Chapter 3
Friendship
Lysis
“Come over here, Socrates,” said Hippothales as he showed me an enclosed space facing the wall and an open door. “We spend our time here. There are other men too. Many of them are really attractive.”
“What is this place,” I replied, “and what do you do here?”
“It is a new wrestling school, just built. We spend most of our time here talking about things. We’d love for you to join us.”
—Plato, Lysis 203b-204a
One reason that gym-goers in Charmides are so unabashed in complimenting each other’s nude, oiled physique is that homoerotic relationships were a widely accepted part of Athenian society.1 Such relationships were not seen as competing with heterosexual marriage. Socrates himself had a wife, Xanthippe, yet flirted tirelessly with other men and had at least one long-term lover, Alcibiades. None of this counted as cheating. We have far less information about women’s experiences in antiquity, yet we know from the poet Sappho of Lesbos that similar relationships existed between women. Homoerotic relationships also had an educational dimension. Because of this, such relationships often, but not always, involved some kind of age gap. In my experience, these age gaps can trip up some modern readers. Before we pass judgment on ancient practices, let us note three respects in which modern society has parted ways with earlier cultures and generations.
First, life expectancy in Socrates’s Athens was significantly shorter than it is today. As it works out, a young man would first take an older lover at about the same age that a young woman would take an older husband: around fourteen years old.2 By some reckonings, this was essentially middle age.3
Second, ancient Greece had more of an apprenticeship culture than we do today. If you wanted to be a blacksmith, you did not go to school to major in metallurgy. You apprenticed with a blacksmith. The gymnasion’s combination of music and gymnastics provided a basic education for future citizens, but more advanced education followed the apprenticeship model. An older lover would take his younger partner to drinking parties, help him network, and provide him with an apprenticeship in citizenship. This helps explain the same-gendered nature of such relationships. Factor in the extreme social separation between the sexes—husbands and wives moved in mostly separate social and professional circles—and we can see why men would look for companionship among people they actually spent time around.
The third, and perhaps greatest, disconnect between us and the ancient Greeks is highlighted by modern feminism. Among other things, feminism championed the idea that marriage should be between equals. The rationale for this viewpoint is obvious: wives, for no good reason, took second place to husbands through most of human history. In the twentieth century, new ideals of equality between spouses made their way into the popular consciousness. This general idea bled into the queer community. Gay male relationships in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were mostly between people who are unequal in age, social status, or both: take Oscar Wilde and his younger lover Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, for instance. While members of gay or lesbian couples today may present themselves as more masculine or more feminine, such identities do not typically dictate which person’s opinions and career take precedence. Today’s gay community is much more likely than the last century’s to shape itself around the feminist ideal of equal partnership. This new standard of equality is, no doubt, a good thing for gay and straight couples alike. But we should recognize that it makes our society the exception when compared to long stretches of human history.
Whatever we may think of mixing romance and education, many ancient Athenians embraced it. It was also a fairly formal affair, with roles assigned to the parties involved. The older man was known as the “lover” (erastēs), from the active form of the Greek verb for “erotic love.” The younger was known as a “beloved” (eromenos), from the passive form of the same verb. To make sure everything was on the up and up, a particular slave, known as a paidagōgos, was assigned to bring young men to and from school. The title paidagōgos (child leader) is the root of the term pedagogy, which now covers education as a whole.
These relationships also followed conventions for the exchange of gifts and favors. Common gifts from the lover to his beloved included roosters, hoops (used in a game), oil flasks (used at the gym), and drinking cups (used at drinking parties). Flasks and cups often depict the beloved with the label kalos, which means “fine” or “beautiful,” with both physical and moral connotations. In return, the beloved would provide favors, which amounted mostly to kissing and cuddling. Sexual penetration was generally frowned upon, though a kind of intercourse “between the thighs” was common. The gym, as a place where fit, naked men of various ages gathered to oil up and wrestle, became a natural setting for this form of courtship.
