At 192d of Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes imagines Hephaestus approaching two lovers who are lying together and offering to weld them into one, so that they might remain together for the rest of their lives and even after death. Aristophanes supposes that neither would refuse, and that, if asked whether this was what they desired, they would be unable to name anything greater. I have always found the circumstance in which Hephaestus makes his offer rather peculiar. The lovers are already lying together, although Aristophanes does not tell us whether they have just come together, are in the middle of whatever brought them there, or are simply resting beside one another. The ambiguity is probably not something that needs to be resolved, but it does make the proposal rather different from what it might initially seem. Hephaestus is offering permanence to two people who are already temporarily together, and the lovers apparently cannot imagine why they might prefer the latter arrangement.
Anthony Hooper draws attention to the optatives Aristophanes uses when describing what the lovers would think of Hephaestus's proposal. Their imagined response, he argues, is not necessarily an accurate judgment of what would make them happy, but a belief produced under the particular circumstances of their desire. They have been “led by their eros into overestimating the promise of Hephaestus’ Net.” This is part of Hooper's disagreement with Arlene Saxonhouse, who reads the Net as an expression of the perfection associated with humanity's original, spherical condition. If human beings were once complete, then being welded together again might seem to offer the recovery of something they have lost. But Aristophanes has already made the original circlemen rather difficult to admire. They are powerful, ambitious, and sufficiently confident in their own strength to attack the gods. Zeus describes their assault on Olympus as a threat serious enough to require their division, and their former condition is hardly presented as an uncomplicated ideal. Hooper therefore resists the assumption that Aristophanes considers reunion the final solution to human existence. The lovers may believe that the Net offers everything they want, but this is not quite the same as saying that Aristophanes believes them to be right.
There is another detail in the passage that I think deserves to be considered alongside Hooper's reading. When Hephaestus approaches the lovers, they are already together; his proposal does not initially provide them with something they do not have, but offers to prevent them from ever losing it. The distinction between being together and being unable to separate is rather considerable, particularly when one remembers what happens to Aristophanes' original halves immediately after their division. They cling to one another so completely that they neglect eating and eventually die of hunger and idleness. Zeus eventually introduces sexual desire so that they might separate long enough to attend to the ordinary requirements of living. Hooper emphasizes the importance of this episode in Aristophanes' suspicion of excessive passions, although the lovers at 192d seem to have forgotten the practical disadvantages of their proposed reunion. Hephaestus is offering them an arrangement that would make the problem of separation disappear, but Aristophanes has already shown that the inability to separate can become a problem of its own.
The comparison with Hermes in the Odyssey makes this somewhat more complicated. When Hephaestus catches Ares and Aphrodite in his net, the other gods laugh, while Hermes expresses his willingness to be caught in the same arrangement, even three times over. Hermes is the only one who appears to regard the situation as desirable, although his enthusiasm does not necessarily reflect particularly well on his judgment. In the Odyssey, Hephaestus constructs the net to expose the lovers, having announced that he is leaving for Lemnos before returning unexpectedly to catch them together. In Aristophanes, he offers the same equipment as a means of ensuring that two people never separate. One net makes an erotic relationship visible to everyone else; the other would make it impossible for the participants to exist independently. I do not think the two episodes need to be treated as equivalent, but the fact that Aristophanes chooses Hephaestus, rather than some other god, is worth remembering when Alcibiades eventually begins describing his own experience with Socrates.
Alcibiades tells Socrates that he considers him the person most capable of making him a better man. Socrates replies that, if he really possesses the qualities Alcibiades attributes to him, the exchange Alcibiades proposes would be unfair, and suggests that they should instead “consider things together” (Symposium 218c). Alcibiades takes this as an invitation, arranges to be alone with Socrates, and eventually slips beneath his cloak. Socrates, however, does not reciprocate. He simply goes to sleep (217a–219d). The encounter is already somewhat unusual because Alcibiades has approached Socrates with two different expectations: he wants to become better through his association with him, but he also expects that this improvement might be obtained through a more intimate relationship. Socrates offers him philosophical cooperation instead, which is apparently not what Alcibiades had in mind.
The word Alcibiades subsequently uses to describe Socrates is eirōneia, a term David Wolfsdorf examines through its appearances in Aristophanes and Plato. Wolfsdorf argues that the word refers to a particular kind of deception, in which someone presents himself as harmless or even benevolent in order to gain an advantage over another person. He compares this with the fox discussed by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, which pretends to be asleep until its prey approaches within reach. The deception depends upon the appearance of inactivity: the fox does not need to convince the deer that it is harmless in every respect, only that it is presently doing nothing. Wolfsdorf finds comparable uses of eirōneia in Aristophanes' Wasps, where Philocleon introduces his donkey-selling scheme with the expectation of catching someone, and in Plato's Euthydemus, where Dionysodorus pauses in a “wholly eironic” fashion before introducing his sophism. Socrates subsequently describes himself as having been twisted around “as though I were caught in a net.”
