge from family wealth and power, unlike the forceful separation of the two that he sets out for the guardians in theRepublic.“To mandate these things by law would be considered laughable and would stir up anger among many” (Laws773c3 – 8). Instead, the citizens must themselves learn to see the merit of marrying into appetitive temperance and voluntarily seek this middle class mean. In theLaws,Plato thus aims only to instill the norm of frugal economic parity within the more traditional Greek framework of marriage and the family.

This alternative is second-rate in his view (Laws739e4), because it leaves in place the appetitive breeding ground that should be supplanted for the moderate society to become a living reality — the individual male ownership of women, their wombs, and children in the family. PL ATO’S EUGENIC AIM IN HIS PROCREATIVE REFORMS Plato in theRepublicandLawsfurther restricts sexual desire through eu- genic constraints on reproduction. Some of the measures derive from pop- ular Greek culture, where they promoted generic well-being of the off- spring and community at large. Plato, though, reshapes these measures to support his own conception of appetitive health. The guardians and citizens must obey population control measures, procreate only during their prime, abide by incest prohibitions, and conduct religious ceremonies in order to have the gods bless and ensure the production of healthy offspring. A few of Plato’s other eugenic measures, though, go beyond retooling popular practices already in place. These measures aim even more pointedly to se-Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator49 79.Laws737e1– 3. The number 5,040 is an admirable choice from a Pythagorean per- spective because it is a multiple of all the numbers from one through ten. P. D. Bardis (“Over- population, the Ideal City, and Plato’s Mathematics,” [1971], 129 – 31) sees additional sym- bolism in Plato’s choice of 5,040.

80. J. Mulhern (“Population and Plato’sRepublic” [1975], 273, 280) is right that for Plato the demographic issue “is at least as much the composition as the size of the population,” but he is mistaken to say that Plato’s concerns have “comparatively little to do with numbers.” 81.Rep460e4 – 7;Laws772d5 – e2, 785b2 – 5. M. Foucault (Use of Pleasure,121– 2) similarly notes that Plato prescribes these reproductive age limits in the interest of the offspring. lect for appetitive restraint so as to create a new order of lean human beings on the run like greyhounds toward virtue.

The guardians in theRepublicand the citizens in theLawsmust produce offspring in a limited number and of the best possible kind (Rep456e3 – 8).

In theRepublicthe ideal population should be large enough so that the city is self-sufﬁcient and not so large as to preclude the city from being politi- cally and psychologically holistic. “The guardians must guard in every way that the city will be neither big nor small but of adequate size and uniﬁed” (Rep423c2 – 4, 460a5 – 6). The city ofﬁcials monitor the frequency with which the guardians engage in procreative intercourse. The ofﬁcials must, for example, take into account population losses due to natural deaths, wars, and diseases (Rep460a2 – 6). In theLawsPlato is more speciﬁc about the preferred demographics of the polis. The adult male segment of the population and its concomitant number of households should amount to no more than the choiceworthy Pythagorean number 5,040. 79 The wives should bear at least two offspring, one of each sex. Though Plato does not quantify the upper limit that each couple should produce, he does have such a limit in mind (Laws930c6 – d1). Once married couples produce a “generous quantity of offspring,” they must stop engaging in reproductive intercourse (Laws784b1– 3). The guardians and citizens thus must procre- ate strictly within the means of their community and respect its need for population control (Rep372b8 – c1). This rule hems in sexual desire, for it is a civic duty to avoid sexual relations that lead to births exceeding demo- graphic interests. Population control further curtails the appetites more generally by sparing the city from having too many mouths to feed. 80 The guardians and citizens also must reproduce only during their prime of life so as to give birth to the healthiest possible offspring. For Plato, the prime is an age span during which human beings are “at their peak” of mind and body, ripe for producing the best offspring (Rep461a1– 2). For females it starts between 16 and 20 and extends to 40 years of age. For males it starts between 25 or 35 years of age, or “whenever a man reaches his peak as a runner,” up to the age of 55. 81This rule is very strict. Since the guardians are committed to producing “the best possible men and women” (Rep456e3 – 4), transgressors who procreate outside of the age limits must either abortGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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50part i 82. In theRepublic’s schema of prohibited incest, all children born within the seventh and tenth months after a communally celebrated procreative marriage event are off limits to those guardians who copulated during that event. The guardians in this group are the aggregate par- ents of all the offspring. The same incest prohibition applies to the guardians’ grandchildren, that is, to the offspring produced by their collective children. These grandchildren too are the product of a festive event of copulation,Rep461c1– 7, d2 – e2. Plato, however, allows sexual re- lations between the aggregate of siblings born as a result of each reproductive festival in Kallipolis,Rep461d2 – e3.

