Diotima and Demeter as Mystagogues

in Plato’s Symposium
NANCY EVANS

Like the goddess Demeter, Diotima from Mantineia, the prophetess who teaches
Socrates about eros and the “rites of love” in Plato’s Symposium, was a mystagogue
who initiated individuals into her mysteries, mediating to humans esoteric knowl-
edge of the divine. The dialogue, including Diotima’s speech, contains religious and
mystical language, some of which specifically evokes the female-centered yearly
celebrations of Demeter at Eleusis. In this essay, I contextualize the worship of
Demeter within the larger system of classical Athenian practices, and propose that
Plato borrowed Eleusinian language because it criticized conventional notions of
the divine, thereby allowing him to reimagine the possibilities for the philosophical
process among humans.

All this flows from the arguments of Plato—laughter

and movement; people getting up and going out;
the hour changing; tempers being lost; jokes cracked;
the dawn rising. Truth, it seems, is various; Truth is to be
pursued with all our faculties. Are we to rule out the
amusements, the tendernesses, the frivolities of friendship
because we love truth? Will truth be quicker found because
we stop our ears to music and drink no wine, and sleep
instead of talking through the long winter’s night?

—Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s Plato did not stop his ears or refrain from wine, and Socrates
in Plato’s Symposium did indeed talk through the long winter’s night. The scene

Hypatia vol. 21, no. 2 (Spring 2006) © by Nancy Evans

2 Hypatia

is a damp, cold January night in perhaps 416 bce, and the poet Agathon has
just won his first tragic victory. He holds a party at his house, attended by group
of young and handsome aristocratic Athenian men. Some of them are lovers
and some are would-be lovers. Socrates, neither the youngest nor the most
handsome, is also present. Instead of drinking the night away into oblivion,
the group of friends agrees to drink moderately while honoring Eros, the god
of desire, with a series of speeches praising love. In the course of this evening,
Socrates gives a speech in praise of Eros that suggests a redefinition of love.
In fact, Socrates’ praise of Eros becomes a philosophical discussion of Being1
that redefines the relationship not simply between human erotic partners,
male-female as well as male-male, but even the relationship between human
and divine. Interestingly, Socrates claims from the outset that the speech he
gives is not his own, but rather one he heard from a woman. It is the prophet
Diotima from Mantineia, Socrates says, who taught him about love, about Eros,
and about eros and the divine.
Diotima is in fact more than an ordinary prophet; like the goddess Demeter,
Diotima is a sort of mystagogue, one who initiates individuals into her Myster-
ies and who mediates to humans information about the divine. This essay will
explore Diotima’s speech as recalled by Socrates in Plato’s Symposium, looking to
the language and images that specifically evoke the yearly celebration of Deme-
ter and Kore (the Maiden, also known as Persephone) at Eleusis. Drawing from
our new understandings of the Eleusinian Mysteries and their role in the larger
system of civic cult observances in the Greek city-state (Evans 2002; Foley 1994;
Clinton 1993, 1988; Burkert 1986, 1985; Richardson 1974; Mylonas 1961), this
essay will further explore the possible implications that the worship of Demeter
had for Plato. Eleusinian cult practices were a centuries-old tradition within
classical Athenian civic religion that focused on female experience, while at
the same time directly addressing the relationship between divine and human,
where ‘human’ is a category that includes both male and female. It is an initiate’s
experience of the Eleusinian Mysteries that constitutes the central metaphor for
encountering Being in the Symposium, and this metaphor is depicted as having
been invented by a woman in a dialogue full of men.
I will suggest that Plato evokes Eleusinian language and images precisely
because the central rituals and revelations at Eleusis challenge conventional
notions of hierarchy in Athenian society.2 The annual Mysteries celebrated
at Eleusis draw from the experiences of women in a male-dominated society,
and Plato knew that these rituals were an integral and familiar part of Athe-
nian civic and popular religious practice. Plato’s allusion to Demeter and her
Mysteries refers to the relationships between male and female inherent in the
myth and rituals of Demeter, and familiar to all Athenians. His own personal
knowledge and experience of Demeter also informs a new vision of the process
of philosophical inquiry.
 Nancy Evans 3

This reading of the Symposium argues neither that Plato was (or was not) a
feminist (Vlastos 1994; Nye 1990, 150; Brown 1988, 594), nor that Plato disguises
himself and speaks in drag (Freeman 1986, 172), nor that Plato appropriated
the feminine, in the person of Diotima, in order to create a purely masculine
philosophical and reproductive process (DuBois 1988, 183). Rather, I argue
that Plato’s appropriation of specific religious language indicates his intimate
familiarity with the diverse ritual traditions of classical Athens. The religious
language of “the rites of love” had a particular meaning for the citizens and
inhabitants of the Greek-speaking Mediterranean in the classical period of the
fifth and fourth centuries bce. Our understanding of Diotima’s speech in the
Symposium and, by extension, Plato’s theories on love and knowledge, are both
enriched as we explore the full civic and religious backgrounds of Socrates,
Plato, and their Athenian contemporaries.

Athenian Civic Religion and the Mysteries

Mystic rites and associations (ta mustika) included a wide range of traditional
practices in Greece, among them the mysteries of Demeter.3 These rites did not
facilitate the intensely private, individual experiences of union with God known
in later Christian mystical traditions (Burkert 1983, 248). The Greek mystery
cults were often public, communal, and even civic phenomena that articulated
the cultural boundaries of human religious experience differently from the rites
of civic animal sacrifice. Civic animal sacrifice constituted the dominant mode
of conventional religious expression in the ancient Mediterranean world. The
ancient mystery cults repositioned the experience of the mortal worshipper
by appropriating some of the mediating functions of the official male priests
and magistrates and transferring these mediating functions to the individual
participants themselves.
The conventional means of communicating with the divine in classical
Greece was the state-sponsored ritual of animal sacrifice (thusia) (Bremmer 1999,
39; Simon Price 1999, 33; Parker 1996; Osborne 1993; Zaidman and Pantel 1992,
29; Burkert 1985, 55). Civic sacrifice carried none of the undertones, familiar
from later Christian notions of sacrifice, of giving something up now for the
sake of gaining something better later on. Rather, sacrifice was a symbolic act
that both expressed and reinforced social roles. Sacrifice took place both at
the macro level of the polis, and the micro level of the household; either way
citizen men held all authority and presided over the rituals (Jay 1992; Detienne
1989; Connor 1988). Priests and official magistrates who were in charge of
civic sacrifice first set aside the fat and thighbones of the sacrificed animal,
often an ox, and burned them on an altar. The smoke and savor that ascended
to the heavens was thought to be pleasing to the gods, and it was the smoke
that symbolized communication between human and divine. Next, the priests
4 Hypatia

and officials roasted and ate the best portions, called the splanchna, and the
remaining meat was butchered and distributed to the public in attendance,
who feasted communally (Detienne 1989). Civic sacrifice included the public
distribution of meat and often was an obligatory ritual for all citizens of the
polis. The rules and formalities of ritual sacrifice within the polis were many
and complex. While some modern scholars have speculated that meat was not
distributed equitably in Greco-Roman societies (Garnsey 1999), others have
debated whether women and children received their fair share of any public
meal (Osborne 1993; Detienne 1989). Among the most basic rules was the
one stipulating that only priests, who were citizen men, could accomplish the
various parts of the slaughter, including the two acts that brought the human
realm into contact with the divine: dedicating the fat and thighbones at the
god’s altar, and consuming the splanchna.
Athenian religion was complex. Our modern binary categories of public/
private and sacred/profane cannot accurately describe the constellation of
institutions and practices familiar to the Athenians of Socrates’ and Plato’s
world (Connor 1988). For example, women’s daily lives were filled with religious
observances, some in the home, some in the public domain. Women’s customs
included everything from magical practices, to initiatory puberty and childbirth
rites, to state-sponsored cult activities such as the Thesmophoria and Parthenaia
(Dillon 2002). At the same time, the democratic institutions run by citizen men
included civic worship of the gods (Connor 1988). Civic sacrificial cult was
financed by the state, and it provided the public with its chief source of animal
protein at the same time that it clearly expressed the hierarchical relationships
within Greek society that placed divine over human, citizen over noncitizen,
and male over female (Garnsey 1999).
Classical Greek initiatory cults (mustika) developed during the sixth and
fifth centuries bce within this context of the Greek polis and its civic sacrificial
cult. Greek mystic rites (teletai, telea) looked toward the goal or fulfillment—the
telos—of a ritual process experienced by individuals who joined private groups
within the polis, often with the express intent of changing their own status after
death. Initiatory cults and movements existed within the polis as subgroups.
One crucial thing that distinguished the mystical cults from the polis cult was
the way in which mystical cults defined ritual purity and pollution (miasma).
For example, members of some mystical groups, because they declined to take
part in the state-sponsored sacrifices, ate no red meat, while other groups cir-
cumvented the city’s sacrifices of domesticated animals by going out into the
countryside and, allegedly, ripping the meat from the bones of wild animals
and eating it raw (Burkert 1986). While some practices remained in harmony
with the civic sacrificial cult and others demanded behaviors contrary to those
of the dominant civic system, all the mystic rites remained within the larger
official structures of classical Athenian polytheism. Some mystery cults were a
 Nancy Evans 5

