Diotima of Mantinea

Jadwiga Łuszczewska, who used the pen name Diotima, posing as the ancient sage in a painting by Józef Simmler, 1855

Diotima of Mantinea is a female seer who plays an important role in Plato's Symposium. Her ideas are the origin of the concept of Platonic love. Since our only source concerning her is Plato, we cannot be certain whether she was a real historical personage or merely a fictional creation. However, nearly all of the characters named in Plato's dialogues have been found to correspond to real people living in ancient Athens.^[1]

Role in Symposium

In Plato's Symposium a series of men at an all-male party discuss the meaning of love. Socrates is the most important speaker. He says that in his youth he was taught "the philosophy of love" by Diotima, who was a seer or priestess. Socrates also claims that Diotima successfully postponed the plague of Athens.

Diotima gives Socrates a genealogy of love, stating that he is the son of "resource and need." In her view, love is not delicate, but beggarly and harsh. He sleeps in doorways, and is a master of artifice and deception (203d). The beloved boy is delicate, she says, but the old lover looking for the boy is poor but resourceful and manipulative (204c).

It is hinted that Diotima's thesis about love is that it is a longing for immortality (207a,b). The instinct to breed that you observe in animals and men who are attracted to women is an expression of this. She says that every one of us longs for endless fame, but that the wise know the difference between bodily and spiritual procreation (209a). Socrates says that he learns from her that it is far better for men and boys to give birth to ideas than to children. Physical love is second to spiritual love, because the goal of spiritual love is to give birth to ideas. Ultimately love helps us to ascend to knowledge of the divine.

Identity of Diotima

Diotima's name means "honoured by God". Plato was thought by most 19th and early 20th century scholars to have based Diotima on Aspasia, the mistress of Pericles, so impressed was he by her intelligence and wit. This question is far from resolved, however. Since Aspasia appears under her own name in Plato's dialogue Menexenus some scholars have argued convincingly that Plato did not use false names, and that therefore Diotima is a historical figure.^[2]

Use of her name

Her name has often been used as a moniker for philosophical or artistic projects, journals, essays, etc.:

• Polish writer Jadwiga Łuszczewska (1834-1908) used the pen name Diotima (Deotyma).
• German poet Friedrich Hölderlin used the pen name Diotima as a moniker for Susette Borkenstein Gontard, who inspired him to write Hyperion. In this work, the fictitious first-person author Hyperion addresses letters to his friends Bellarmin and Diotima.
• Italian composer Luigi Nono used her name as part of the title in one of his most important works, the string quartet: "Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima", including quotations from Hölderlins letters to Diotima from Hyperion in the work.
• Diotima is one of the main female protagonists in The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil

Notes

1. ^ Ruby Blondell The Play of Character in Plato's Dialogues, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p.31
2. ^ Wider, Kathleen. "Women philosophers in the Ancient Greek World: Donning the Mantle". Hypatia vol 1 no 1 Spring 1986. Part of her argument focuses on the point that all scholars who argued 'for' a fictitious Diotima were male, and most used as a starting point Smith's (Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, 1870) uncertainty of her actual existence.

Bibliography

• Navia, Luis E., Socrates, the man and his philosophy, pp. 30, 171. University Press of America ISBN 0-8191-4854-7.]