What I find particularly strange about Wolfsdorf's discussion is that the one scene in the Symposium in which Socrates is explicitly asleep beside someone who desires him is also the scene in which he is accused of a form of deception whose traditional imagery involves pretending to sleep. Wolfsdorf does not make much of this, having explicitly set aside the question of whether Alcibiades' accusation is true. Nevertheless, the association is difficult to overlook. Hephaestus, in the Odyssey, announces that he is leaving for Lemnos, allowing Ares and Aphrodite to assume that he is absent, and returns to catch them in the act. His success depends upon the difference between what he appears to be doing and what he is actually doing. Socrates, in Alcibiades' account, also appears to be doing nothing, although whether this constitutes a deception depends rather heavily on whether Alcibiades is entitled to expect anything from him in the first place.
There is an additional problem with the comparison, since Alcibiades is not simply describing Socrates as deceptive; he is describing himself as the person who has been deceived. The vocabulary of eirōneia, particularly when considered alongside Wolfsdorf's examples of bait and nets, makes Socrates resemble someone who has arranged the encounter in advance. Yet the story itself gives us very little reason to conclude that he has. Alcibiades has interpreted an offer to deliberate together as an invitation to intimacy, and, when the interpretation fails, he describes Socrates as having misled him. The fox is supposed to be the one who pretends to sleep, but in the Symposium we are left with a sleeping Socrates and a very awake Alcibiades, who has subsequently decided that he was the fox's prey.
Socrates' criticism of Aristophanes at 205e makes this distinction between the two accounts of desire especially important. He objects that Aristophanes has made eros a desire for one's own half rather than a desire for the good. Alcibiades' proposal seems to contain both desires at once. He approaches Socrates because he believes that Socrates can make him better, but imagines that this improvement might be obtained through intimate possession. He wants the good that Socrates might provide, although he seems to believe that he can obtain it by becoming, in some sense, one with him. Socrates' suggestion that they deliberate together is therefore rather different from the arrangement Alcibiades has imagined. He offers a relationship in which neither person is absorbed into the other, and in which the desired improvement cannot simply be transferred through proximity.
This is also where Hooper's reading of Aristophanes becomes relevant again. The original halves are not released from their condition until Zeus introduces sexual desire, allowing them to separate and return to ordinary activities. Their desire is satisfied, but its satisfaction is what permits them to resume living independently. Alcibiades encounters almost the reverse situation. He wants an intimacy that will make him better, but Socrates refuses to provide the satisfaction through which he imagines this improvement might occur. His desire consequently remains attached to its original object. Aristophanes' lovers are willing to surrender their independence to avoid separation; Alcibiades, having been denied the possibility of intimacy, cannot quite bring himself to surrender the expectation of it.
I am not sure that this is entirely a private problem. Hooper places the dramatic date of the Symposium around 415 or 416 BCE, which means that the dialogue takes place in the period surrounding the Athenian destruction of Melos and the preparations for the Sicilian expedition. The Athenians attacked Melos in 416, eventually killing its adult male population and enslaving its women and children; in 415, they voted to undertake the expedition to Sicily, with Alcibiades among its principal advocates. Hooper also suggests that Aristophanes' description of the circlemen's assault on Olympus may recall the historical comedian's treatment of the Peloponnesian War. I would hesitate to treat the circlemen as a direct representation of the Athenians, or the Net as a commentary on the Sicilian expedition, but the chronology makes the description of men who become so confident in their own strength that they challenge the gods difficult to read without remembering what Athens was attempting to accomplish at the time.
Alcibiades is particularly difficult to separate from this atmosphere. At 218a–b, he compares his political ambition with a more philosophical form of mania, describing his desire for power in terms that make the two difficult to distinguish. Panos Eliopoulos, in his discussion of the political function of Platonic eros, draws attention to the danger of becoming what the Republic calls a “lover of rule” (521b). Socrates' attention to Alcibiades is therefore not simply a matter of one philosopher attempting to improve an unusually promising young man. There is the further question of what happens when the person being educated is already attracted to the power that education is supposed to teach him to use responsibly. Eliopoulos also draws upon Gregory Vlastos's observation that philosophical love can involve “freedom from the tyranny which even the unidealized love object can exercise” over the lover. This is precisely the kind of freedom Alcibiades appears unable to achieve. He wants Socrates to make him better, but he also wants Socrates himself, and the two desires become difficult to distinguish.
