Symposium - AIC

Ruby Blondell – Sandra Boehringer
In short, Lucian does not, in Dialogue 5, present a coherent picture of female-female
sexuality. This work does not function with reference to reality (that is, to “real” “lesbians”) but
through engagement with its Platonic subtext, which likewise does not provide a coherent picture of
the classical categories governing sexual behavior. In the Symposium, Plato is not interested in
providing an alternative sexuality. Rather, he employs the licence supplied by comedy and fantasy to
manipulate conventional sexual roles in the service of a philosophical agenda. Lucian responds by
rendering Plato's subversion of the active-passive homoerotic binary gleefully physical, and by
reintroducing the drunken, female physical body eschewed by Platonic dialogue. He places at the
center of his sympotic drama female characters that were confined to the margins of Plato's: the
excluded female musician and the hetairistria. He completes the Platonic picture by taking the
tantalizingly underspecified women of Aristophanes' myth and filling them out with a wealth of carnal
detail worthy of the comic playwright himself. Like Plato, however, he is not offering us an
alternative sexuality, or revealing one that has been suppressed by other authors. He is, rather,
responding to Plato by appropriating philosophy in its turn for his own purposes--namely, to win
applause for the ingenious manipulation of intellectual and erotic traditions. The result is at once a
satire of the pretensions of philosophical eros and an homage to its absurdities.
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