central part of the state-sponsored festivals, as the Eleusinian Mysteries occupied

a particular place in the official calendar of the polis of Athens. It is notable
that some mystic cults (including Eleusis) allowed women, noncitizens, and
slaves religious functions and identities that the civic cult of animal sacrifice
denied them.
Still, there was no binary distinction in this system of Greek religious cult
practices that placed civic sacrifice in one sphere and mystic cults and move-
ments in another. Both types of observance struggled to understand what it
meant to be human in a traditional cosmos filled with gods. The coexistence
of Greek mystic cults alongside and within the system of civic animal sacri-
fice demonstrates that precise boundaries separating human from the divine,
and human from human, were not firmly fixed in classical Greek cosmology
(Evans 2002). In a world where boundaries remain a reality, mystic cults and
the mysteries offered individuals, sometimes regardless of gender or civil status,
the opportunity to recreate the relationship between human and divine. This
recreation ensured not union with the divine, but the possibility to reexperience
the divine through the power of the individual senses, unmediated by priests
and the hierarchies of animal sacrifice.
By far the most important mystic cult during Plato’s time, and indeed
throughout most of antiquity, was the mystery cult of Demeter at Eleusis, a
small town sixteen miles outside Athens. Assuming that some motifs present
in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter correspond to the initiation rite (Foley 1994;
Burkert 1986; Mylonas 1961) Demeter, the initiate, was at one time living among
the other divinities, but then separated herself from them after Death (the god
Hades) forcibly took her daughter Kore away to live with him in the underworld.
The Hymn, or the initiation rite, then illustrates the process of preparing to
unite oneself with the divine, as Demeter and Kore are reunited with each
other and with the deities on Mount Olympus after Persephone’s return from
the underworld (Foley 1994; Richardson 1974). To commemorate the reunion
with her daughter, Demeter taught the humans at Eleusis how to sow crops,
as well as how to celebrate her mysteries. The Eleusinian rites were unusual
in the full system of Greek polytheism because their focus remained fixed on
the experience of the female, in this case a divine mother and her daughter
as she comes of age and marries, all the while maintaining a relationship
with her mother.
At the Athenian civic festival of the Eleusinian Mysteries, held annually
during the fall, initiates (mustai, mustes in the singular) were accompanied by
mystagogues (leaders of the mustai) to a unique building of the theater type
called the Telesterion (Initiation Hall), where they all witnessed a spectacle
of sorts, apparently a dramatic performance depicting the rape of Kore, the
wanderings of Demeter, and the reunion of the divine mother and daughter.4
Before entering the Telesterion, initiates may have deposited piglets into pits
6 Hypatia

called megara attached to the front porch of the building (Clinton 1993, 1988,
76–77). Another group of people present, called watchers (epoptai, epoptes in
the singular), were those who had already been initiated in past years and
returned to witness the rites again; as Helene Foley has written, the Myster-
ies were “an experience apparently worth repeating” (Foley 1994, 66). All the
groups present in the Telesterion at Eleusis, the initiates, the mystagogues, and
the watchers, learned something—we don’t know exactly what—that changed
their lot after death.
Civic priests and public officials also present performed civic sacrificial rites
at Eleusis, just as they did at the civic festivals that regularly took place in the
urban center in Athens. But contrary to the customs of official animal sacrifice,
it was not only the priests in attendance at the Mysteries who communicated
with the divine at the altar on behalf of the group. Animal sacrifices officiated
by priests were part of this festival of Demeter, but apparently were not a part of
the central ritual in the Telesterion that revealed Demeter’s Mysteries. In fact,
the altars where public sacrifice would have taken place were located outside
the sacred precinct at Eleusis (Evans 2002). Rather, each individual among the
initiates—male, female, slave, and free—dedicated piglets to Demeter, watched
the sacred drama, and experienced knowledge of the divine directly through the
power of his or her own senses. While admission to the Eleusinian Mysteries
came at some cost (about ten days’ wages for a common laborer in the fifth and
fourth centuries: Mylonas 1961, 237), we do know from testimonia that women,
slaves, foreigners, and even children regularly attended alongside citizen men.
This makes the Mysteries, a type of ritual practice existing alongside other polis
sacrifices and rites, among the most inclusive and egalitarian of Athenian reli-
gious institutions. They thus allowed men and women alike to express changing
conceptions about communication between divinity and humanity that the
traditional public cult of animal sacrifice alone could not match.
Positioning Greek mysticism in its wider cultural context allows us to
reexamine the reasons why what is now known as a “philosophical” text by
Plato contains the imagery and language of the Eleusinian Mysteries.5 The
metaphysical and philosophical discourse of Plato arose from the same cultural
framework as civic sacrifice and the Mysteries, and Plato too was concerned
with issues of humanity, change, divinity, and mortality. The speeches in the
Symposium, with their sometimes contrary visions of the role of love in an
individual’s life, mirror the situation of state sacrificial ritual and mystery ritual
in classical Athens. Hierarchical practices in the polis and the more egalitarian
rites of Demeter at Eleusis existed side by side, and simultaneously offered con-
trary conceptions of purity and impurity, male and female, human and divine.
In the Symposium it is the language of the Mysteries that Plato evokes at the
end of Diotima’s speech, depicting a “leader” like a mystagogue conducting the
“initiate” through the “rites of love.” The encounter with Beauty and Being is
 Nancy Evans 7

depicted as a rite that one can be initiated into as one was initiated into the
rites of Demeter at Eleusis.
Diotima’s speech offered Plato’s audience the opportunity to shift their
views on reality, change, and human experience. Just as the Demeter tradition
celebrated at Eleusis allowed individuals to reconstruct their conception of the
divine and its relation to the human social and political structures inherent in
the polis, so Plato in Diotima’s speech presents a different conception of human
experience and its relative distance to and difference from the divine. Centered
on the experience of the divine mother and daughter, the Eleusinian Mysteries
allowed initiates, both male and female, to experience the divine immediately
and with their own eyes during the night ritual in the Telesterion at Eleusis.
Likewise, Diotima the mystagogue leads Socrates to realize that initiates into
her rites of love will, in loving their beloved, see Being and thereby enter into
a new, mutual relation with the divine and become theophiles, both loving-the-
divine and beloved-of-the-divine.