The problem is not entirely unlike the one Nichols examines in her discussion of Alcibiades and the Sicilian expedition in Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom. Alcibiades' advocacy of the expedition is bound up with his desire for distinction, and his confidence in the possibility of acquiring power through the expansion of Athens. In the Symposium, his desire for Socrates is similarly accompanied by the expectation that the relationship will provide him with something beyond the immediate encounter. These are obviously different circumstances, and it would be rather too easy to make the historical Alcibiades into an illustration of every problem Plato identifies with eros. Still, the comparison is worth retaining, particularly because the language of philosophical and political ambition appears together in Alcibiades' own speech. His desire for Socrates is not detached from the rest of his character, and his account of their encounter does not suddenly become reliable simply because it concerns a private rather than a political matter.
There is a curious object associated with the historical Alcibiades that makes the relationship between these ambitions even more difficult to ignore. Athenaeus describes a shield belonging to Alcibiades on which Eros appears carrying a thunderbolt. Robert Littman discusses the object in his examination of Alcibiades' sexual reputation, although he considers the possibility that the shield was a comic invention. P. H. von Blanckenhagen had previously treated it as a historical object and interpreted the imagery as a possible homage to Socrates. The distinction is rather important. If the shield existed, it provides an unusual image of the relationship between erotic and divine power; if it did not, then the image tells us something about the kinds of associations that comic writers found appropriate for Alcibiades. Either way, the object reaches us through a literary tradition in which the distinction between historical recollection and comic invention is not always particularly convenient.
Littman's larger discussion of Alcibiades' reputation makes this problem difficult to avoid. The surviving accounts of his private life were produced by authors with very different interests. Orators attacked him, comedians made him ridiculous, biographers collected anecdotes, and Socratic writers had reasons to defend the reputation of their teacher. Much of the gossip reaches us through Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae, a literary account of a dinner party in which scholars quote earlier writers and exchange stories about famous people. Alcibiades' reputation therefore reaches us through another literary dinner party, several centuries later, where the stories have already passed through different authors, genres, and political circumstances. Aristophanes' Triphales, for example, appears in the tradition surrounding Alcibiades' supposed sexual excesses, while other anecdotes concern his relationships with women and the circumstances of his birth. Littman attempts to distinguish the historically plausible from the comic, but even the decision to discard a story as irrelevant to its original audience depends upon an interpretation of what that audience would have found funny.
The same problem applies to the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades. A. E. Taylor dismissed the sexual gossip as “such garbage,” largely on the grounds that Plato's account presents their relationship as philosophical. Littman, however, observes that Plato had an interest in presenting it this way, just as Xenophon had an interest in defending Socrates against the political accusations associated with his companions. The suppression of a possible sexual relationship does not necessarily establish that one existed, but it does complicate the assumption that the pedagogical account is automatically the most historically reliable. Littman describes the possibility of an un-Platonic relationship between the two as reasonable, although the evidence cannot establish it. The difficulty is that the Symposium provides its most detailed account of their attempted intimacy through Alcibiades, who has every reason to describe the encounter in a way that explains his humiliation, while Socrates offers no corresponding testimony.
Alcibiades announces that he intends to tell the truth at 214e, but the circumstances of his speech make the declaration rather difficult to evaluate. He is drunk, he is speaking in front of Socrates, and the story he tells concerns an encounter in which he was unsuccessful. His account is not necessarily false, but neither is it independent of the disappointment it describes. Socrates does not confirm that he deliberately deceived Alcibiades, nor does he explain what he intended by suggesting that they deliberate together. The accusation is preserved without a corresponding defense, although the accused is present throughout the narration. Plato's arrangement is particularly effective because it allows Alcibiades to reveal his own understanding of the encounter without giving the reader the means to establish whether that understanding is correct.
I keep returning to the fact that the person who offers the Net in Aristophanes' speech is Hephaestus, the same god who constructs it in the Odyssey, and that Alcibiades subsequently uses a word whose associations include the equipment of deception to describe a man who has just gone to sleep beside him. I do not think this establishes that Socrates is secretly behaving like Hephaestus, or that Alcibiades is simply another Ares. The correspondences are not quite so orderly. But the two scenes do share a problem concerning the interpretation of intimacy: the person who believes he understands what an encounter promises may not be the person best placed to judge it. Aristophanes' lovers believe that being welded together would give them everything they desire; Alcibiades believes that being intimate with Socrates will make him a better man. In neither case does the desired arrangement necessarily produce what its participants expect.
Littman closes his discussion with a dilemma attributed to Bion: if Socrates felt desire and abstained, he was a fool; if he did not feel it, his conduct was hardly remarkable. The formulation is difficult to escape because either possibility seems to deprive Socrates of something. Yet it also assumes that his conduct must be evaluated according to Alcibiades' understanding of what was offered. The Symposium does not give us enough evidence to settle that question, and perhaps the difficulty is partly that we keep trying to extract a definitive account of the encounter from the person who was most invested in its outcome. The Net remains suspended between the two stories: in one, it is offered as the solution to desire; in the other, it is the vocabulary through which a rejected lover explains why he did not get what he wanted.