Setting Plato Straight: Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance

403 Pages·2015·2.547 MB·English

by  Todd W. Reeser

setting plato straight

setting plato straight
Translating Ancient Sexuality in the Renaissance
todd w. reeser
university of chicago press
chicago and london
todd w. reeser is professor of French and director of the Gender, Sexuality,
and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2016 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2016.
Printed in the United States of America
25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 30700- 8 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 30714- 5 (e- book)
doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226307145.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data
Reeser, Todd W., 1967– author.
Setting Plato straight : translating ancient sexuality in the Renaissance /
Todd W. Reeser.
pages ; cm
Includes index.
isbn 978-0-226-30700-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-30714-5 (ebook)
1. Plato—Translations—History and criticism. 2. Plato—Themes, motives.
3. Homosexuality in literature. 4. Eroticism in literature. 5. Greek literature—
Europe—Translations—History and criticism. 6. Translating and interpreting—
Europe—History. I. Title.
pa4291.r44 2016
488'.04—dc23
2015019947
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48- 1992 (Permanence of
Paper).
contents
Preface: Strictly Platonic vii
Note on Translations Used xi
Introduction 1
1. Solving the Problem with Plato 21
2. The Antitheses of Same- Sex Sexuality in Bruni 62
3. Ficino and the Theory of Purging Same- Sex Sexuality 87
4. Ficino and the Practice of Purging Same- Sex Sexuality 117
5. Importing Ficino: Gender Balance in Champier 150
6. Seducing Socrates: The Silenus in Erasmus and Rabelais 179
7. The Gates of Germania: Space, Place,
and Sexuality in Cornarius 207
8. Fractured Men: Feminism and Neoplatonism
in Mid- Sixteenth- Century France 228
9. Orientations: Female- Female and
Male- Male Eros in Dialogue 258
10. Reading Sexuality Skeptically in Montaigne 284
Conclusion: Bending Plato 307
Appendix: Major Translations of Plato’s Erotic Dialogues 315
Acknowledgments 317
Notes 321
Index 379

