Symposium - AIC

Ruby Blondell – Sandra Boehringer
but Leaena declares "by the Heavenly Goddess"--that is, by Aphrodite Ourania--that she will say no
more because it is shameful.
Even though Dialogue 5 makes no explicit reference to philosophy or philosophers, it is
highly Platonic in tone. It is pervaded with expressions of confusion and ignorance that evoke Plato's
Socrates ("doing I don't know what," "I don't understand," etc.); the central question is an
epistemological problem; and in the inset conversation the audience is treated to a parody of
philosophical dialogue, as Leaena attempts to solve that mystery through a logical sequence of
questions and answers. The ending is, moreover, aporetic. Neither Clonarium nor the reader ever finds
out the exact nature of the "something" that Megilla has insted of a male sex organ.
Dialogue 5's most striking Platonic antecedent and intertext is, for several reasons, the
Symposium. Like Plato's dialogue, Lucian's consists of an outer conversational frame containing an
inner narrative that describes a drinking party, elicited by questions from a curious friend. At both
gatherings the topic of conversation is eros and the participants outdo each other in demonstrating
their expertise on the subject. The inset story, like the most famous episode in Alcibiades' speech, is a
tale of seduction--but this time a successful one. Both those tales are told by unreliable narrators, who
present their own behavior as a shameful secret. Both are willing to undergo considerable
embarrassment, by participating in transgressive sexual behavior, in order to discover the truth about
an erotic mystery. But if Leaena is an Alcibiades, she is also a Socrates, who brings her audience to
the very brink of revelation by ventriloquating Megilla, an expert in erotics, just as Socrates does by
ventriloquating Diotima. At the end of the dialogue she teases her audience--and Lucian his--by
witholding the answer, just as Plato's Socrates--in the view of his enemies and even his frustrated
admirers--withholds his wisdom, as part of a larger Platonic strategy to elicit our philosophical desire.
Both these drinking parties are, moreover, quite unconventional. Plato's symposion is
notoriously devoid of drunkenness--at least until Alcibiades appears. It is further marked as both
unusually cerebral and exclusively male by the banishment of the female musician (176e). Lucian's is
extraordinary for a very different reason: the fact that it consists only of women, who are
enthusiastically devoted to the very pleasures of music, drunkenness and sex that Plato's symposion
eschews. Leaena is invited in the first place as a musician to entertain the other women--as if she were
the Platonic flute-girl dismissed from the male symposion and sent away to play for the women of the
household (Symp. 176e). Lucian thus offers the perspective of those who are excluded from male
philosophical "intercourse." But the excluded women are not thwarted or downcast by the male
identification of the feminine with the body and its pleasures. On the contrary, they enthusiastically
embrace that identification--without, however, abandoning their right to engage in rational
conversation about those very pleasures. Plato excludes women from the elite male world of
philosophy; but Lucian appropriates that world for them, portraying a self-sufficient and harmonious
single-sex world that mirrors the male world of philosophy.
Dialogue 5 also includes a number of more specific allusions to Plato's Symposium. In the
interests of time, we will focus here on two interrelated themes that connect these two dialogues: the
confusion surrounding conventional sex-roles, hierarchies and practices, and the motif of sex among
women.
In Plato’s Symposium, conventional erotic categories are disturbed in several ways, notably
the role reversal between Alcibidiades, the eromenos who pursues Socrates like an erastes, and
Socrates, the ugly philosophical erastes who is also an eromenos. Such confusion is also a marked
feature of the myth of Aristophanes, which explains sexual desire as the consequence of chopping in
half three primordial beings--the complete male, the complete female and the androgyne. The comic
playwright purports to organize human sexuality into three tidy categories. In reality, however, it is
impossible to map them neatly onto the roles and expectations that were in place in Plato's Athens.
Aristophanes' geography of human sexualities disrupts the active-passive binary by generating three
types of couple in all of which desire is equal and reciprocal, leaving no room for conventional
hierarchies.
Aristophanes' myth also introduces the second theme that will be important for Lucian--sex
among women. Because this theme is so rare in our surviving ancient texts from all periods, scholars
have seized on Dialogue 5, with its extended and detailed account of sex among women, to fill the
vacuum created by the silence of our other sources. Though interpretations vary, the dialogue is
typically understood in one of two ways (which may overlap). The first approach sees Lucian as
providing an active-passive model of female sexual relationships based on the male erastes/eromenos
model, with Megilla filling the "active", "male" role, in order to make it comprehensible to his male
audience (thus, Megilla is interpreted as physically masculine, she behaves like a man, and uses a
dildo). The second sees him associating sex among women with gender inversion and construction of
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