Narrative, Mediation, and Knowledge

The outermost narrative that frames the Symposium takes place before the
death of Socrates in 399 bce and is spoken by one of Socrates’ followers, a young
man named Apollodorus. Although he doesn’t initially realize it, Apollodorus
himself is not even old enough to have been present as an adult at the party,
which took place fifteen years earlier, at the height of the Peloponnesian War.
The account he currently narrates to Glaucon, and later retells to a certain
unnamed companion, had been recently reported to him by Aristodemus, who
long ago had accompanied Socrates to Agathon’s dinner party uninvited.6 This
strategy of complex narrative distancing recurs throughout the dialogue, and
itself replicates an essential aspect of human knowledge. Human knowledge has
a social component that requires multiple individuals to mediate information
among each other (Bacon 1959).
Aristodemus told Apollodorus how the seven Athenian men present at
Agathon’s gave speeches, each in his own fashion, in praise of the god Eros.
It was the combined suggestion of Phaedrus and Eryximachus that each man
give a speech of praise, known as an encomion. They started with the couch on
the furthest left occupied by Phaedrus, and worked their way around the room
in a counterclockwise fashion, proceeding to Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristo-
phanes, and Agathon before reaching Socrates. After questioning Agathon at
length on a few points he had made in his speech (199c–201c), Socrates then
related that he had long ago heard a persuasive speech on “erotics” (ta erotika)
from “a woman from Mantineia, Diotima,” who was learned “in these and in
many other things” (201d2–3). Socrates’ report of his earlier conversation with
Diotima constitutes the innermost narrative frame in the dialogue. Diotima’s
8 Hypatia

speech is the most distanced from Apollodorus and Glaucon—and from us

today. Diotima’s voice is heard only through the reported speech of Socrates,
and hers is the only female view among many male views expressed that evening
about the nature of love.
Diotima’s entire speech is embedded in the dialogue in a syntactical con-
struction that grammarians call indirect discourse. Socrates’ speech moves in
three steps: first from Socrates’ cross-examination (elenchos) of Agathon, next
to Diotima’s elenchos of Socrates, and finally to Diotima’s lessons in erotics,
which culminate in the so-called ascent passage. The very syntax of her lesson
in erotics thus serves to remind the reader that human knowledge is indirect,
dependent, and always mediated. Earlier scholarly analysis of the rhetoric and
grammar in the dialogue found links between the form of Socrates’ speech
and its philosophical content (Bacon 1959). Some more recent readings of the
dialogue have focused less on syntax, however, and more on “the [male] embodi-
ment of the voice of the woman” (that is, transvestitism and ventriloquism:
Irigaray 1989, 32), as well as on women as the absent presence (Dubois 1988,
182; Freeman 1986, 172). But while identifying ventriloquism can raise questions
about male appropriation of the female, it loses focus on how syntax itself can
implicitly carry meaning about gender, status, and identity.
Interestingly, Diotima’s very name held significant meaning for the fourth-
century Athenian audience, although that meaning may not immediately be
apparent to the modern reader (Halperin 1990, 119–20; Nussbaum 1986, 177).
Diotima means “Zeus-Honor,” either in the active sense of a woman who honors
Zeus, or in the passive sense of a woman honored by Zeus. She is said to be from
the Peloponnesian city of Mantineia, which allied itself with Sparta during the
Peloponnesian War. The Greek form of this place name, Mantinike, notably
appears to contain the root mantis, which means “prophet, seer,” and strongly
suggests that Diotima is herself a prophetess, or at least is somehow associated
with prophecy. Mantinike also contains what sounds like the word for “victory”
(nike); as a pun in Greek, Diotima Mantinike thus would sound like “Diotima
from Prophet-victory.” Socrates provides additional significant information for
his fellow symposiasts about Diotima Mantinike that hints at her victorious
prophetic powers.
He recalls how, at a time in the past when the Athenians were about to be
beset by a plague, she was able to delay the plague for ten years by prescribing
which civic animal sacrifices (thusiai) the Athenians should perform.7 Given
the Athenians’ experiences during the Peloponnesian War, including the
devastations of the urban plagues of 429 and 427 bce and the Spartan defeat
of Athens in 404–403, Diotima’s name “Prophet-victory” is not without heavy
irony for Plato’s original audience.
Once Socrates mentions his acquaintance with Diotima, he reveals that
the exchange he has just conducted with Agathon duplicates the exchange
 Nancy Evans 9

Diotima had conducted with him all those years ago. Socrates relates that he
once believed Eros to be very much as Agathon has just described in his speech.
Before he was acquainted with Diotima, Socrates, like Agathon, had believed
Eros to be a beautiful and good god. Diotima’s lesson in erotics demonstrated to
him that Eros was neither beautiful nor good. Using the language of parents and
children (which will recur at certain key points later in the dialogue) Diotima
and Socrates teach that Eros is love of something, as a parent is a parent of
something, namely a child (199d). Since Eros is the love of something, and
since Eros would not love something that it already securely had, then Eros
cannot possess beauty or goodness. Rather, Diotima and Socrates argue, Eros
loves what is beautiful and good; Eros loves what it lacks, and desires to possess
forever what it currently lacks (199d–201c). According to their argument, this
makes Eros neither beautiful nor good.8
As Socrates recounts Diotima’s lessons on erotics, he establishes the dif-
ference between contraries and contradictories. Once it is shown that Eros is
neither beautiful nor good, an obvious question arises: does that make Eros
ugly, unattractive, and base? Such a polarized argument arises from the tradi-
tional distinction between kalos and kakos, words whose well-known meanings
(“beautiful, good” and “ugly, bad”) ever since Homer encompassed both physical
characteristics and moral judgments. Diotima teaches that there lies a middle
term between any two opposite terms. Contraries like good and bad, or beautiful
and ugly, are not necessarily contradictories; something in between, metaksu,
lies between them. Before she reveals to Socrates what lies between good and
bad, Diotima generates more examples of contraries that are not contradicto-
ries. An important one centers on the opposition of human (thnetos, anthropos)
and divine (athanatos, theos). Since Socrates had agreed that Eros lacks what is
beautiful and good, and since the gods are those who are happy because they
eternally possess the beautiful and the good, Diotima teaches that Eros is not
a god (202c, oude theon).
Diotima then proceeds to teach Socrates that between mortal and immortal
is to daimonion, a term that has no proper analogue in English, but which may
be rendered “godlike.” Furthermore, Eros, neither human nor divine, is a great
daimon (202e). The noun daimon, like the adjective daimonion, is very difficult to
translate. In the polytheistic system of classical Athens, a daimon could indicate
a god or a goddess, a supernatural power, a spirit, or a semidivine entity. The
latter is what it seems to mean in this dialogue. A definition of religious practice
that stresses its culturally defined “in between” nature begins to emerge: “for
in fact all that is to daimonion is between (metaksu) god and mortal,” Diotima
tells Socrates (202e1). Inherent in this discussion of the “in between” is the
concept of mediation, in which a third, intermediate term can bridge two terms
defined as opposite, or commonly conceived to be completely separate from each
other. An important connection between mediation in this philosophical and
10 Hypatia

linguistic sense and mediation in a religious sense is then made explicit in the
next part of Diotima’s speech, when the priestess openly discusses traditional
Greek religious practices (202e3–203a8). At 202e, Diotima’s outline of Greek
religion (pan to daimonion) explicitly includes civic sacrifice (thusia), prophecy
(mantike), and mystical cult (teletai). Since the gods do not mingle at all with
men, the entire art of divination (he mantinike pasa) and the skill of priests both
relate civic sacrifices (thusiai) and the special knowledge of mystery initiations
(teletai) back and forth between human and divine (202e7–8). Since Eros too is
part of to daimonion, he has the power to cross back and forth between human
and divine, carrying prayers and sacrifices from men to the gods, and requests,
precepts, and orders from the gods to men (202e3–5). Eros and to daimonion
thus fulfill important religious functions in Diotima’s lesson on erotics.

Interlude: The Speech of Aristophanes

Diotima’s discussion of ritual practices (pan to daimonion) relates humans

(anthropoi) to the gods (theoi). To understand more fully what this category
‘human’ could have meant to those at Agathon’s symposium, we can now read
Diotima’s speech in light of an earlier speech given that evening at Agathon’s.
In its discussion of human in contrast to the divine, and of human as defin-
able in relative terms to the divine, Diotima’s speech recalls the earlier speech
of Aristophanes. Aristophanes had narrated a myth about the original three
genders: male, female, and androgyne (189d ff.). At the very beginning, his
myth defines human nature (anthropinen 189d5). In the context of a world that
also includes gods, humans (anthropoi) were at first wholly different from what
they are now. Long ago, mortals had two faces, four eyes, four arms and four
legs, and went about the earth doing cartwheels (190a). The male gender had
two sets of male genitals, the female gender two sets of female genitals, and
the androgyne one set of each. These humans were cunning and awesome, and
they threatened the power of the gods, so Zeus split them in two. This previous
speech in praise of Eros thus also contrasts human and divine, but supplies more
background for the human half of the cultural relationship.
The rest of Aristophanes’ myth (190d–193) gives an account of the role that
love—what we today call homosexual and heterosexual love—plays in human
experience. Once split apart, the two halves loved each other; they loved what
they had formerly known and now lacked, and they longed to be together again.
Each half loved the other half of the former whole much the same way Diotima
claims Eros is love of what one does not securely possess. Aristophanes’ myth
details how the immortals adjusted human anatomy, Zeus splitting us in half,
and Apollo healing our wounds. Later the gods felt pity when the humans kept
dying because of a great longing to be whole, so the gods invented a new type of
procreation. These details of Aristophanes’ myth of Eros contribute to a comic
 Nancy Evans 11

