Ancient & Modern | 14 November 2009

Socrates once met such a girl, Theodote. A stunning beauty — everyone wanted to paint her — she admitted that she came by her wealth through her ability to persuade ‘friends’ to be generous to her. At this Socrates pointed out that, great beauty though she was, it was above all her mind that made all the difference, enabling her to talk attractively and build relationships with her ‘friends’ on the basis of creature kindness and mutual pleasure.

Perhaps that is not quite the career that the Cambridge stunners have in mind, but Socrates might still approve, on more philosophical grounds. Returning from military service, he goes to the wrestling ground to see ‘if any young man has become pre-eminent in wisdom or beauty or both’. The free expression of such an interest would certainly land him in the courts today, but it was taken for granted in classical Greece that both mind and body needed training, and Socrates — or his ghost-writer Plato — placed a high premium on the role of physical beauty.

As Plato explains in his Symposium, the erotic is the most important blessing of all. For erôs is driven by love for something, and in this case it is love for the beautiful — male or female, in the first instance. Fulfilling that experience itself gives man his first taste of the transcendent, a longing for something beyond the earthly, especially as erôs leads to physical procreation and thus immortality through one’s children or, in same-sex relationships, spiritual procreation, producing immortal thoughts. This engenders a growing desire for yet closer union with immortality, which will take man beyond the physical world into an abstract world of ultimate, unchanging reality.