83.Laws838a4 – c1, cf. SophoclesOed Rex,1360 – 6. In Athens incest rules forbade sexual relations between parents and children, and also between full siblings and half-siblings with the same mother ( ımomÆtrioi ), C. Cox,Household Interests: Property, Marriage Strategies, and Family Dynamics in Ancient Athens(1998), 116 n. 42.

84. Plato’s rehabilitated religious traditionalism in theLawsis so strong as to be reac- tionary, given its “vehemence . . . and virtuous indignation against the impugners of orthodox belief ” in the gods of his city, G. Grote,Plato,vol. 4, 384, 381– 6. As M. Piérart (Platon et la cité the fetus or expose the newborn infant. If they disobey, they commit a crim- inal act of impiety (Rep461b9 – c7). In theLawstoo, overage citizens who transgress this rule are to be penalized and dishonored with public humili- ations and the occasional beating (Laws784e2 – 5). Plato thus curbs human sexual desire further by imposing a rule of quality control in addition to population control. The guardians and citizens must refrain from procre- ating until they are at the right age and the city needs newborn members to add its populace.

Incest prohibitions in theRepublicandLawsserve partly to set another bar- rier to unregulated sexual desire. In theRepubliche requires the guardians to obey a communal version of the traditional Greek rule to avoid parent- child incest. 82In theLawshe reverts to the traditional Greek rules. 83Sexual relationships between parents and children are “not in the least holy, but loathed by the gods and most shameful of shameful deeds” (Laws838a4 – c1). Though incest prohibitions prevent inbreeding, in Plato’s cities they further tighten the reins of sexual desire, for the taboo in theRepublicap- plies to guardians who are already retired from their reproductive duties and forbidden to produce more children, when the problem of inbreeding no longer applies. The guardians and citizens thus have to mind their place in the kinship structure as well as their age and demographic concerns be- fore allowing themselves to engage in sexual activity.

In theRepublicandLawsPlato insists that procreative relations elicit the benevolent involvement of the gods through the use of religious ceremo- nies. This requirement regulates sexual desire further by linking the repro- ductive urge with a piety that is both sexually explicit and solemn. The cer- emonialism also reafﬁrms the presence and importance of the Greek gods, whom Plato has rehabilitated so that the gods are supremely good and im- pervious to corruption — models of divine virtue for the citizens to emu- late. 84 The worship of Plato’s noble Olympians is required to ensure that Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator51 grecque: Theorie et realité dans la constitution des Lois.[1974], 353) likewise notes about theLaws, “L’aspect le plus marquant qui se dégage de l’examen de l’organisation du culte est le respect profond que Platon porte à la tradition grecque.” See too P. A. Brunt, “The Model City,” 252 – 3; G. Morrow,Plato’s Cretan City(1960; reprint, 1993), 434 – 96; M. Morgan, “Plato and Greek Religion” (1992), 227– 47; E. R. Dodds,The Greeks and the Irrational(1951), 219 – 24; and O. Reverdin,La religion de la cité platonicienne(1945), 218 – 41, 244 – 50. Hence if Plato lived in Porphyry’s day, the question is not whether he would harbor sentimentsadversus Christianosbut how much more trenchant his criticisms would be. M. Morgan (Platonic Piety: Philosophy and Rit- ual in Fourth-Centur y Athens[1990], 100 – 57) ventures to interrelate Plato’s religious piety and traditionalism with theRepublic’s epistemology and educational reforms.

85.Rep459e5 – 60a2;Laws716d4 – e2, 774e9 – 75a6.