yet culturally meaningful symbolic explanation for the origins of love. In the
end, Aristophanes describes how Hephaistos could meld two bodies together
for all eternity to satisfy human desire, and yet even this did not satisfy humans
because sexual intercourse is not what humans are truly after. Aristophanes
suggests that humans seek the mythic wholeness that sex approximates.9 Such
are Aristophanes’ reasons for praising Eros.
This speech of Aristophanes, clearly a fiction invented by Plato and attrib-
uted to the famous comic poet, in no way reflects the classical Greek scientific
theories about the origins and development of human anatomy, sexuality, and
procreation. But it does nevertheless present a myth that spells out important
Greek assumptions of the relationship between human and divine. The myth’s
precision about what human (anthropos) means in contrast to divine (athanatos)
reinforces the cultural separation between these two categories, a separation
largely due to the fact of mortality. The gods in Aristophanes’ speech are the
deathless ones (athanatoi). At the same time in this speech human (anthropos)
includes male, female, and androgyne mortals who remain subordinate to the
deathless gods.10
The myth points, too, to the basic religious role that humans accomplish
for the gods: humans make ritual sacrifices, thusiai. The reason the immortal
gods could not destroy the human race (as they earlier had destroyed the race of
Giants when they became overly ambitious) is that the gods’ honors that result
from sacrifice would disappear (190c5). Even here in Aristophanes’ speech, the
category ‘human’ in opposition to the divine is defined by the religious behaviors
of animal sacrifice. Humans and gods maintain a religious relationship that
requires humans to initiate sacrificial behaviors that expressly honor the gods.
Humans—independent of gender—live in a cosmos inhabited both by mortals
and by awesome, powerful immortals, and humans must incorporate religious
acts and rituals into their mortal lives.

Eros and the Daimonion

Diotima shares with Aristophanes this same conception of a cosmos inhabited

by opposing categories of beings, those who will know death and those who will
forever remain untouched by it. But Diotima’s cosmos is more complex than
that of Aristophanes because it includes the third mediating class of beings, the
daimones. Diotima defines Love as one of these daimones that mediates between
bad and good, and between human and divine. Like Aristophanes, Diotima
illustrates her point with a story. The myth of Eros’s parentage that Diotima
now narrates further elaborates this aspect of Love’s status as a medium between
two opposites. Love is the child of the mortal woman Penia and the god Poros
(personifications for want or lack, penia, and resource, poros, who is the divine
son of the goddess Metis, or cunning). Penia conceived Eros at a birthday party
12 Hypatia

for the goddess Aphrodite, and it is this that explains his connection to the
goddess of love (203c). The language in Diotima’s myth of the parentage of
Eros relies again upon the oppositions (good/bad, immortal/mortal) that she
has previously made. One the one hand, Diotima describes the mortal nature
of the mother Penia as base and inherently lacking in beauty. She gives these
qualities to her son (203d), and Eros is homeless, barefoot, rough, and squalid
(the very same qualities that Alcibiades will later attribute to Socrates himself
in 220a ff.). On the other hand, the father Poros, who is by nature beautiful and
immortal, gives his son manliness, cleverness, intensity, and resourcefulness
(203d5). This makes Eros in between (metaksu, 203e2–3); neither beautiful nor
ugly, neither mortal nor immortal, but continuously dying, and then coming
back to life and flourishing.
Eros’s in-between nature is developed further in the opposition of ignorance
and wisdom. Penia is ignorant, Poros wise, and their son Eros somewhere in
between the two. This family relationship allows Diotima in 204b to define
‘philosopher’ as someone who isn’t fully wise, but who is reaching after wisdom.
Since the gods are by nature wise (204a), as they are by nature beautiful, they
do not long for wisdom and beauty. But Eros, a personification of mediation
between human and divine, lacks the essential wisdom possessed by his father
Poros and the other gods, and is by nature a “philosopher who is between wise and
ignorant” (metaksu, 204b).11 While this mythic narrative of Eros and his parents
echoes the language of family relations that Socrates earlier used with Agathon
in the elenchos (199e ff.), Diotima here refines the argument. Now the language
of familial relation in a myth represents the relationship between human and
divine. The myth symbolically represents three entities that can mediate between
god and mortal: to daimonion, correct opinion, and the philosopher.
Eros, himself a mediator and a daimon, therefore practices philosophy, and
enables the human and the divine to communicate with one another (202e3).
Diotima proposes that because humans are mortal (and lack beauty, goodness,
and wisdom), they experience the communicative or hermeneutical aspects of
divinity when the daimonion relays to them divine orders, precepts, and com-
mands (202e). But humans need constant mediation not just between human
and divine, but even between human and human. Relation with other people
constitutes yet another type of divine mediation, as when the Athenians
learned the gods’ will about the plague through Diotima. In that instance,
Diotima understood the gods’ will through prophecy (manteia) which came to
her through the daimonion; she then interpreted her mantic experience to the
Athenians.
But even the Platonic dialogue form, with its repetition of speeches from the
inner to the outer narrative levels, exemplifies how humans mediate knowledge
for each other in the social world. The story about Eros’s mediating powers goes
from Diotima to Socrates, from Socrates to the other symposiasts including
 Nancy Evans 13

Aristodemus, from Aristodemus to Apollodorus, and from Apollodorus to

Glaucon and the unnamed friend—and finally to us today. The many narrative
layers needed to reach Diotima’s theory on the role of sexual love in human life
illustrate how humans mediate knowledge, including knowledge of the divine,
back and forth to each other. The story of Eros’s origins and identity expresses
mythically what the grammar expresses through indirect discourse, and what
the narrative expresses through the complex network of relationships that
stretches through the centuries from Diotima and Socrates to us as contempo-
rary readers. As to daimonion mediates between divine and human, and as Eros
mediates between contraries, so too humans mediate knowledge for each other.
The level with Diotima is the most removed from the outermost narrative, and
within her speech and even within her very identity as prophetess are found
other instances of mediation.
Although no specific Eleusinian language occurs in this section of the
dialogue, language and concepts that evoke religious customs repeatedly rise
to the surface. This portion of Diotima’s speech begins to set the stage for the
explicitly Eleusinian language of Demeter’s Mysteries. Like Eros and Diotima,
Demeter too was a mediator of knowledge to humans—both in myth and in
ritual. Demeter’s myths and rituals, like Diotima’s stories of Eros, revolve around
and celebrate birth and death, the granting of gifts, the transmission of stories,
and the knowledge of the divine obtainable by humans. These qualities will
continue to be developed as Diotima’s lesson in erotics continues.

Birth in the Beautiful

There are other means through which humans can communicate with the
divine. After Diotima in her questioning and in the myth defines who Eros is,
and demonstrates that Eros is a true philosopher, she goes on to teach Socrates
the purpose of love. Socrates admits that he doesn’t know what its purpose is,
and hints that it is Diotima’s role as teacher of erotics to explain it to him. Her
answer is cryptic. The purpose of love is “birth in the beautiful, both in body
and in soul” (206b7). Socrates is still puzzled, and responds by saying that he
needs prophesy (manteia, 206b9)—the Mantinean woman Diotima—to figure
out what she is saying.
Philosophers and classicists alike have also struggled to understand what
“birth in the beautiful” means. Several different words denoting birth appear in
this section of Diotima’s speech (206c ff.). While some critics have commented
on this birth language (Pender 1992; Irigaray 1989, 40), and on how surprising it
is to find it in the pederastic context of a classical symposium (Halperin 1990,
117–20), few (Nye 1990, 140–42) have tried to explore fully what it might mean
that the subject of all these verbs meaning “give birth” is, without exception,
anthropoi, human beings.
14 Hypatia

