A work · 370 BC · Antiquity
Shag-eared and deaf
Plato describes an older man in love with a boy who is compared, in the text, to a hunting animal that is deaf. The animal's ears are the point: the love is addressed to someone who cannot hear it, and the whole scene turns on that.
The earliest surviving description of this site's subject written down by someone who was inside the institution rather than looking at it from outside, and it is startling how modern the anatomy is. In the Phaedrus the lover hunts a beast that is 'shag-eared and deaf', and the closing image is the one nobody expects: having finally got what he chased, the lover finds himself running away and the *beast* pursuing him, because it never understood the terms. The one-sided party was not withholding. It was deaf. And in the First Alcibiades, Alcibiades tells Socrates that he is the only lover who has not abandoned the suit and that the others 'pestered you with their conversation' while he stayed silent for years - so the same structure is described from both ends, which almost nothing else on this site manages. It is also the first entry here where the power asymmetry is institutional rather than accidental, and the first where a written text tells you that role reversals were constant: the beloved could become the lover. Whether that is friendship or something else was never settled, which is why it belongs here.
Application. One-sided attachment put to work on purpose. Creator economies, community, fandom as infrastructure, and the things that genuinely help people. Not automatically good - a tool with an obvious use is a tool that will also get a bad one.
Where it sits
3000 BC Before 0 · 370 BC 1 BC
Provenance · 4 source record(s)
- retrievableThe figure, from the primary text. The Phaedrus compares the beloved to a beast 'put together anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark colour, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion; the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf, hardly yielding to whip and spur'. And the reversal: 'he changes pursuit into flight, while the other is compelled to follow him with passion and imprecation not knowing that he ought never from the first to have accepted a demented lover instead of a sensible non-lover'.Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Internet Classics Archive. ↗
- retrievableThe other end of it, from the primary text: 'Socrates, son of Cleinias, I think it must surprise you that I, the first of all your lovers, am the only one of them who has not given up his suit and thrown you over, and whereas they have all pestered you with their conversation I have not spoken one word to you for so many years.'Plato. Alcibiades I, 103a. Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University. ↗
- retrievableThat role reversals were normal rather than exceptional - 'role reversals between lover and beloved are constant, as they are in the Symposium' - and that the dialogue was composed around 370 BC, alongside the Republic and the Symposium.Phaedrus (dialogue). Wikipedia. ↗
- retrievableThe setting that makes the entry's structural point: in the Symposium the speeches are given at Agathon's house by a company including Phaedrus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates and - arriving drunk and late - Alcibiades, who insists on singing 'the praises of Socrates' in the character of 'a disappointed lover'.Plato. Symposium. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Project Gutenberg, e-text 1600. ↗
Connected · 4 out, 2 in
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