86.Laws721b6 – c6, 773e5 – 74a1, 776b2 – 4, and see also T. Van Eijk, “Marriage and Vir- ginity, Death and Immortality” (1972), 209 –11.

the gods will recognize their mortal counterparts in virtue and favor the people’s production of appetitively sedate offspring. The rituals especially serve “the gods of reproduction ( yeo‹ gen°ylioi )”(Laws729c5 – 8), such as Hera and Zeus, who were important deities presiding over the birth process in ancient Greece. The guardians and citizens must incorporate ample re- ligious ritual into their mating through traditional feasts, hymns, and sacri- ﬁces. 85 The gods receiving such worship gain in honor and strength, as is their due, and once gladdened in their hearts, the gods are then propitious toward the city and its reproductive efforts. The guardians and citizens thus are obliged to sustain the gods in order to bear appetitively well-bred chil- dren, and to raise children worthy of sustaining the rehabilitated gods, just as the Greeks had long been doing by Plato’s day, though without his refur- bished Olympian theology and express eugenic aims. The generations to come, Plato insists, are required to hand on this living torch of worshipping the good gods. 86He therefore supports the traditional polytheistic web con- necting the Greek gods, city, adults, and children together in a symbiotic community, though his community and its Olympians are dedicated to ap- petitive virtue.

To Plato, as to the Greeks, the inaugural act of marital intercourse is it- self a religious ceremony, such as the wedding night in theLawsor a com- munally reproductive event in theRepublic.In theLaws,a personiﬁed deity of reproductive “Beginning” ( érxÆ ) presides over this initiation. She en- sures reproductive continuity across generations and its ceremonial ex- change between the citizens and their gods. This goddess “maintains all things provided that she receives due honor from those who make use of her” (Laws775e2 – 4). A male citizen thus would be outrageously impious if he refused to be a husband and father and abandoned this civic symbiosis with the gods. “It is never holy for a man to willingly and deliberately be de- prived of a wife and children” (Laws721c6 – 8). The goddess of reproduc- tive Beginning helps prevent this impiety from occurring. As immortal over-Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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52part i 87. 456e6 – 7, 459d7– 60c5, cf. 451d4 – 52a1.

88. 460c3 – 5. Plato is likely referring to infanticide here, though it has been argued that the inferior offspring are removed to the lower social classes of laborers and farmers. The lat- ter interpretation seems dubious, though, for in 460c3 – 5, Plato states that “the ofﬁcials will hide away ( katakrÊcousin )” the offspring in an “unspeakable and secret place.” By contrast, he designates that legitimate children (viz., those produced through the ceremonies) who are not visibly defective but prove not to be of golden caliber “will be thrust out ( Ö vsousin ) to the craftspeople or farmers,”Rep415b6 – c2. For discussion of the question see J. Mulhern, “Pop- ulation and Plato’sRepublic,” 274 – 7; W. K. C. Guthrie,A Histor y of Greek Philosophy,vol. 4 (1975), 481– 2; G. van N. Viljoen, “Plato and Aristotle on the Exposure of Infants at Athens” (1959), 63 – 6; and J. Adam,TheRepublicof Plato 2vol. 1 (1963), 357– 60.

89. Plato expressly refers to these more frequent opportunities as a prize ( g°raw ),Rep 460b1– 5. Here he adapts the idea, prominent in theIliad,that sexual activity is a prize for valor,Il1.109 – 20. In theRepublic,though, the prize is a sexual and procreative opportunity, whereas in theIliadit is a civilian female captive who becomes the warrior’s reward, his spear- prize concubine. In this respect as well, Plato privileges the male over the female guardians.

Just as the males are the friends and the females belong to the aggregate that they share in common, so too the males win reproductively sexual enjoyment of the females in their ascetic harem, but not vice versa. seer, she accompanies the newlyweds to the bedroom and sees to it that they carry out their procreative responsibility for the city and the gods.

Plato also proposes specialized methods of selecting for temperance that go beyond adapting popular Greek reproductive mores. In theRepubliche proposes selective breeding, by analogy with purebred dogs, horses, and the like. 87Through a rigged system of lots of which the guardians are unaware, “the best” female and male guardians, that is, the ones most virtuous in their appetitive discipline, should have the most frequent opportunity to mate.