As Aristophanes’ speech made clear, the category human (anthropoi) has

a religious meaning in the context of familiar classical Athenian religious
practices. The assumptions about human and divine common to the different
speeches given that night at Agathon’s indicate that humans have a particular
place and an expected religious function known to those in the original fourth-
century audience who would have read or listened to Plato’s Symposium. The
notable language of humans (anthropoi) and birth must likewise be unpacked
and reconstructed in the context of the larger Greek culture.
Birth, prophecy, and what comprises “human” were first linked together in
the earlier part of Diotima’s speech where she discusses Eros’s birth, and defines
traditional ritual practice as that which communicates between human and
divine (202–203). Traditional cult practices (thusiai and teletai) constitute one
type of mediation that accomplishes communication between the mortal human
and the immortal divine. But Diotima teaches Socrates that humans can—and
do—achieve a different sort of immortality, and this type of immortality is
possible because of Eros, and love’s role in conceiving, giving birth, and raising
children (207a, 207d). Procreation for all mortal beings, human and animal
alike, replaces the individual with his or her offspring, and thereby allows for a
type of immortality and social deathlessness. This experience of death, birth,
and nurturing of offspring also underlies the myth of the divine Mother and
Daughter, Demeter and Kore, and stands at the basis for the Eleusinian Myster-
ies. Another Athenian festival that celebrated the story of Demeter and Kore,
the Thesmophoria, even culminated in a joyous day called Kalligeneia, the
Day of Beautiful Birth. Linking Eros to a discussion of immortality, parents,
and children allows Diotima to continue setting the stage for her coming use
of explicit Eleusinian language. Diotima’s lessons in erotics highlight the con-
ceptual similarity between birth and traditional religious practices. Both are
forms of mediation between the individual mortal, and the larger immortal,
whether the immortal is the realm of the gods with which the priest commu-
nicates, or whether the immortal is the community of a family encompassing
several generations.
Diotima’s phrase “birth . . . in both body and soul” (206b7) clearly points to
a metaphoric usage. This language of birth also has a tradition of use in other
literary contexts. At first glance to a native English speaker it would seem that
these words having to do with giving birth denote meaning that is gender
specific, only having literal meaning for the female (Dover 1980, 147; Halperin
1990, 117 and 139 ff.). But a look at other examples of actual Greek usage shows
otherwise. For example, kueo can mean conceive in the sense that a woman
conceives a child and becomes is pregnant; but with a male subject, it has a
causal meaning, something like impregnate.12 Tikto works the same way. In the
most abstract sense, it means bring into the world, engender; used with a female
subject, it means bear, and with a male subject, beget. Gennao is used mostly
 Nancy Evans 15

with male subjects, but also with female.13 It becomes clear that these words
in Greek cover semantic ground the corresponding English words do not. In
English, beget and conceive are thought to be conceptually different, one used
solely of the male, the other solely of the female; but in Greek, each single verb
covers the role that both genders play in procreation. Verbs like kueo and tikto
are, in a sense, gender neutral: consider the Greek word for parents that also
comes from tikto: hoi tekontes.14
The same language of conception and birth thus had concrete meanings for
both male and female. In addition, the Greeks had a tradition of using these
verbs metaphorically even before Plato, as when Aeschylus says the earth bears
all things (kueo: Choephoroi 127), or when Theognis sings that the polis does—or
does not—produce (tikto) the right kind of citizen. This tradition of metaphoric
usage predates Plato, and indicates to us today that these words had an even
broader range of meanings for the Athenians—used literally with men and
women as subjects, but used figuratively of other things that can produce and
form people. Diotima’s use of anthropoi as the subject of verbs denoting birth
then further expands the breadth of possible meanings inherent in language
of birth. Humans, regardless of gender, by their nature engender in body and
achieve one sort of immortality by physically procreating. Diotima adds that
humans can also engender and be pregnant in soul.15 At 206d5, Diotima intro-
duces an even more abstract notion of mortal reproduction with the neuter form
of the substantive participle, “the engendering”: to kuoun. When “the engender-
ing” (to kuoun) draws near to what is beautiful, it becomes gracious and happy
and it “engenders and gives birth”: tiktei te kai genna (206d5). This is not an
example of exclusively male pregnancy (Pender 1992); rather, Diotima teaches
Socrates that for mortals the purpose of love is—regardless of their gender—to
give birth with their bodies and souls.
Birth and death, and the cultural opposition between the two, had a par-
ticular religious meaning for Greek-speaking Athenians not entirely like our
own. We are not members of a polytheistic or sacrificial system, and the tradi-
tional Western Christian monotheistic deity does not need humans in order
to continue existing. The birth imagery that Diotima uses here emphasizes the
cultural definition of human as both male and female mortals in opposition
to the divine. In her speech, birth comprises a type of mediation for humans,
and Eros is a daimon that can accomplish mediation and make birth easier
for the struggling mortal by bringing the human closer to the presence of the
beautiful and immortal (206d2 ff.). When humans, male and female, engender
children, they approximate corporeal immortality in a concrete way while also
actualizing Love’s role as mediator between human and divine. Diotima thus
places Eros in a profoundly religious context: humans require mediation with
the divine, and Eros, in his nature and in his effects, accomplishes this. “Birth
in the beautiful” means not just simple mediation between human and divine, or
16 Hypatia

straightforward sexual intercourse between human and human. But the human
and the mortal can draw near to the beautiful and the immortal because the
function of mediation in all its forms—ritual, Eros, and human sexuality (both
reproductive and nonreproductive)—is to bring the human into relation with
human, and then to bring both mortals as a social unit into proximity with
the presence of the divine.
When Diotima begins discussing Being in her lesson on erotics (207–212), she
amplifies this characteristic of mediation that brings individual humans together
before approaching the divine. She makes this mortal/immortal characteristic
of mediation clearer than ever through the explicit references to Eleusinian
language. In the Eleusinian Mysteries, the social unit brought together was
general humanity, anthropoi, without the social or political distinctions upon
which sacrifice within the polis was based. In the Telesterion, male priests played
a different role than they did in the sacrificial cult of animal sacrifice. Priests did
not mediate between mortal and immortal, rather the ritual reenactment of the
myth mediated knowledge of the divine to the human participants in the Mys-
teries. The Eleusinian myth of Mother and Daughter was based on the particu-
larly female experience of birth and nurturing, separation and reunion, and the
Eleusinian mystical ritual extended this unique female experience to all anthro-
poi, mediating a qualitatively different knowledge of the divine to humanity,
and bestowing blessings on humans regardless of gender and civil status.

The Ascent

Diotima teaches that humans are capable of real proximity to the divine in the
section of her speech commonly called the “ascent passage” (207a–212b). Here
she narrates an individual human’s encounter with Beauty (to kalon) and Being
(to on). Diotima begins the ascent by speaking about people who are pregnant
(egkumones) in body and soul, and she at last tells Socrates what it is that preg-
nant humans give birth to. Those (implicitly male anthropoi) pregnant in body
turn to mortal women, and achieve their measure of immortality, memory, and
happiness by fathering children (208e). In addition, birth mediates between the
individual mortal and the collective immortal, when humans (anthropoi) give
birth to abstract concepts such as virtue (209b4). Following the examples of
poets (Homer and Hesiod) and lawmakers (Solon and Lycurgus), those pregnant
in soul give birth to wisdom and virtue by writing poems and laws that serve
the good of the community (209a1).16 The larger community carries on the
memory of an individual and of his or her virtuous acts in much the same way
that a family carries on the memory of specific members who have passed on.
But it is only the presence of another beautiful person, anthropon (209b7), that
allows a pregnant human soul to conceive and produce virtue, the soul’s spiritual
offspring that benefits mankind as it mediates with the immortal and divine.
 Nancy Evans 17