All of this provides the backdrop for Plato’s dialogue, Lysis.4
Flirting at the Gym
Lysis opens as Socrates is walking from the Academy to the Lyceum, two gyms that were the future sites of Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophical schools. Along the way, he runs into some friends who call him into a new palaistra. Socrates’s first question is who there is good-looking (kalos; 204b). At this point, the assembled company starts teasing Hippothales, a would-be lover, who is clearly smitten with the beautiful young man Lysis. In something approximating locker-room banter, Hippothales’s friend Ctesippus mocks Hippothales’s attempts to court Lysis by writing poetry about the wealth, athletic victories, and mythic descent from Zeus of the young man’s ancestors (205b-d). In context, such behavior is not strange so much as unimaginative: such themes are the bread and butter of victory odes, which poets like Pindar wrote to celebrate victories at Olympia and other ancient games.5
Socrates points out that Hippothales is shooting himself in the foot. By treating his would-be beloved in terms suited to an Olympic victor, Hippothales will give the young man a swelled head, making him harder to catch. Hippothales is like “a hunter who scares off his prey” (206a). Rather than tell Hippothales the right way to flirt with men at the gym, Socrates decides to show us his moves. A lesson in flirtation ensues. Hippothales watches from the sidelines, while Socrates engages Lysis and his friend Menexenus in a conversation about friendship. With this setup in place, their discussion proceeds in four rounds through which Socrates leads Lysis and Menexenus into perplexity.
In the first round (207d-210d), Socrates argues briefly that Lysis’s parents must not love him because they do not let him do various things, like drive the mule team. What is worse, they even put a slave, the paidagōgos, in charge of Lysis who is freeborn. Lysis takes the bait, replying that this is because he has not yet come of age. Socrates replies that it is not merely age but knowledge that makes people worthy to be entrusted with responsibilities. Since Lysis is still a student, it must be that his parents, and everyone else, will love him only when he has learned more and “become wise.” Lysis apparently appreciates this perplexing conclusion: youthful whispers ensue as Lysis asks Socrates to question Menexenus too. The moral of the story so far? It is best to talk with a potential conquest by “cutting him down to size” (210e).6
In the next two rounds, Socrates tries to determine what kind of person is a friend, by going through all possible options and ruling them all out. The Greek term philos has a broader range than the English word friend and encompasses not just people but anything that is dear to us. This explains some of the oddness of their discussion. Starting with Menexenus (212a-213d), Socrates makes use of the lover/beloved distinction and points out problems with all possible combinations. The basic idea is that if only one person loves the other, then it is possible to love our enemies and hate our friends. But if friendship requires that the object of one person’s love loves him back, then it is impossible to love horses, wine, or wisdom, which would rule out philosophy as the love of wisdom. Menexenus is stumped.
Socrates turns again to Lysis as he begins the third round (213d-218c). This time he brings in moral terms: bad people cannot be friends to bad people, he argues, since they will act unjustly toward each other. Good people are self-sufficient, so they would not need other good people as friends. Can good people, then, be friends to bad people? That would mean, Socrates argues, that unlike people would be friends, and unlike people are opposite, so that does not work. The just, after all, cannot be friends to the unjust! In this, Socrates leans into the moral implications of the Greek kakos (bad). In the context of friendship, we might translate this as “toxic.” We have all seen scenarios of toxic friends. But what is the opposite of a toxic person? A healthy person? A solid person? Whatever we call him, can such a person really be a friend to a toxic individual? As a final option, Socrates considers someone who is neither good nor bad but neutral, and asks whether this person could be a friend to a good person. This option seems to gain traction. Socrates suggests a parallel: a body is neither good nor bad but neutral, and because of disease, it is a friend to medicine. But the victory is short-lived.
In the fourth round (218d-221c), Socrates draws a distinction: a person is a friend (a) to someone, (b) on account of something, (c) for the sake of something. In the medicine scenario, a patient is a friend to a doctor, on account of disease, for the sake of health. In this case, it seems that health is our real friend. And we can expand this beyond just medicine: whenever we are a friend to someone, it is for the sake of the good, so it seems that the good is our real friend. But we are not friends to the good for the sake of something else, so their conclusion about friendship in round three fails to hold up. Furthermore, this suggests that we would stop being friends to the good if somehow the bad were to disappear. And that just seems backward.
