1 The Tyrannicides: Greek Sculpture and Platonic Thought
In his speech in Plato’sSymposium, Pausanias praises the power of the godErôs 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 examplepar 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 theSymposium 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 theSymposium, 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