It is here in the discussion of human community, memory, birth, and

immortality that Diotima begins to use Eleusinian language and imagery. The
Greek polis, the community in which humans produced children, laws, and
poetry, included both mystical and nonmystical religious traditions and groups.
Sacrificial cult practices and mystical cult practices both required mediation
between mortal and immortal, but mediation was accomplished differently in
the two systems. In the mystical cult, the individual member of the group had
a more direct experience of the divine through the senses, especially through
the sense of sight in the case of Demeter’s mysteries at Eleusis (Burkert 1986;
Riedweg 1987). As she starts this last part of her speech, the very heart of her
teachings on erotics, Diotima begins to draw on the language of sight, and of
initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries:
Even you, Socrates, might be incorporated (muetheies) into
these erotic rites (erotika). But as for the initiatory rites and the
higher grade of rites (telea and epoptika)—the reason why even
the erotic rites exist for those who go through them correctly—I
do not know if you could do it. (209e5–210a2)
Diotima here implies that the earlier part of her speech (201–209) that had
included the myth of the birth of Eros was a sort of elementary initiation
(muesis). Like the Eleusinian initiation in the Telesterion, her earlier lesson
had been a ritual that incorporated Socrates into an esoteric group that
shared specific knowledge about the religious significance of Eros, sexuality,
and birth. Diotima says this initiation is relatively simple: “even you, kai su,
could do it, Socrates” (209e5). One as newly schooled as Socrates (or Agathon
in the outer narrative), who had only just recently believed Eros to be a great
god, could grasp first that Eros is not a god, but a daimon and a philosopher
who mediates between human and divine. Even a new initiate could compre-
hend that birth in the beautiful is also a form of mediation between human
and divine.
But Diotima will now continue to the higher level of initiation into the
mysteries of love (ta erotika), namely the view of Being, or the epoptika. Diotima
extends the metaphor of an engendering class of mortals by combining language
of birth, sexuality, and humans with language of Eleusinian mystical experience.
Diotima claims that the human ability to engender true virtue in the presence
of the beautiful is what brings the human into an Eleusinian proximity with
the divine (212a1). These are the initiatory rites and the higher grade of rites
(telea and epoptika) that constitute the height of Diotima’s speech on love; they
lead the way to the vision of Being at the top of a ladder from which the initiate
may look down upon the vision of Beauty itself. In her higher grade of visionary
rites (epoptika), Diotima teaches that as the lover loves the beloved, and looks
upon him or her, the lover also learns to recognize the beauty of one person
18 Hypatia

in the beauty of another, and next the beauty of another in the beauty of all.
Gazing at the beloved leads the lover to gaze at all creation.
Plato’s use of visual language in this passage is particularly effective because
it capitalizes on the meanings of seeingg that are both sensory and cognitive.17
When one truly sees the beloved, one sees—one intellectually grasps and
knows—that all instances of beauty can be conceived of as similar. These
higher grades of rites of Diotima’s lesson in erotics are given the same name as
the most advanced stage of initiation into Demeter’s mystery rites at Eleusis:
the epoptika. Plato’s fourth-century audience would have immediately made
the connection between Diotima’s rites of love (erotika) and Demeter’s rites
of initiation (mustika) when they heard Diotima mention her higher grades of
initiation (epoptika) and their rituals of sight. Epoptika, derived from the verb
that means “look upon,” has no other meaning in classical Greek outside of the
meanings uniquely attached to the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Discussing Plato’s use of visual metaphors, Nancy Tuana and William Cowl-
ing (1994, 251) have argued that “the association of knowledge and vision pro-
vides a model of knowledge as disembodied.” I would counter that a fuller and
more nuanced understanding of Plato’s cultural context leads us to the opposite
conclusion. Greek culture of the fifth century provided many opportunities to
learn by watching and doing. As Aristotle wrote when describing the sights
one viewed at the Eleusinian Mysteries, “to experience (physically) is to learn”
(pathein mathein, fragment 15). Vision was central not simply to the learning
experienced at the Mysteries, but also to such institutions as the Athenian
drama that reached its height in Plato’s youth. Even the word theory, which for
us today has the most abstract and disembodied meaning, in the fourth century
had quite a concrete meaning: it meant to travel as a pilgrim to a religious site
to see (theaomai) things related to the gods and to the sacred realm. The genius
of Plato lay in borrowing such common terms from ritual practice and then
adapting them to his philosophical project.
In addition to these metaphors of sight in Diotima’s epoptika, there is also
language in the ascent passage of leading someone through a complex process.
The initiate into Diotima’s rites is led by someone else who knows the way and
is able to lead rightly (ho hegoumenos, 210a6–7). In Diotima’s telea, the initiate
is at first led passively, is taught to love the body and beauty of another person,
and, through the process, ultimately perceives and considers abstract beauty
in all bodies (210b3). Diotima here plays on the meaning of the word hegeomai,
a verb that means “lead,” as well as “think, consider.” The word play here is
subtle, but indicates an important shift. In the first instance, the one leading
the initiate (ho hegoumenos) is the grammatical subject: the leader conducts the
initiate lover through the rites of love (210a6–7). But once the initiate lover
recognizes that the beauty of one is akin to the beauty of others, it is the initi-
ate who becomes the subject (210b3; 210b6, 7). With this switch of subject, the
 Nancy Evans 19

meaning of hegeomai slips, and instead of meaning “lead” as it did at 210a6 and
7, in 210b it means “think, consider.” The leader drops out after a certain point,
and the initiate continues alone the journey to the vision of true Being.
Significantly, the passive language of being led had more than these two
sets of meanings on which Diotima played. Like the sense of sight, the passive
experience of being conducted through the unknown was a key component for
those experiencing the Mysteries at Eleusis (Foley 1994; Burkert 1986). Each
first-time initiate had a mystagogue who led her or him through the experience
of the rites (telea) at Eleusis. The epoptika (210a) constituted the advanced level
in the Eleusinian initiations, a level attainable only for those who attended
the festival more than once and were therefore prepared to “look upon” the
proceedings with an added awareness. In Diotima’s rites of love, one is led to an
experience as one is led to the vision of the mysteries at Eleusis. Both revelations,
the Eleusinian and the Platonic, are notably passive; one is brought by a familiar
and trusted person to the specific spot where learning about the divine can take
place. Just as Demeter first initiated the Eleusinians, and each Eleusinian initi-
ate (mustes) had a mystagogue, so Diotima serves as a mystagogue for Socrates,
and, by extension, Socrates serves as mystagogue for the others at Agathon’s
symposium, and even for us. When the more advanced epoptai and the first-
time Eleusinian initiates (mustai), accompanied by their mystagogues, all met
together into the Telesterion on the night of the Mysteries, all saw something
that forever changed their conception of the world and their place in it. The
experience at Eleusis was something above all intensely visual, and certainly
passive. The initiates (mustai), the mystagogues, and the watchers (epoptai)
took part in the Eleusinian rites, and saw something that took the terror out
of human mortality. Likewise with Diotima’s initiation of Socrates.
In Diotima’s ascent to Being (to on), when an individual mortal has been
correctly led and taught, he or she can now look upon love correctly and view
Beauty. The initiate finally sees divine Being itself in its most pure and divine
form (theion, 211e1–3). When the final rites and most advanced mysteries (the
epopteia) are revealed in 211d8–e4, Diotima returns to the concepts of the ear-
lier part of her speech. She goes back to speak about “birth in the beautiful,”
combining the mystical language of sight with the notion that the human can
give birth to true virtue.
For one who looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can
be seen—only then will it become possible for him to give birth
(tiktein) not to images of virtue—because he’s in touch with no
images—but to true virtue—because he is in touch with true
Beauty. And being theophiles (god-loved/god-loving) belongs
to anyone who has given birth to true virtue and nourished it,
and if any human being could become immortal, it would be
this one. (212a)
20 Hypatia