The conversation ends as Socrates concludes that either desire has nothing to do with friendship, and this has all been chatter (221d), or that a friend is what “belongs to us” (221d-222b). With the second response, we seem finally to arrive at a conclusion. Hippothales takes it this way, and beams as Socrates concludes that a young man must therefore passionately love his lover. But this victory is also short-lived. As Socrates attempts to spell out what belongs to means, the group loops back to positions they have already rejected. At this point the paidagōgos shows up to take the young men home, and the work concludes in perplexity all around.
Flirting with Philosophy
What should we make of the Lysis? Put another way, what is Lysis about—the nature of friendship or the correct way to flirt? Seeing it as merely a lesson in flirtation would go some way to explain why so many of Socrates’s arguments seem obviously flawed. Still, it is possible to draw a serious point from an undertaking that is basically silly. The comedies of Socrates’s contemporary Aristophanes often presented serious political commentary through humor that would make a sailor blush even today: the ten minutes of jokes about excrement at the beginning of Peace, for instance, or the giant flaming phallus of Thesmophoriazeusai. The Greeks even had a term for the serious in the silly (spoudaiogeloios). Perhaps the point of Lysis is to figure out how Socrates’s arguments are flawed. This is not to say that there is a secret message in Lysis for those who read between the lines, but rather that legitimate perplexity about the nature of friendship can itself act as a springboard for moving beyond superficial assumptions.7
One place to start looking for a more serious takeaway is the opening round’s assumption that we only love people who are useful. This is mirrored in the third round’s assumption that good people will not love each other because they do not need anything from each other. Is love based on need? If not, then what is it based on? Another promising connection comes in the brief mention of philosophy (218a-b). Here, the philosopher—the lover of wisdom—sits between the actually wise person and the person so ignorant that he does not even know to seek wisdom. Is this a more positive take on Socrates’s initial argument that Lysis will be loved when he has become wise?
If we can set aside sexual connotations, which are basically absent from Lysis to begin with, there is something special about teacher-student relationships. Such things are not merely about two people enjoying each other’s company. Such relationships point beyond themselves, as they help the student grow. They are, in Lysis’s terms, “for the sake of the good.” Participants in such relationships play different roles, but they are not “opposed.” Schools today sometimes treat teachers as knowledgeable, students as ignorant, and education as a form of knowledge transfer. People who think this way tend to see good students as sponges that soak up information. Understood this way, I could see student and teacher as opposed: forced into a transactional relationship not unlike “the rich and poor, … the sick and the doctor” (215d).
We find a clearer parallel today among coaches. It is not that a coach has the ability to run fast, which she somehow transfers to her players. If anything, coaches are often past their physical prime. The point, rather, is that coaches guide student athletes as they improve through their own hard work. Furthermore, a coach who praises athletes to the point that they get “swelled heads” rather than helping them focus on what they need to improve is a terrible coach. The setting of Lysis, a palaistra, invites us to draw such parallels. Just as wrestlers compete with each other to make each other stronger, Socrates wrestles intellectually with Lysis and Menexenus to help them improve their powers of reasoning. As we have seen in their discussion, to begin the search for wisdom, one first has to admit one’s own ignorance.
There is no perfect, modern parallel to the ancient gym. The modern world has largely separated coaching from teaching, athletics from academics. Romantic relationships between teachers and students clash with ideals of equality between romantic partners. Whether or not there is a right answer in Lysis for those who read between the lines, the dialogue works through a constellation of ideas that were interconnected for the Greeks and we might think about as forms of tough love. The text invites us to think more rigorously about important aspects of our lives: friendship, teaching, growth. It also gives us a chance to bring into dialogue parts of our world that we normally see as separate. What can teachers learn from coaches? Should we look for romantic relationships to make us better people? Should we, as students, seek out people who tell us we are wonderful or those who help us see what we need to work on?