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← ExitStobaeus, Volume I

Reading language

Book I Chapter 9

Chapter 9: Aphrodite and Love

On Heavenly Aphrodite and ⟨Divine⟩ Love.³⁰⁰

1 ⟨Euripides⟩

Do you not see how mighty a goddess Aphrodite is? You could not even tell or measure how great she is, or how far her power extends. She nourishes you and me and all mortals. Here is proof, so you need not learn by words alone: I shall show the goddess’s strength in what she does. Earth longs for rain when its dry ground, made barren by drought, is short of moisture; and the august sky, filling with rain, longs, under Aphrodite’s influence, to fall upon the earth. When the two mingle together, together they bring forth and nourish everything for us, by which the mortal race lives and flourishes.³⁰¹

2a Euripides, Oedipus

⟨Yet⟩ though love is one, its pleasure is not one: some love shameful things, others noble things.

2b ⟨Euripides, Stheneboea⟩

But love that leads to self-restraint and virtue is enviable among human beings; may I be one of them.³⁰²

3 From Bion’s Bucolic Poems

May Love summon the Muses, and the Muses bring Love; may the Muses give me, ever longing, song, sweet song, than which no remedy is sweeter.³⁰³

4a Euripides, Dictys

For he was dear to me, and Love once took hold of me, without turning me to folly or to Cypris.³⁰⁴

4b ⟨Euripides, Theseus⟩

But there is another Love among mortals: love for a soul that is just, restrained, and good. And this ought to be the law for mortals: to love those who are reverent and self-controlled, and bid farewell to Cypris, Zeus’s daughter.³⁰⁵

5 Hesiod, Theogony (116, 117, 120)

First of all Chaos came to be; then ⟨broad-breasted Earth, the ever-secure seat of all,⟩ and Love, most beautiful among the immortal gods.³⁰⁶

6 Parmenides

Love was devised first of all the gods.³⁰⁷

7 ⟨An unidentified writer⟩

It is not only necessity and conviction that spur us to be good, but also what accomplishes the greatest things in human life: love. Love also makes virtue run its course to the finish.³⁰⁸

8 Plato, Phaedrus (245b-c)

Let us therefore have no fear of this very thing; let no argument alarm us by threatening that we must choose a clear-headed friend in preference to one who is beside himself. Let it carry off the prize only after showing, in addition, that love is not sent by the gods for the benefit of lover and beloved. We, in turn, must prove the opposite: that this kind of madness is given by the gods to bring good fortune. The proof will be unconvincing to the clever, but convincing to the wise.³⁰⁹

9 In the same work (265a-b)

“What I was looking for, however, is precisely this: we said that love was a kind of madness, did we not?” “Yes.”

“And there are two kinds of madness: one arising from human illnesses, the other from a divine departure from customary practices.” “Certainly.”

“We divided the divine kind into four parts belonging to four gods: we assigned prophetic inspiration to Apollo, initiation to Dionysus, poetic inspiration to the Muses, and the fourth to Aphrodite and Love. This last, the madness of love, we said was best.”³¹⁰

10 In the same work (249d-e)

The whole argument has thus reached this point concerning the fourth kind of madness. When someone sees beauty here and is reminded of true beauty, he grows wings; as they grow, he longs to fly upward, yet cannot, and like a bird he looks above and neglects what is below. For this he is accused of being mad. The argument is that this inspiration is the best of all and comes from the best sources, both for the person who possesses it and for the one who shares in it; and that by participating in this madness the lover becomes a lover of beautiful people.³¹¹

11 ⟨In the same work (252b-c)⟩

This experience, beautiful youth to whom my speech is addressed, is what human beings call Love. When you hear what the gods call it, you will probably laugh, young as you are. Some of the Homeridae, I believe, recite two lines about Love from their secret verses. One of them is thoroughly outrageous and not especially metrical. Their hymn runs like this:³¹²

Mortals, you know, call him winged Love; the immortals call him Wing-love, because he compels wings to grow.³¹³

12 ⟨The same author, Symposium (178a-c)⟩

He said that Phaedrus began more or less at this point: Love was a great god, wonderful among humans and gods in many other respects, but especially in his origin. “For being among the most ancient gods is an honor,” he said. “Here is the evidence: Love has no parents, nor does anyone, whether an ordinary person or a poet, name any. Hesiod says that Chaos came to be first, and after Chaos these two, Earth and Love. Acusilaus too agrees with Hesiod that Love is among the most ancient. And being most ancient, he is the cause of the greatest blessings for us.”³¹⁴

13 In the same work (180d-e)

We all know that Aphrodite does not exist without Love. If there were one Aphrodite, there would be one Love; but since there are two, there must also be two Loves. How could there fail to be two goddesses? The elder is motherless, a daughter of Uranus, whom we accordingly call Heavenly; the younger is the daughter of Zeus and Dione, whom we call Common. So the Love who assists the latter must rightly be called Common, and the other Heavenly.³¹⁵