In the end, Diotima teaches that although being human has limits, the limits of
mortality can almost disappear for those who choose to view the philosophical
vision of Being made possible by initiation into the highest level of her erotic
rites. Diotima suggests two outcomes for mortals who make the journey and
devote their mortal lives to this pursuit: the individual will give birth to true
virtue, and such a birth would make the human divine (if it were at all possible
for that boundary to be crossed). Just as engendering children and writing laws
and poems had earlier been discussed as activities that mediate between the
individual mortal and the collective immortal, so too engendering virtue is a
type of mediation. But there is more; engendering virtue after viewing Being
puts one into a new relation with the divine; one becomes theophiles, both loving
the divine and beloved of the divine.18 This type of mutuality did not exist in
the conventional religious relationship maintained by polis sacrifice, or in the
conventional sexual and social relationships that kept male and female, active
and passive, citizen and slave sharply separate from one another. But the pos-
sibilities for egalitarianism and mutuality are suggested in the metaphor of the
Eleusinian Mysteries.
Although Diotima’s teaching is partially couched in terms of homoerotic
love of boys (211b5), her rhetoric at the end returns to the purpose of Eros for
humans regardless of gender (anthropoi 211e2, 212a1, b7; thnetes; 211e3). The
homoerotic context of the dialogue signifies relationships of dominance and
submission, activity and passivity among Greek male aristocrats (Halperin
1990; Winkler 1990; Price 1989; Dover 1980, 1978). Diotima, as a good teacher,
uses examples that are familiar to her homoerotic audience while not rejecting
heterosexuality as inferior (Pender 1992; Nye 1990, 142; Brown 1988). But by
evoking the unique language of Eleusinian mystical experience, Diotima indi-
cates that the context is not simply homoerotic. She teaches that the experience
of loving correctly is the experience of being initiated correctly, and relearning
subject/object relations.
Loving boys was one example of the social and cultural definition of the
erotic object who submits to the will of the citizen male, much the same way
that all mortals submit to the will and commands of the immortal gods in
conventional Greek religion. But for that anthropos who enters into a mutual
relationship with the true Being and becomes theophiles, god-loved and god-
loving, that familiar pattern of domination and submission vanishes. Diotima
teaches that the mortal individual, anthropos (212a1, b7), who enters into a
mutual relationship with the divine will give birth to and nurture virtue, nearly
becoming immortal (athanatos, 212b7) him/herself.
As Demeter the goddess had given birth to and nurtured Persephone, and
as an old woman after Persephone’s rape had nurtured Demophoon at Eleusis
in the household of King Celeus, so Diotima teaches that the goal of love is
to be pregnant, give birth to, and ultimately nurture something divine. In the
 Nancy Evans 21

ascent passage, Plato is not appropriating for men the female capacity for pro-
creation; rather, he “locates philosophy in the realm of love, nurturance, and
procreation” (Brown 1988, 607). The specifically female activities of giving birth
and nurturing—activities highlighted in the Eleusinian Mysteries—are thus
the very faculties that allow any human to communicate with the divine in a
more mutual fashion. This, the final revelation of Diotima’s rites, is the goal of
love, the telos of Diotima’s telea and epoptika. Truth lies in the recognition of
the essentially divine nature of Being and Beauty, and the possibility of this
recognition is rendered familiar and concrete by an analogy with the widely
known rites of Demeter at Eleusis.

The Drama of the Mother and Daughter

It is of more than passing interest that Plato chose to write about an encounter
with Being in the language of the Eleusinian Mysteries, and chose to attribute
this didactic speech about “the rites of love” to a foreign woman with prophetic
skills. Commentators have long noted the presence of Eleusinian language in
Diotima’s speech, and they acknowledge the “mysterious” influence of the reli-
gious metaphor. Some have viewed Diotima’s speech as the locus for Plato’s own
personal views on religion, claiming that Plato places a speech full of mystical
language in the mouth of a woman because there is something inherently more
“feminine” about religious experience (Bury 1932, xl, 193). Scholars who have
completely dismissed this idea and think of Diotima as being separate from
Plato are unable to account for the religious elements in the dialogue (Halperin
1990, 127). Feminist scholars who work with the dialogue have displayed little
interest in the full range of religious language, while the historians of religion
who study it have had little interest in readings that account for the significance
of female experience. But Eleusinian language cannot be pushed aside. Writing
about Eleusis and its influence on Greek culture, Sarah Pomeroy has remarked,
“One may well be astounded at the appeal that a unique religion centering
on a mother and daughter held for the Athenians” (Pomeroy 1975, 77). Such
a statement of surprise by a classical scholar of the twentieth century reveals
perhaps more about us moderns than about the ancient Greeks. Yet, truly, why
should we be surprised? Worship of Demeter had existed independently for
centuries in Attica, Plato’s home. It is perhaps a modern preoccupation with
the male experience of Greek religion and male citizens’ roles and functions
in cult practices—even mystical cult practices—that leads scholars to express
surprise when they realize the impact that female experience could have had
on Greek culture.19
The experience of separation and mortality, and the interplay of separa-
tion, mortality, reunion, and revelation as expressed in the myth and rituals of
Eleusinian Demeter and Persephone, challenged the hierarchical structures of
22 Hypatia

conventional animal sacrifice. The Eleusinian Mysteries offered the individual

mortal a direct, but not totally unmediated, view of the divine. Instead of
watching political officials and priests communicate with the gods, initiates,
regardless of gender or civil status, saw the divine through the Mother and
Daughter drama. Each initiate took part in a ritual that commemorated the
reunion of mother and daughter after an experience of rupturing violence and
symbolic death. Eleusinian teletai, or rites, pointed to a goal, an experience
that fulfilled or completed what it meant to be human in the classical Greek
cosmos. It was the antithesis of divine/human, not male/female, that conveyed
meaning to those who participated in Demeter’s ancient cult at Eleusis (Foley
1994, 84). Eleusinian initiates witnessed and contemplated a divine drama based
on the particularly female experience of birth, sexual maturation, separation,
giving birth and nurturing, and finally reunion. By repeatedly returning in
the Symposium to language of mysteries (teletai), birth, nurturing, and Eleusis,
Plato thus gave individual humans the power to reimagine the role of eros in
human life.
With Eleusis in the mythic and cultic background, Plato borrowed Eleusin-
ian images and language to express a new vision of the divine that redefined
Being—that abstract, unitary concept—as that which is divine. A woman is
depicted as teaching young male initiates about reality. Encountering what is
divine happens in the context of loving and nurturing another person. Encoun-
tering reality and falling in love are like being initiated into Eleusis; those
who love correctly are like Eleusinian initiates, to whom a particular esoteric
knowledge about the human and divine was revealed. In the end, relation-
ships and concepts of domination give way to new visions of a more mutual
relationship between human and human, and human and divine. Conventional
distinctions collapse when one takes love step by step and truly “sees” Being,
as one saw the drama of divine Mother and Daughter, Demeter and Kore, at
Eleusis. Some modern scholars of Plato’s Symposium have commented that in
Diotima’s speech the spiritual and male replaces that which is feminine and
corporeal (Nye 1989; Freeman 1986). But as modern readers we need to real-
ize that the discussion we see as becoming increasingly abstract and removed
from the body for the classical Greek audience was actually moving closer to a
very familiar ritual—closer to a profoundly physical and experiential form of
knowledge (Nye 1989, 46).
Although Plato may have encouraged others to follow him and think new
thoughts, he still was a product of late fifth- and fourth-century Athens, and
as such, he reflects the history, values, biases, and cultural language common
among his contemporary Athenians. Plato’s inclusion of Eleusinian language
of the mysteries of Demeter is best understood in this light, for it shows both
the limitations of Athenian culture and society, and one person’s visionary
ability to imagine a world not so limited. Eleusinian initiates relived, from a
 Nancy Evans 23

woman’s perspective, the experience of temporary separation from the divine

and the temporary reunion. Esoteric knowledge of the myth of the Mother and
Daughter was transferred to the individual, both female and male, and became
a valuable knowledge of the mortal self. The vision of the possible human
relationship with the divine held in common among Eleusinian initiates into
the rites of Demeter contradicted the dominant vision apparent elsewhere in
Attica, and in other Greek city-states. This essay has argued that the singular
experience of the goddess Demeter and of her rites celebrated yearly in Eleusis
helped lead Plato to imagine anew the possibilities for a mutual encounter of
the self and the larger cosmos. As Demeter was, perhaps, Plato’s mystagogue to
the highest mysteries at Eleusis, his imagination later created Diotima, another
mystagogue who initiates Socrates, those present at Agathon’s symposium that
night, and also us.

