The boy who has loved better than a woman

Achilles' excellence from Phaedrus' speech in Plato's Symposium

Abstract

In this article, we present an interpretation Phaedrus’ speech in the Platonic Symposium, one of the least worked on by the interpretive tradition. We analyze the insertion of Alcestis, Orpheus, and Achilles, at the discourse' structure. Alcestis dies so that her husband Admetus can live, Orpheus who doesn’t dare to die for Eurydice invades Hades using artifices, and Achilles follows Patroclus in death. Our interpretation explores issues related to pederasty and marks in the text, a flagrant difference between specific references to this institution and mere references to lovers and loved ones, the latter broader. Broad to the point of inserting, as a lover, in a speech marked, until that point, by references to contexts in which only men appear, the character Alcestis. Phaedrus presents the variable of the partner's gaze as an intensifying element of the repudiation of disgusting things and the ambition for beautiful things, a characteristic mechanism of the erotic relationship and fundamental to its cohesion. The culmination of Eros' manifestation would be to die for the other. Precisely, Achilles' position in pederasty as Patroclus' eromenos, and the fact that he died when Patroclus was already dead, which excludes the gaze of the other as an enhancer of virtue, that differentiates him from Alcestis in the supreme manifestation of love since the two characters died for those who they loved. Our interpretation allows us, by verifying the intricacies of speech and Phaedrus, to understand the extraordinary benefit of the eromenos