On passion and starvation in middle-period Plato.

Not sure yet what to make of thus, but I noticed today that Plato's two sustained examinations of rhetoric and love -- the Symposium and the Phaedrus, both thought to date from his Middle Period -- both contain myths in which groups of people die out through becoming so absorbed in some other activity that they forget to eat.

In Aristophanes's speech in the Symposium, the people Zeus has split in two, frantically seeking reunion with their other halves, languish in each other's embrace until they die of hunger. Now Zeus has already expressed his commitment to keeping the human race viable, so as to continue receiving the gifts and sacrifices only people lavish upon gods. So he changes the way humans reproduce: earlier, we had "spilled seed in the ground ... like cicadas," but now he has made us reproduce sexually (like the Greek gods themselves); so that our natural yearning to be joined with each other will not stifle but promote the continuation of the species. Fascinating myth, brilliant speech, mysteriously placed in Aristophanes's mouth, often taken to be very romantic (as in the linked clip from "Hedwig and the Angry Inch," which do check out if you're unfamiliar). Comic -- really, farcical -- and mournful at once, silly and profound. Further intriguing for its stubbornness in BOTH tying sex to reproduction AND insisting that procreation is posterior to the main point of love -- and continues so past the origin story, for there were three sexes originally -- man-man, woman-woman, and man-woman -- and only people split from the last of them perpetuate the species without further activity, but their love is not the more valuable for it. (The others are satisfied with the "fullness" or "completeness" (πλησμονή) of reunion.) And premised on the idea that people can en masse become so involved in other things that they forget to eat, indefinitely.

The relevant bit of Phaedrus is shorter and simpler: there once was a group of people who -- existing before the Muses had come into being -- had never heard song. But when the Muses arrived, they were so enraptured that they spent quite all of their time in song, forgetting to eat and drink and "they did not even notice as they died." They were changed to cicadas, who sing all day and do not need to eat or drink; and now they praise the Muses constantly after their own fashion.

In both stories gods transform and preserve human beings, in both stories seeking humans' prayers, sacrifice, and praise. In both stories cicadas appear. In both stories an entire group of people is overcome and then consumed by a shared passion. I'm certain that's important, that they aren't like Narcissus gazing at his reflection until he pales and shrinks and fades into a flower by a lake. In both stories the passion grows in response to major changes in their circumstances: devastating, destabilizing loss and the introduction of art, respectively. Neither is affirmed as such; the first story is in Aristophanes's mouth, the second Socrates tells Phaedrus, as a myth, in a complete digression of less than obvious purpose. I don't know what it means.