Notes

Editions of the Symposium refer to R. G. Bury’s 1909/1932 Cambridge edition (with

notes and commentary), John Burnet’s 1901 OCT, and K. J. Dover’s 1980 Cambridge
text with commentary. All translations of the Greek are my own.
1. The Greek expression is to on, “the being,” a phrase used by Socrates repeatedly
in the “ascent passage” (Symposium 207–212), to be discussed below. Throughout this
essay, I will be translating to on as “Being,” although this does not quite capture the full
meaning of the neuter substantive participle.
2. Wendy Brown has made a similar claim about Plato’s “gendered discourse on
epistemology,” arguing that Plato criticizes “socially male modes of thinking, speaking
and acting” (Brown 1988, 594). In particular, Brown looks at the Republic and the
personification of truth as female.
3. Ta mustikaa and ta musteriaa are what fifth- and fourth-century Greeks called these
rites (for example, Thucydides 6.60). Ta mustika literally means “the mystic things,” or
the rites associated with choosing to join a voluntary initiatory group; ta musteria is
often translated as Mysteries, or the mystery religions. Initiatory, elective groups included
many forms of worship (including rites of Demeter or Dionysos) of the Great Mother
(Anatolian Cybele), and Orphic and Bacchic rites. For a fuller discussion, see Walter
Burkert 1986. Initiates into the mystery religions did not achieve a type of immortality
in the later, Christian sense of immortality.
4. The ritual in the Telesterion constituted the Greater Mysteries. Earlier in the
summer, something known as the Lesser Mysteries were celebrated in Athens; these
were perhaps a sort of preliminary rite of purification for the mustai.
5. The presence of religious language still baffles and sometimes even hinders
many contemporary scholars of Plato. To give a very recent example, Christopher
Rowe (1998, 244) in an otherwise careful and insightful essay on the nature of Eros in
Diotima’s speech, discusses the telea and epoptika in the ascent passage at great length,
24 Hypatia

but never once mentions Demeter or the Mysteries. David Konstan’s response (1998,
265–66) draws attention to this oversight in Rowe’s argument, and suggests that fail-
ing to see the connection between the ascent passage and the Mysteries limits Rowe’s
understanding of the dialogue.
6. The outermost narrative also indicates that Socrates is still alive, so it takes place
prior to 399 bce. We date Agathon’s victory at the Lenaea to January 416 (Athenaeus
217a–b), shortly before the Athenians launched the expedition against the Sicilians
and shortly before the infamous sacrilege of the Eleusinian Mysteries and the mutila-
tion of the herms (Thucydides 6.28, 6.53–61). At least two of the men present at this
symposium, Alcibiades and Phaedrus, were implicated in one or both of these crimes.
Martha Nussbaum (1986, 171) has argued convincingly that a fourth-century audience
would have believed Phaedrus and Alcibiades guilty of both mutilating the herms and
profaning the mysteries—even though Alcibiades was never officially found guilty of
both charges.
7. Some think she is referring to the plague of 430, known also from Thucydides
2.47 ff. Bury (1932) thinks Diotima is a complete fiction, and doesn’t even discuss the
date of her conversation with Socrates, but does, oddly, discuss the historicity of the
plague. See also Dover 1980, 138. I do not believe the plague reference is entirely reli-
able as evidence on which to date the time of Diotima’s alleged visit to Athens or on
which to affirm her historicity, as some have tried to do. Diotima must have dramatic
relevance, and her historical context must be completely plausible to the Athenian audi-
ence. As David Halperin wrote (1990, 180): “The pertinent issue for the interpreter is
not whether Diotima existed, but what it is Plato accomplishes by introducing her, and
that is not an issue whose resolution depends on Diotima’s historical authenticity.”
8. Their definition of love based on lack relies on the repetitions of the genitive
case. I am myself not wholly convinced by their argument, but for the dramatic pur-
poses of the dialogue, the logic of the argument does not matter. Commentators have
traditionally understood the grammar of all these genitives as “genitives of separation.”
For critiques of the logic of the argumentation based on the genitive of separation, see
Freeman 1986, Nussbaum 1986, and Price 1989. But as Thalia Pandiri has pointed out
to me, English speakers may intrinsically miss the point of what the genitive case meant
for Greek speakers, who may not have understood each and every use of the genitives
so narrowly as separative.
9. This reading of Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium challenges some earlier
feminist philosophical readings of the dialogue, such as Elizabeth V. Spelman (1994, 98)
who argues that “the love of men for women has been referred to—by Diotima among
others—without challenge as vulgar and unmanly.” I will return to this point below.
10. Note all the forms of anthropos in Aristophanes speech: 189c4, 189d1, 2, 5,
8, 189e5, 190c5, 8, 190d7, 190e5, 191d1, 3, 4, and 192d4. The notion that the cat-
egory ‘human’ includes both female and male is as old as Homer (for example, Iliad
9.132–4).
11. Andrea Nye makes an interesting and quite persuasive case for taking the dative
auto(i) in 204d5 as a dative of interest, rather than a dative of possession, thus removing
any idea of ‘possession’ from the discussion of the goals of love. In her understanding
of gignesthai auto(i), lovers want the beautiful to “happen to them” or “come to be for
them” (Nye 1990, 139).
 Nancy Evans 25

12. Examples of kueo meaning “conceive” or “be pregnant” are found in Hesiod
Theogony 405; Iliad 19.117, 23.266; Herodotus 5.92. The causal meaning “impregnate”
that applies to the male is attested in the aorist tense in Aeschylus fr. 44 (a fragment
from the Danaids). The fact that the aorist is causal makes sense: the simple aspect of the
aorist tense denotes the male role in procreation. When the aorist tense takes a female
subject, it means “conceive,” while the present tense with female subject means “be
pregnant.” In this text, consider its aorist use at 203c1, ekuese, with Penia as subject.
13. In Homer, tikto is used of both men and women: of men, for example, Iliad 2.628,
6.155 of Phyleus and Glaucus; of women, for example, Iliad 16.180, 22.428 of Polymele
and Hecuba. Gennao is the causal form of gignomai, become, be born. See, for example,
Sophocles Electra 1412.
14. This philological observation controverts Halperin’s conclusion (1990, 117–20).
Nye’s careful reading (1989, 55) reaches the same conclusion that I do (namely that
engendering is not an exclusively feminine activity for Diotima) even without the
philological analysis. I do not follow E. E. Pender’s 1992 reading of the text on this point:
she begins her argument by defining this type of pregnancy in 206c as an example of
exclusive “male pregnancy.” I argue otherwise, especially given the use of this language
in Aristophanes’ speech earlier. As for the English word parents, note that it is exactly
analogous to tekontes: parents comes from the Latin nominative plural participle of pareo,
“produce, bear.”
15. For a provocative and enlightening interpretation of the language of pregnancy
and birth in Plato see Pender 1992, which discusses the language of “spiritual pregnancy”
in the Symposium in great detail. Pender does not discuss any religious dimensions of
this birth language in the dialogue, nor does she explore the full meaning of anthropos
in connection with ideas of pregnancy.
16. The verb here in 209a1 is kouousin, again from kueo, to bear, engender, produce.
Note the amount of birth language in 209: forms of kueo; (209a1, a2, b1, b5, c3), tikto
(209a3, b2, c3), and gennao; (209b2, b4, c3). Most all of these refer to people pregnant in
soul. Also note the forms of anthropoi at 209b4, d1, e4. The frequency of birth language
here in 209 nearly matches that in 206.
17. There is a link between see and know in Greek, through the root id—as evi-
denced in eidon and oida. Consider all the verbs of seeing in this passage: katide (210d7),
katopsetai (210e4), kathoran (211b6), and katidein (211e4), all forms of kathorao.
18. See Dover’s remark (1980, 159): “in a relation of mutual philia with the gods.”
Compare this also with Diotima’s name (Zeus-loving, beloved-of-Zeus) as discussed
above. Luce Irigaray (1989, 43–44) argues the opposite of this, namely that Love’s
intermediary role, defined so well in the first half of Diotima’s speech, is eclipsed in the
ascent passage, as love becomes a means to a goal or object, or telos. I disagree. The
noun telos had many meanings, some of them related to cult practices. The network of
religious language in this passage is too dense to be ignored, and it would be a mistake
to reduce telos and telea to narrow or ahistorical understandings. Pender (1992, 85)
discusses this passage in excellent detail and focuses on the metaphorical meanings
but does not explore how religious metaphors inform the meaning.
19. In a similar vein, consider Nye (1989, 53): “In historical context, then, it is
neither surprising nor anomalous that Diotima would appear in the authoritative role
as the teacher of Socrates. As prophetess/ priestess she was part of a religious order that
26 Hypatia

had maintained its authority from Minoan/Mycenaean times.” This is only partially
true at Eleusis for the worship of Demeter; modern scholars have discredited claims of
continuity between the classical age and the Mycenaean age (Evans 2002, 231).

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