Chapter One Introduction

1 The Tyrannicides: Greek Sculpture and Platonic Thought

In his speech in Plato’s Symposium, Pausanias praises the power of the god Erôs to engender strong bonds of civic “friendship” and “communion” (φιλίας καὶ κοινωνίας, Symp. 182c3). The legendary story of Aristogeiton and Harmodius’ love and friendship, says Pausanias, is the example par excellence of the power of love. Eros and friendship inspired the two men to resist despotic power and facilitate the construction of a new political order. Eros is a subversive force; he influences ethics; he overturns political regimes. Heavenly Eros, concludes Pausanias, endows people with almost invincible power, and makes them beautiful, noble, courageous, and virtuous. Heavenly Eros, who abides throughout life, “welds” the lovers “permanently together”.1 Pausanias’ praise of Harmodius and Aristogeiton’s time-enduring love in terms of “welding” is echoed by Hephaestus’ famous promise to the lovers in Aristophanes’ speech to give them what their enamoured souls truly desire. He promises to “fuse and weld them together into a single piece” (συντῆξαι καὶ συμφυσῆσαι εἰς τὸ αὐτό, Symp. 192d8–e1). He can make the two divided bodies be one, share a single life, share a single death, and be together forever, even in Hades. The Aristophanic lovers are envisaged as separate sections that can be welded together to produce a complete sculptural whole. Power, gratification, pleasure, and even quasi-divinity is inventively encapsulated in this image of humans as a “sculptural artefact” made of amalgamated flesh.

This use of welding imagery in the Symposium is a representative example of a type of metaphorical language that permeates Plato’s dialogues. The sculptural associations of such imagery, and its implications in Platonic thought usually pass unobserved in the scholarly literature. However, if we inspect it more closely and situate it against the broader material and historical context of fifth- and fourth-century Athens, then such imagery is in fact an implicit invitation to visualise the lovers of the Symposium, and indeed the characters of the Platonic dialogues at large, from a different interpretative angle: in three-dimensional, malleable, and plastic terms. We are also invited to investigate the reasons that may have necessitated the construction of such conceptual metaphors in the first place.2

This book aims to map out the network of sculptural image-making in certain Platonic dialogues in order to argue the thesis that Greek sculpture, revolutionised by the advent of the lost-wax technique for the production of bronze statues and large statue groups, lies at the heart of Plato’s conception of the philosophical relation of “participation.” Participation is the elusive relationship of the material and sense-perceptible particulars of our earthly realm to the world of the immaterial and invisible Forms – a relationship that is described in the dialogues by the terms κοινωνία, μετοχή, μίμησις, and ὁμοίωσις. In this respect, the book proposes to adopt an interpretative angle that is sensitive to the visual and art-historical developments that shaped viewers’ engagement with sculptural artefacts and their response to them in Classical Athens. A fundamental thesis of this book is that Greek art helped Plato both conceive and articulate the way humans can be “moulded,” both on an individual and collective basis, to embody on earth qualities of the intelligible realm. Thus, the sculptural imagery used throughout several dialogues can help us reconstruct the way in which material culture was transfused into the dialogues and translated into the philosophical language of ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics. Art imagery helped Plato put the tangible and the material in the service of the invisible and the immaterial through the construction of a positive type of mimêsis. This is a position contrary to the long dominant view that Plato’s stance towards art and mimêsis is hostile, either throughout his dialogues or becoming more positive only in the so-called late-period works.

I argue that, as we move between different dialogues, Plato explores the possibilities of an ever-evolving network of associated imagery drawn from the fields of music, mathematics, weaving, dance, sculpture, and religion to talk about how humans should imitate the world of the intellect and its structure and how they participate in it. These images evolve in an interconnected way. In different dialogues some images come to the fore as he explores the connection between them. By the time we reach the Laws, there is a network of associated imagery that he can plug into and develop in his analysis of the way the individual and society may reproduce on earth the structure of the Forms and of the universe.

Let us return to the Tyrannicides; the consideration of this famous statue group may serve as a useful guideline for our interpretation of sculptural images in the dialogues as it is perhaps the best example of how the symbolic character of material art may have had an impact on Platonic conceptual thought. The sculptural complex of Harmodius and Aristogeiton – two eminent Athenian aristocrats who were credited with the killing of Hipparchus, brother of the ruling tyrant Hippias in 514 BCE – was an emblematic image in Athens of the Classical era. From an art-historical perspective, it is a “benchmark in the history of Greek sculpture,”3 which “literally marks the birthday of the classical style in Athens.”4 When the original statue by Antenor was removed by the Persians after their invasion of Athens in 479 BCE, the Athenians ordered Critius and Nesiotes to replace it, and they created the bronze sculptural complex now known from Roman marble copies.5 In fact, the new Tyrannicides statue was the only honorific portrait placed in the sacred area of the Agora in 477/6 BCE, and the two figures became moral exemplars, posed as symbols of democracy and representations of ethical and political virtues. According to some scholars, they were even venerated with heroic cult honours.6 The statue, a physical embodiment of the political contrast between tyranny and democracy, formed an integral part of the cultural dialogue between different forms of artistic representative media (sculptures, paintings, vases, and choral dancing) at the very heart of the Athenian Agora.7 As has been argued, the “manipulation of the bodily proportions” of the statue complex, the very position of the two men and the way they “press their bodies towards” the viewer highlights “the erotic bond between the two men – and between statue and beholder.” The result is the creation of an “emblematic bond between citizens in a democracy.”8 Thus, the spectator is “drawn into the action and invited to complete the narrative for himself”;9 he is visually invited to emulate the Tyrannicides against the tyrant, and to venerate the heroes.10 Scholars have extensively discussed the leakage of the Tyrannicide iconography into other artistic registers and forms of representation in Classical Athens. This involves not only the reproduction of the sculptural complex on vases but also in poetic performance. Thus, Ober has argued that the “blow of Harmodius,” whose symbolic significance was easily recognisable by the Athenians, was emulated by the chorus of old Athenian men in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.11 When the Aristophanic chorus “takes its stand ‘beside Aristogeiton,’ Aristophanes’ old men explicitly take on the role of Harmodius.” Ober proposes that we must “imagine the dancers of the chorus, as they sing ‘Like this!’ mimicking the form of the Harmodius statue and assuming for a moment the ‘Harmodius stance’.”12

The imaging of the Tyrannicides in Classical Athens gives form and substance to several concepts that are central to Plato’s effort to examine ethics and politics through the lens of ontology and metaphysics. These involve ethical concepts, such as courage (andreia) and moderation (sôphrosynê), and self-sacrifice for the city, as well as civic bonds, such as φιλία (“societal friendship”) and ὁμόνοια (“unity”).13 As has been extensively shown in the scholarship, pederastic relationships acted as “as an apprenticeship” that prepared the Athenians for their future role as citizens.14 This ideology involved a strong interconnection between erotic love, civic philia, and the formation of civic identity. Such an erotic relationship between the lover (ἐραστής) and the beloved (ἐρώμενος) created strong bonds of friendship, trust, and reciprocity, and secured the reproduction of the civic body and the continuation of its solidarity.15 The book argues that these concepts, which the Tyrannicide iconography embodied in various art registers in the heart of the Agora, lie at the very core of Plato’s vision about how life should be organised in his two cities, the kallipolis of the Republic and Magnesia of the Laws. As I argue, Plato’s use of sculptural imagery for...