The guardians who prove somewhat inferior and less restrained should have the least frequent opportunity — and only with other inferior guard- ians (459d7– 9). Their offspring are to be secretly taken away by ofﬁcials and almost certainly left to die, along with the visibly defective offspring of the superior guardians. 88Appetitive moderation is thus its own limited he- donistic reward in theRepublic.Since the best guardians are most capable of managing their sexual desire, they win most of the available occasions for experiencing sexual pleasure while they are passing on their traits. 89In the Laws,however, Plato abandons the breeding altogether and prefers to mate husbands and wives who complement each other psychologically as well as economically. The dispositions of the spouses should carefully counterbal- ance or offset whatever personality extremes the two partners may have.

The intended result is to achieve the golden mean of temperance in the character formation of the offspring. For example, a rash man should marry and mate with a placid woman. This “will beneﬁt the civic order” because their personalities will blend and form offspring who are more balancedGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator53 90.Laws773a7– b5. See further W. Fortenbaugh, “Plato: Temperament and Eugenic Pol- icy” (1975), 291– 6.

91. G. Grote (Plato,vol. 4, 345) recognizes the temporary nature of this strictly reproduc- tive regimen.

92.Laws783a1– e1, M. Piérart,Platon et la cité grecque,161– 3. and restrained. 90 Plato thus ventures into innovative methods to implant the norm of appetitive virtue across generations. He is ready to be a politi- cal animal breeder or a marital chemist mixing character — whatever it takes to realize his reforms.

Plato offers a ﬁnal eugenic plan in theLaws,and only in this dialogue, that is of great importance for the prominence it gains in Middle and Chris- tian Platonism, albeit in a much transmuted form. The citizens of the hy- pothetical city of Magnesia must engage strictly in temperate and deliber- ately reproductive sexual relations when they ﬁrst marry. This restriction pertains only to “the procreative union” ( ≤ t∞w paidogon¤aw sunous¤a ) (838e5 – 6), and it is in force either until the couples have produced their requisite number of children or throughout their prime of life, if they do not meet the quota. The rule ceases to apply once they produce sufﬁcient offspring or pass their prime. 91Plato imagines that the rule would be in ef- fect for no more than ten years on average per couple (784b1– 3). During this time their sexual interests and activity must be exclusively procreative.

“The bridegroom must direct his mind to his bride and reproduction, and the bride must do the same,” especially when no children are born yet (783e4 – 7). Newlywed husbands in particular are prohibited from ejaculat- ing in a willfully nonreproductive way. They must refrain from homoerotic sexual activity, masturbation, and sexual acts that are either actively contra- ceptive or performed with ﬁngers crossed to prevent conception. They also must avoid intercourse that is carelessly indifferent to whether pregnancy will ensue (838e4 – 39a6). Through this conditioning, the citizens during their procreative duty should ideally come to ﬁnd nonreproductive sexual activity as unthinkable as incest and avoid it voluntarily (837e9 – 38e1). In case the citizens still prove sexually unruly, however, Plato has backup forces ready. The female overseers, police, and city council must, if need be, stop them from shirking or transgressing their reproductive obligation. Trans- gressors must be stigmatized in public; their names posted in public view.

They are prohibited from attending marriage and birth ceremonies, and other citizens may beat the reprobates with impunity if they dare to attend such ceremonies. 92The married couples thus must keep their sexual activ- ity strictly procreative during their period of childbearing. The goddess Be- ginning is with them in the bedroom to reinforce compliance and a repro- ductive dragnet keeps them under surveillance.Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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54part i 93. As discussed in chapter four, Athenian husbands in Plato’s day were allowed to engage in sexual relations with concubines, prostitutes, female slaves, and younger men. Wives, though, were allowed to copulate only with their husbands. Whatever sexual activity wives may have practiced without overt social recognition remains an obscure but important question.

The procreant male citizens in theLawsreceive a list of sexual prohibi- tions against masturbating and so on because Plato ﬁnds them his main reg- ulatory problem, oversexed as he thinks men are in their ideas about virile happiness, especially in youth. Keeping the young women in line seems less difﬁcult to him because Athenian social mores already recognized no sex- ual venue for female citizens beyond marital sex, unlike the many venues that men were openly accorded — to the city’s detriment, as Plato saw it. 93 As he puts it, through his anatomical displacement of the social imperative, the womb naturally commands women to become mothers, while men must undergo full-scale reprogramming.

