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GREEN-MASTERSREPORT-2014.Pdf Copyright by Jerry Dwayne Green Jr. 2014 The Report Committee for Jerry Dwayne Green Jr. Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report: Health and Harmony: Eryximachus on the Science of Eros APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Supervisor: Lesley Dean-Jones Paul Woodruff Health and Harmony: Eryximachus on the Science of Eros by Jerry Dwayne Green Jr., M.A., A.B., B.A. Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin August 2014 Acknowledgements First, to honor our profession, I am indebted to Lesley Dean-Jones and Paul Woodruff for their helpful and insightful comments on this paper, and for their flexibility and patience throughout my time writing it. I have been thinking about the Symposium, and Eryximachus’s speech in particular, for longer than I would like to admit. I am grateful to Steve Hays and Jim Andrews for teaching me to read the Symposium in the original, and to Steve White for his helpful suggestions for expanding and improving my original take on Eryximachus. I am also thankful to Tim Moore for his comments on what become §2 of this paper, and for his help in learning about Greek music. Second, I owe a great deal of gratitude to my wife, A.P., for her patience and support. I couldn’t ask for a better teacher on the topic of Love and Beauty. iv Abstract Health and Harmony: Eryximachus on the Science of Eros Jerry Dwayne Green Jr., M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2014 Supervisor: Lesley Dean-Jones Plato’s Symposium masterfully depicts several different explanations of the phenomenon of Eros or love. The physician Eryximachus depicts Eros as a cosmic force that can bring harmony to a number of areas, from medicine and music to astronomy and divination. Most readers of the Symposium have read Eryximachus in an unflattering way, as a pompous know-it-all who fails to give a speech that meets either his high aspirations or his high opinion of himself. In this paper I argue that this reading of Eryximachus and his speech is unpersuasive. My defense of Eryximachus has three components: (1) Plato treats Eryximachus sympathetically in the Symposium and elsewhere, and has him deliver a modest and perfectly coherent speech about the science of Eros. (2) Eryximachus’s speech can only be properly understood if we read it in the context of Hippocratic medical theory, which infuses the speech throughout. (3) Outside the Symposium, Plato views medicine as a model technē, and health as a central philosophical concept; inside the Symposium, Plato has his mouthpiece Socrates give a speech on behalf of the priestess Diotima that agrees with Eryximachus on nearly every point of his speech. This indicates that Plato would have viewed Eryximachus’s speech quite favorably, and that modern readers should follow suit. I conclude by suggesting how this reading of Eryximachus should influence how we read the Symposium as a whole. v Table of Contents Introduction .............................................................................................................1 §1 - Eryximachus and the Science of Eros ..............................................................3 §1.1 - Introduction: Eryximachus's Reputation ..............................................3 §1.2 - Eryximachus's Role in the Symposium .................................................4 §1.3 - Eryximachus on the Importance of Medicine.......................................8 §1.4 - The Science of Eros ............................................................................12 §1.5 - Conclusion ..........................................................................................20 §2 - Eryximachus and the Hippocratic Corpus ......................................................21 §2.1 - Introduction: Hippocratic Texts and Context .....................................21 §2.2 - Hippocratic Methodology ..................................................................23 §2.3 - Hippocratic Doctrine ..........................................................................30 §2.4 - Other technai in Hippocratic texts ......................................................38 §2.5 - Eryximachus and On Regimen ...........................................................43 §2.6 - Conclusion ..........................................................................................51 §3 - Eryximachus and Plato ...................................................................................52 §3.1 - Introduction: Plato on Eryximachus ...................................................52 §3.2 - Plato on Medicine ...............................................................................53 §3.3 - Plato on Health and Harmony ............................................................60 §3.4 - Diotima and Eryximachus ..................................................................77 §3.5 - Conclusion ..........................................................................................88 Conclusion ............................................................................................................89 Bibliography ..........................................................................................................94 vi Introduction Of all Plato’s dialogues, the Symposium shows most vividly Plato’s ability to take on the voice of other people, including expert wordsmiths like the comic poet Aristophanes and the tragedian Agathon. The Symposium features seven speeches praising Eros, each of which expresses a different view in a unique style. While this makes the Symposium an enjoyable read, it also makes the dialogue’s interpretation that much more difficult. We can fairly confidently assume that Plato himself agrees with the speech of Diotima relayed by Socrates, a speech which presents Plato’s Theory of Forms in broad agreement with other texts like the Republic. But why, then, did Plato write the other speeches? A full answer to this question would requiring a close examination of all the speeches in the Symposium. In this paper I will focus on just one, the speech of Eryximachus. Eryximachus, unlike the other speakers, is a physician rather than a rhetorician or playwright, and his speech presents, in essence, a science of Eros. Eryximachus has been subjected to criticism that is out of proportion with its prima facie quality. But this dismissiveness is, I argue, unmerited. Eryximachus is a more important character in the Symposium, and his speech more important to Plato’s thinking, that the almost unanimous sanction of modern commentators would suggest. My argument will go in three stages. First, I will address the most common criticism of Eryximachus and his speech, that Eryximachus is a humorless pedant whose intellectual abilities fall far short of his aspirations to subsume all technai to medicine. Instead, I argue that the Eryximachus in Plato’s text is a respected and respectable scientist who appreciates other sciences and who presents a coherent view of how these sciences related to one another. Second, I will examine in detail the many connections between Eryximachus and the Hippocratic corpus. Many of the features of Eryximachus’s speech which come in for criticism are hallmarks of the medical 1 school which Eryximachus represents, a school which is certainly not incoherent (even if it is rather misguided in the light of modern medicine). Modern readers may fail to appreciate Eryximachus’s speech if they do not realize the extent to which it is embedded in the context of what was, in Plato’s day, cutting edge physical science. Third, I will argue that Plato himself viewed Eryximachus’s speech quite favorably. Plato was a fan of the Hippocratic school of medicine, and used the physician and his art as a model for both theoretical wisdom and practical virtue.1 In his own works outside the Symposium Plato agreed with many of the specifics of Eryximachus and the Hippocratic school, concerning both methodology and doctrine. Moreover, in the same speech where Plato presents his own favored metaphysical view, the Theory of Forms, Plato also has its speaker, Diotima, agree with much of what Eryximachus says in his speech. If these three arguments are correct, then the Symposium should be read in a rather different way than it standardly is. Rather than a progression from worst to best speech, with Eryximachus third from the bottom, the structure of the Symposium is one of alternating pairs of speeches, with Eryximachus and Diotima, who comprise what is in Plato’s eyes the correct pair, giving a comprehensive account of physics and metaphysics. In the conclusion I will suggest some reasons for thinking that this reading of the Symposium is a plausible one. But even absent this conclusion, it is nevertheless the case that (i) the received view of Eryximachus is not just unobvious, but implausible, (ii) Eryximachus’s speech must be appreciated in its historical/intellectual context, and (iii) the evidence from the whole of Plato’s writings suggest that Plato’s own view of medicine and other technai is much closer to Eryximachus’s speech than is generally acknowledged. 1 I will use the term ‘Hippocratic school’ rather loosely throughout, as an easy way to refer to a certain approach to medicine exemplified by the set of Hippocratic treatises I discuss in §2.1. While there certainly was a Hippocratic school of medicine (on which see Jouanna (1999) 42-55), and Plato does
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