Antiquity Studies

Socrates in Love (Herodicus Suppl. Hell. 495)

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Abstract

This paper considers two surviving extracts from a hexameter poem in which Socrates apparently narrated the story of his love for Alcibiades and Aspasia’s role in the pursuit of the young man. The author of the poem was very likely Herodicus (second century BC), known for other anti-Platonic writings. The paper considers some of the linguistic and textual problems of the fragments, the probable structure of the poem as a whole, the debt of the work to Plato and Aeschines, and the importance of Socratic literature more generally to the development of erotodidactic themes in later poetry.


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Submitted: May 17, 2021 | Accepted: June 23, 2021 | Published Dec. 16, 2021 | Language: en

Keywords Alcibiades • Athenaeus • Plato • Herodicus • Erotodidaxis • Xenophon • Aeschines • Socrates • Aspasia

Copyright © 2021 Richard Hunter. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.30687/978-88-6969-548-3/019


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