Plato facilitates his goal to inculcate appetitive restraint by construing the temperate and reproductive regimen as a work of art for the procreant cit- izens to make. Reproductive activity, as he describes it in theLawsalone, is a skillful craft, and like other crafts, it requires a purposeful and controlled technique to do well. “All persons who are partners in any enterprise pro- duce ﬁne and good products when they direct their mind to themselves and the activity, and do the opposite when they are inattentive” (Laws783d8 – e4). If the prospective parents are not deliberate and sedate in their acts of reproduction, then they fail in their duty to be master artisans of offspring.

Like careless woodworkers whose furniture wobbles, they produce badly wrought offspring who are bound to become dissolute. To drink and then copulate is particularly reprehensible, rather as “drinking and driving” is to- day. Intoxication interferes with the sexual craftsmanship required to shape embryos that are “well-built, steady, and tranquil” (775c4 – d4, 674b5 – 6).

Plato further insists that the citizens can master this procreative skill only through life-long appetitive restraint in all respects. They cannot be undis- ciplined in other respects and then try to look restrained when they copu- late to reproduce, such as by holding their breath or taking a sedative. Day after day they must avoid all the “diseased, violent, and unjust” activity that Plato associates with uncontrolled appetition (775d4 – e2). Thanks to this overall habituation to temperance, parents imprint their sober craftsman- ship on the embryonic character of their offspring. They also bring the new- borns into a society where rampant desires have in theory become un- thinkable due to the vigilant monitoring of the appetites that concentrates primarily on sexual desire as the deepest root of all vice. This eugenic pro- posal is the consummate touch to the program of sexual restraint that Plato works out in theRepublicandLaws,his key way to eliminate the profusion of human wrongdoing that uncontrolled sexual desire unleashes.Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator55 94. 930d3 – e2. Plato vacillates only on the question whether male citizens should be al- lowed to impregnate females slaves in their own, rather than only in other men’s households, 841d5 – e4, 930d3 – e2. Within a man’s own household, the female slave and child are to be ex- iled only if the case gains public notoriety.

The sexual program in theLawsis far more restrictive than the one in theRepublicdue to its twist on reproduction as purposive craft. In theRe- publicPlato argues only that city ofﬁcials must monitor the frequency and coupling patterns of the guardians’ procreative activity (460a2 – 6, 459d7– 9). He does not demand that this activity be temperate and attentively pur- poseful. In theLawsPlato not only adds this major qualiﬁer, he arms it with policing mechanisms for the procreant citizens (784a1– e1). TheRepublic, moreover, never speciﬁes that guardians in their prime must engage only in reproductive sexual relations — it states only that their acts of procreation are to be strictly regulated. TheRepublicdoes not rule out autoeroticism, for instance, let alone stigmatize reproductive guardians for “killing the human race” if they occasionally masturbate to climax, whereas male citizens are so stigmatized in theLaws(838e7– 8). Plato in theLawscreates a society that is more repressive due to this regimen of strict procreation that has no precedent in theRepublic.

Plato’s greater severity in theLawsis partly a compensatory measure for having to accommodate the family, clans, and the marketplace in Magnesia.

Since these customs give sexual desire a ready way to breed myriad vices, he grants the reproductive urge and sexual appetite far less latitude. In theRe- public,by contrast, the communal guardians are precluded from having sexual desire run wild through the conduits of the family and free market.

Plato, if given a choice, would control sexual desire by eliminating these conduits rather than leaving them in place and having to clamp down on sexual desire. By the time he wrote theLaws,though, he found to his dis- may that people refused to surrender familial clans and the market. Sexual desire thus pays the price and gets put under maximum security.

