So boy-love, practiced right, is all about the man’s quest for greatness—is that it? In pursuing the lofty goal of virtuous immortality, the wise man is expected to transcend the earth-bound love of an individual boy. The too-cute-by-half Diotima says,
...the correct order of going...is to begin with the particular examples of beauty, but always to mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using them as steps only, from one going on to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies...until...he arrives at the study of nothing but beauty itself...
It certainly worked a treat for Socrates. His cold refusal of Alkibiades’ favours got him a canon-ful of “the glorious fame of immortal virtue”. The rebuffed boy, however, felt “dishonoured” by his mentor’s “contemptuous and derisive and disdainful” attitude towards his “youthful beauty.”
Alkibiades was driven to his “wit’s end” by the man he was besotted with but couldn’t snag. With wine loosening his tongue, Alkibiades remembers how he found himself, as Athens’ most beautiful boy, taking on the lover’s role, trying to seduce the ironically aloof old goat. Healthy or humiliating? Difficult to read it as something done for Alkibiades’ benefit. It seems far more about Socrates’ quest for godhead.
Moving into manhood, Alkibiades becomes an erratic wrecker, a self-indulgent party-boy and dedicated womaniser, completely uninterested in the honourable Greek love tradition of pederastic mentorship. Perhaps unsurprising given his experience with the one man he fell seriously in love with.
Alkibiades concludes by saying:
I am not the only person he has treated thus: there are Charmides, son of Glaukon, Euthydemos, son of Diokles, and any number of others whom he has deceived into thinking of him as the lover, while bringing it about that he is the beloved rather than the lover.
Always the beloved, so always positioned to be the receiver of gifts and attention. Irony can only exculpate so far. I think Alkibiades’ accusations deserve to be taken seriously. Believing the victim, I think it’s called. It has to be asked: Was Socrates a dirty old man? Were the charges brought against him at the end, of corrupting Athens’ youth, justified?
More bumble-bee than gadfly, Socrates was forever buzzing his way through the agora, regularly pausing to dip his prickly dialogue into every boyish bloom opening to the rosy dawn of civilisation. Tirelessly gathering up inspiration like big bags of pollen, he never stopped to risk the dread sting of physical contact, only went buzzing on and ever upward to some immortal state where this Socratic back-and-forth finally becomes One.
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