preface
Strictly Platonic
In a 1903 short story by Mildred Champagne, Mrs. Judson asks the doc-
tor she visits: “Do you believe in platonic friendship between man and
woman?”1 The plot of the story revolves around the idea that he is in love
with her, so the question drops on him like a “bomb.” She is asking him, of
course, if a man and woman can be friends without the involvement of sex
or sexual desire. But the meaning of the phrase “platonic friendship,” which
also happens to be the title of the story, is so well known that Mrs. Judson
does not have to explain it. In fact, after asking the question, she adds: “By
platonic, you know, I mean what is generally accepted by the term” (12).
Today, in English, we use the term so widely that we, too, know what is
generally accepted by “platonic.” We talk of “platonic love” or “platonic
friendship,” or we say that a relationship is “platonic” or that two people
love each other “platonically.” When we talk of a “platonic” relationship,
we may imagine a man and a woman who are “just friends.” Pop cultural
sources affirm this usage. On the website craigslist, a rubric for personal ads
includes a section titled “strictly platonic.”2 Wikipedia defines the phrase
“platonic love” as “a type of love that is chaste and non- sexual.”3 The on-
line “Your Dictionary” defines this sense of the term as “designating or of a
relationship, or love, between a man and a woman that is purely spiritual or
intellectual and without sexual activity.”4 The OED provides the following
as the relevant definition of “platonic”: “Of love, affection, or friendship:
intimate and affectionate but not sexual; spiritual rather than physical.”5
This use of the term is not a recent invention. The OED’s list of ex-
amples for “platonic” as not sexual begins with a series of seventeenth-
century examples, the first occurring in Ben Jonson’s 1631 play The New
Inn. William Davenant’s 1636 English play The Platonic Lovers is about
two sets of male- female couples, one platonic and the other not platonic.
vii
viii preface
The Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana gives 1544 as the date of
appearance of the Italian phrase amor platonico.6 Platonique enters into
French in 1659 as part of the phrase amour à la platonique, transformed
in the following century into amour platonique.7 The phrase amour pla­
tonique appears, for example, in a 1739 “Epistle to Thérèse about Platonic
Love,” which concludes with a reference to “the laws of Platonic Love.”8
The 1762 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defines
amour platonique as “mutual affection between two people of different
sexes, whose end is merit, with no relation to the senses.”9
But if there is a generally accepted meaning in these various time pe-
riods, it is a historically inaccurate one. In Plato, love—o r more precisely,
eros— incorporates the senses and is not necessarily asexual. If fidelity to
Plato were the goal, the phrase “Socratic love” would be better suited to
describe the relation since Socrates appears as chaste in Plato. That Voltaire
in the eighteenth century uses the phrase “Socratic love” to refer to peder-
asty suggests that “platonic love” was already defined as an asexual relation
between men and women.10 While the Platonic dialogues absolutely allow
for the possibility of intimate, affectionate, and spiritual love, what we and
early moderns call “platonic love” would likely seem somewhat strange to
Plato. The scene from the story “Platonic Friendship” might have confused
Plato, too, had he read it. Although Plato never used the phrase, the sense of
“platonic love” for him would undoubtedly evoke the image of a man with
a younger male. While male- female love is not always excluded in Plato,
male- male eros was clearly the highest form of love and “platonic love”
would certainly not be imagined by Plato as between two people of different
sexes. Were the philosopher to read craigslist, he might take “strictly pla-
tonic” as a category requiring a man and a boy of a fixed age and as discount-
ing love between a man and a woman or between two grown men.
Mrs. Judson’s notion of platonic, then, does not correspond to Plato on
two counts: the sex of the two people involved and the possibility of sexual
activity between them. How did this shift happen? How did Platonic eros
turn into “platonic love”? How did it become heterosexual and purified
of sex? This process of “setting Plato straight” is the subject of this book,
which recounts the story of how and why these changes happened. Not a
rapid or sudden shift, it takes place in the Renaissance over the course of ap-
proximately a century and a half, particularly in Italy and France. While the
fifteenth- century Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino is credited with coin-
ing the Latin phrase “platonic love” [amor platonicus], he does not single-
handedly transform Plato, but rather he is a part— albeit an important
part— of a much larger cultural transformation.11 Setting Plato Straight dis-
strictly platonic ix
cusses a key moment in what Louis-G eorges Tin calls “the invention of
heterosexual culture.”12 By virtue of transforming Platonic same- sex sexu-
ality, the Renaissance creates a type of heterosexuality, even if the term or
concept is not yet articulated as such. This book is composed of a series of
studies of important Western European texts in which this transformation
occurs. While I do not treat the English context (that would require a second
book), the texts studied here strongly influence what happens across the
Channel as the English are reading many of these texts. I am told by native
speakers of many languages (e.g., Arabic, Dutch, German, Hebrew, Polish,
Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish) that a version of “platonic love”
in the modern sense exists in their languages, suggesting that this usage,
whose origins I locate in the Renaissance, has become widespread around
the globe and that the influence of the texts I study extends well beyond
their specific cultural contexts.
Despite this transformation of eros, some thinkers display an awareness
of the anachronism of “platonic love.” In the play The Platonic Lovers, the
physician- philosopher Buonateste remarks about Plato to Lord Sciolto: “I
still beseech you not to wrong / My good old friend Plato, with this court
calumnie; / They father on him a Fantastick Love / Hee never knew, poore
Gentleman.”13 He is responding to the Lord who noted that his son is “very
much Platonically given” (139). Soon after, another character asks the phi-
losopher “Did not Plato write of Love?” to which the philosopher responds:
“Divinely sir, but not such kind of Love / As Ladies would have now; they
mistake him” (140). Part of the issue in the play is Sciolto’s son, who “mis-
takes [Plato] too” since he “understands no Greeke” (140). The Lord thus
plans to “give’t him straight” (140). The philosopher’s comic remarks sug-
gest an awareness that the English of the time are seeing Platonic eros as
straight instead of getting him straight, thus that the cultural process of set-
ting Plato straight is in no way an even or linear process without hiccups.
One of the key arguments of this book is that the Renaissance does not fully
set Plato straight, and that the numerous and various attempts to do so never
fully take hold. In this way, Setting Plato Straight is meant as a contribu-
tion to a twenty- first-c entury sexual counterdiscourse that reveals how our
assumptions about so- called platonic love cover up a series of normative
sexual slippages and mutations.