Despite the marital and procreative orientation of theLaws,in no dia- logue does Plato require his citizens to engage in exclusively marital sexual relations. In theRepublic,of course, he would prefer to do away with mar- riage altogether for the guardian class. In theLaws,where marriage is the norm, he takes it for granted that male citizens in their prime will occa- sionally impregnate female slaves as well as wives, though he requires this practice to remain discreet. “If a female slave mates with . . . a free man, her offspring must belong to her master.” 94Plato’s position here is compatible with his eugenic rule that a procreant male citizen must not ejaculate into a woman unless he intends to make her pregnant (Laws839a1– 3). Because this rule is not as strong as requiring a male citizen to inseminate only hisGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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56part i 95. In theLawsPlato initially entertains the idea of having his citizens be monogamously sexual after they ﬁnish their procreative duty to the city, but then states that this is unattain- able, 840d9 – 41b5.

96. The city ofﬁcials may, for instance, put the citizens through various physical workouts in order to redirect the nutriment that otherwise fuels their sexual appetite overmuch, 841a6 – 8. own wife, the men remain free to exercise a reproductive prerogative with female slaves so as to replenish the slave labor force on a locally grown ba- sis. And though Plato does not say as much, if the men are temperate and purposive while copulating with female slaves, they in theory improve the slave breed too — better workers who eat less. TheLawstherefore does not mandate strictly marital sexual practices, 95 while theRepubliceliminates marriage outright for the main enfranchised group.

Plato in theLawsandRepublicleaves the sexual behavior of the citizens and guardians unmonitored after they complete their reproductive service to the city. He is quite conﬁdent that they will heed the limits of necessary and beneﬁcial sexual pleasure, for by this time they are disciplined to be moderate and their reproductive urge has quieted down. Plato also thinks that those who are ﬁnished procreating inevitably will be sexually active be- cause of the sexual appetite’s driving force for much of the human life span.

Assuming theLaws’ten-year average period of reproduction, most of the women would be only in their later twenties and most of the men would be around forty, hardly too old for eros. In theLaws,likewise, postreproduc- tive sexual activity “should remain silently unregulated” so long as the citi- zens remain moderate, avoid incest, do not procreate, and refrain from copulating with citizens who are still serving reproductive duty (784e2 – 85a3). Even more permissively in theRepublic,guardians past their prime need only obey incest rules and avoid reproducing. Otherwise the men are “free to have sexual activity with whomever they please, . . . and likewise the women” (461b9 – c1), whereas Plato offers no such carte blanche in the Laws.In theLaws,further, he keeps plans to enforce sexual moderation on standby, for the sexual appetite needs an extinguisher in case the citizens break away from their controlled burn. 96 This outbreak is more likely to happen to them than to the communal guardians, for the family and pri- vate ownership fuel sexual desire.

Though Plato does not specify when postreproductive sexual behavior crosses the line from being necessary to unnecessary, what matters most is that necessary sexual activity takes place discreetly, not lewdly on display (784e5 – 85a3). Thus, even though he is stern in his restrictions, he is not so severe that he would require sexual abstinence from the guardians and cit- izens who have completed their reproductive service to the city. In fact, as he states in theLaws,citizens who have ﬁnished reproducing should regard moderation and “not complete sexual abstinence” as honorable, and theyGaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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desire’s hunger and plato the regulator57 97. P. Hall (Cities in Civilization[1998], 27) is representative of this interpretation: Plato’s “ideal city of Magnesia, described in theLaws,is an utterly joyless place in which . . . sex would be solely for procreation.” W. K. C. Guthrie (Histor y of Greek Philosophy,vol. 5, 354 – 5) is Hall’s source. Note also J. Brundage (Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe[1987], 16 n. 30), who attributes strict procreationism to both theLawsandRepublic.I address this marked over- statement of Plato’s position further in chapter four. should act accordingly (841b4 – 5, 784e5 – 85a1). In so doing they serve Aph- rodite properly (841a9 – b2), which she naturally compels them to do until they become elderly. Plato therefore never seeks to limit all sexual activity to a strictly procreative function, even though this position has been attributed to him, both in Jewish and Christian Platonism and in the modern day. 97In theLawsthe citizens adhere to a strictly temperate and deliberately repro- ductive function only for the time they must engage in their baby-making craft. In theRepublicno such restriction applies. To Plato, then, temperate sexual hedonism is the mark of appetitive virtue, not sexual renunciation apart from the perfunctory performance of reproduction. This principle re- spects the force that Plato accords to the sexual appetite and is in keeping with the Apollonian tenor of his ethics, mhd¢n êgan , “nothing in excess.” CONCLUSION Sexual desire according to Plato is the most incorrigible of the inherently antirational physical appetites and gives rise to myriad ills individually and socially. It has plagued the human condition in its uncontrolled or poorly regulated form, and thus must be curtailed to the necessary degree. The sexual appetite, when successfully domineering, both deters the embodied soul from attaining enlightenment and places it at risk of reincarnating as a dumb animal, never to desire Beauty or even to think again. As a bodily health problem, further, excessive sexual desire and activity bring distress due to the gross imbalance of burning pain over pleasure. Finally, individ- ual vices, crime in the streets, and warfare between cities and states are the seedy fruits of sexual desire, hunger, and thirst — and sexual desire espe- cially. The inhibition of sexual desire and the other appetites would conse- quently bring great beneﬁts for individual health, the social good, and the enlightenment of the embodied soul, and the last beneﬁt for Plato is the most important of all.

