Pye. Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Lever Humeghum Trust online at

W.W. History of Philosophy. Net. Today's episode will be an interview

about Plato's erotic dialogues and I have with me the ideal guest my colleague

Frisbee Sheffield who has published one book and

edited another about Plato's Symposium. Hi Frisbee. Hi Peter. Thanks for coming

on the show. The show is supposed to be about Plato's erotic dialogues.

So can you remind us which works we're actually talking about when we talk about the

erotic dialogues of Plato?

Yes, it's a good question, which dialogues of Plato's are erotic, an answer to which to some extent depends on what one means by erotic.

Typically what is meant is that these are dialogues that are about Iros, roughly passionate desire.

It had a strong sexual sense, the term Iros, though it was broader in scope and could be used of desire, say, for food or war.

So it was really used to sort of designate any intense desire.

And a more specific notion that's often implied by the term erotic dialogues,

are those dialogues concerned with erotic relationships between an older man and a younger boy?

These sort of pederastic relationships were not uncommon amongst certain social circles amongst Athenian elites.

And typically an older man would seek sexual favors in exchange for some sort of

social and political training and that sort of educational aspect goes some way

towards explaining Plato's interest in these kinds of erotic relationships.

Were these relationships frowned upon by other people?

Is it something that everyone acknowledged as a kind of acceptable relationship between

an older man and a younger boy?

I think that, I mean, we don't have a broad spectrum of social evidence for this. In some of Aristophanes' plays he associates these kinds of relationships

...