ASPASIA OR DIOTIMA

Who was Socrates' erotic teacher?

Abstract

In the present investigation, contrasting Plato's Socrates with Socrates' character that emerges from the texts and doxography from the Socratics, I present two hypotheses about who Socrates' erotic teacher was. On the one hand, there is the general doxographic hypothesis of the Socratics who point to Aspasia as his erotic teacher, since Aeschines and Xenophon, disciples of Socrates, as well as other philosophers and doxographers after the classical period (Alciphron, Athenaeus, Cicero, Philostratus, Lucian, Maximus of Tyre, Plutarch, Synesius, Victorinus), portray Aspasia as Socrates' teacher in the erotic arts. On the other hand, there is the Platonic innovation that presents Diotima as the true erotic guide of Socrates. I seek to demonstrate the importance of the priestess of Mantineia in the Banquet, since Diotima is directly associated with the platonic novelty of philosophical éros. Next, I indicate the possible reasons for this displacement (replacing Aspasia with Diotima as the central figure of philosophical éros and Socrates' erotic guide) carried out by Plato, focusing on how these reasons are linked to essential aspects of the erotic novelties proposed by Plato. Finally, I question whether this Platonic strategy, which limits the wisdom of Aspasia to just one of the subjects for which it was known (rhetoric), would not it be another one of the camouflages that philosophy made with the sophistic inheritances, in particular, of the Aspasian rhetorical-erotic sorceries that profoundly influenced Socratism.