In theRepublicandLawsPlato does not present one ﬁxed plan to rein in sexual desire, but he aims to control it by managing the reproductive urge in a variety of ways. Despite the absence of systematic ﬁxity, he supports sev- eral constant plans across both dialogues. First, he advocates communalism, and reproductive communalism especially, in order to eliminate divisive clan groups and the marketplace through which the appetites run riot. Cru-Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

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58part i cial though this reform is, in theLawsPlato despairs of its feasibility and con- structs a second-best plan, while still preferring his communal ideal. The compromise system retains the family along with trade in the marketplace.

As a compensatory measure, he constrains sexual desire even more ﬁrmly as the primary origin of vices. Second, Plato advocates procreative age lim- its and strict measures of population control in the interest of appetitive re- straint and the greater good. Third, he requires the guardians and citizens to honor the gods through Greek religious ceremonies in order to enhance the greater symbiotic community of noble gods and well-behaved mortals through the reproduction of children destined for appetitive virtue.

In addition to the constants, Plato promotes several eugenic options to inculcate sexual and other appetitive restraint. In theRepubliche encour- ages breeding only the better-restrained guardians; in theLawshe has per- sons mate with spouses of counterbalancing personality traits and economic backgrounds. As his most ambitious and historically signiﬁcant plan, Plato in theLawsmaintains that reproduction is a skill that requires life-long con- trols on the appetites, especially during the delicate craftwork of procre- ative sexual intercourse. To prevent the slipshod production of children, he requires the ever-temperate citizens to be strictly and deliberately repro- ductive in their sexual activity, but only while serving their time of provid- ing newborn human resources for the city. After the citizens have per- formed their service, Plato directs them to continue paying their virtuously moderate sexual dues to Aphrodite, which the sexual appetite presses them to do until its yearning for fricative pleasure fades away much later in life.

Despite Plato’s repertoire of eugenic plans, their common goal is to regulate procreation so that uncontrolled sexual and reproductive activity become passé customs that a new breed of human beings have transcended — the once sex-hungry men in particular. If Plato had his way, sexual prac- tices and their progeny of vices would undergo major reduction and re- form. So effective would the social reconditioning be that the citizens of the future would look back upon Plato’s fellow Athenians as primitive sex- ual savages, much as we pride ourselves for our greater brain capacity over Australopithecus.

The early Stoics Zeno and Chrysippus, as I argue in the next chapter, strongly dissent from Plato’s conviction that sexual desire is antirational and wildly prone to interfere with the good of the soul, individuals, and society.

Though the early Stoics are critical of Greek sexual mores, their criticisms and proposed sexual reforms differ greatly from Plato’s. Plato, as we have seen, is ready to do whatever it takes to prevent the sexually appetitive beast from spawning its wanton desires. The early Stoics deny that there is any such beast. To understand their arguments, we should now enter the early Stoic city of eros and then explore how later Stoics rework the sexual principles of Zeno and Chrysippus into a tamer and more traditional social form.Gaca, Kathy L.. The Making of Fornication : Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, University of California Press, 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lehman-ebooks/detail.action?docID=223852.

Created from lehman-ebooks on 2020-06-01 13:53:40.