14 In the same work (185b-c)

In this way, to grant every favor for the sake of virtue is certainly noble. This is the love belonging to the Heavenly goddess: it too is Heavenly, and of great worth both to a city and to private persons. It compels lover and beloved alike to take great care over their own virtue. All other loves belong to the other goddess, the Common one.³¹⁶

15 In the same work (186a-b)

I think he was right to distinguish Love as twofold. But Love is present not only in human souls in their attraction to beautiful people: it has many other objects and exists in other things too, in the bodies of all animals, in plants growing in the earth, and, one might say, in everything that exists. I believe I have learned from medicine, our own art, how great and wonderful the god is, and how he extends over everything in both human and divine affairs. I shall begin with medicine, to give our art its due honor. The nature of bodies contains this twofold love: we agree that what is healthy in the body differs from and is unlike what is diseased, and unlike things desire and love unlike objects. Thus the love present in what is healthy is one kind, and that in what is diseased another.³¹⁷

300.“Divine” is supplied in the chapter heading from the ancient outlines cited by Wachsmuth. Erōs names both love as a desire and Love as a personified power or deity; the excerpts explore rather than erase this range.

301.Earth and sky are represented as lovers whose union produces sustenance. The attribution to Euripides is supplied from a parallel quotation cited in the apparatus; the extract does not name a play.

302.“One of them” refers to those who experience this love. Sōphron here means morally restrained or temperate. The play-title is supplied from the parallel evidence cited by Wachsmuth.

303.The wish joins poetic inspiration to desire: song is also its remedy. The Greek preserves the poem’s Doric forms, including Moisai for the Muses.

304.Cypris is Aphrodite. Here the name stands for sexual desire, contrasted with the attachment the speaker describes. The source prints these two lines separately from the following five.

305.The heading Theseus is supplied from another Stobaean occurrence of the first two lines. Aphrodite as Zeus’s daughter will reappear in the distinction between two Aphrodites in excerpt 13.

306.Wachsmuth supplies the line about Earth from Hesiod. This is a selection of lines 116, 117, and 120, not an uninterrupted passage of the Theogony. Chaos names the primordial gap or chasm.

307.The Greek verb is active, “devised,” but its subject is not expressed in this isolated line. The English uses a passive construction to avoid supplying an agent whom the excerpt does not identify.

308.Telesidromos evokes a runner completing a course. The editor prints these words as anonymous prose, rejecting an earlier attempt to arrange them as tragic verse. The Latin author-heading is rendered in Greek and English.

309.“Madness” translates mania. The next excerpt distinguishes divinely inspired departures from ordinary behavior from states caused by illness. Here “clear-headed” renders sōphrōn in that contrast.

310.The “four gods” are four divine sources or groups: Aphrodite and Love share the fourth. Telestikē concerns religious initiation or rites, as distinct from prophecy and poetic inspiration.

311.The wings express the soul’s movement toward the true beauty of which earthly beauty reminds it. Enthousiasis means divine inspiration or possession, more than ordinary “enthusiasm.” The final wording follows Stobaeus’s printed text, including its repetition of “lover.”

312.The Homeridae, literally “sons of Homer,” are invoked here as keepers of secret verses. The playful attribution and warning about the meter belong to Plato’s speaker; the lines are not presented here as an authenticated quotation from Homer.

313.Pterōs, the divine name (printed in the accusative Pterōta), joins the sound of Erōs to the Greek word for a wing. “Wing-love” attempts to preserve the joke, followed by its explanation in the verse.

314.This is Phaedrus’s praise of Love, reported within Plato’s dialogue. Stobaeus abbreviates the passage: the verses of Hesiod and Parmenides quoted in Plato have already appeared separately as excerpts 5 and 6. The claim that Love is a god should be read alongside, rather than assimilated to, Diotima’s different argument in excerpt 17.

315.The distinction is made in Pausanias’s speech (Symposium 180c-185c). Ourania, “Heavenly,” echoes Ouranos, “Heaven” or “Uranus.” Pandēmos means “of all the people,” here “Common”; the next excerpt attaches an ethical distinction to the two names.

316.Charizesthai, “grant favors,” concerns yielding to a lover. Pausanias’s conclusion makes the cultivation of virtue the condition of its nobility. The opening follows the fuller wording printed by Wachsmuth, including pan, “every” or “all.”

317.Eryximachus, the physician, extends Pausanias’s distinction to the natural world. His speech begins at Symposium 185e; the first sentence here refers back to Pausanias. “Love” now describes bodily attractions as well as human relationships.