#simposio

Lo struggente richiamo di quell'essere perduto,

il desiderio di tornare a un solo cielo:

questo è il nome sacro dell'Amore»

(Platone, Simposio - Discorso di Aristofane, in particolare 192e-193a)

Infants begin to see by noticing the edges of things. How do they know an edge is an edge? By passionately wanting it not to be. The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general. It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is.

Like Sappho’s adjective glukupikron, the moment of desire is one that defies proper edge, being a compound of opposites forced together at pressure. Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person.

The locus classicus for this view of desire is the speech of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. Here Aristophanes accounts for the nature of human eros by means of a fantastic anthropology (189d-93d). Human beings were originally round organisms, each composed of two people joined together as one perfect sphere. These rolled about everywhere and were exceedingly happy. But the spherical creatures grew overambitious, thinking to roll right up to Olympus, so Zeus chopped each of them in two. As a result everyone must now go through life in search of the one and only other person who can round him out again. “Sliced in two like a flatfish,” says Aristophanes, “each of us is perpetually hunting for the matching half of himself” (191d).

Most people find something disturbingly lucid and true in Aristophanes’ image of lovers as people cut in half. All desire is for a part of oneself gone missing, or so it feels to the person in love. Aristophanes’ myth justifies that feeling, in typical Greek fashion, by blaming the whole situation on Zeus. But Aristophanes is a comic poet. We might look, for a more serious exegesis, to more serious lovers. A feature of their reasoning will at once strike us. It is outrageous.

L'amore, quindi, diventa il desiderio di ricomporre l'unità originaria, di ritrovare la propria anima gemella. Questa ricerca di completezza è spesso espressa con la metafora della "mezza mela": ogni persona è una metà di un tutto, e solo trovando l'altra metà si può raggiungere la vera felicità e realizzazione.

La modernità dei Greci

L'ottusità dei "Moderni" !

Cultura del vino en el Mediterráneo helenístico

La cultura de beber vino se disfrutaba en todo el mundo mediterráneo, y lo que es cierto ahora también lo era en la antigüedad: el vino siempre es un buen negocio. El período helenístico (en torno a 335-30 a.C.), entre Alejandro Magno y Cleopatra VII, fue testigo de la expansión de las relaciones comerciales en un área en constante crecimiento, poniendo a regiones distantes en contacto directo o indirecto entre sí. A través de rutas comerciales de larga distancia, mercancías del noroeste de Europa, Oriente Medio, Arabia, India y Asia central llegaban al Mediterráneo. Por primera vez en la historia, incluso los productos chinos llegaron al Mediterráneo, lo que sentó las bases de la Ruta de la Seda. Desde artículos de lujo hasta alimentos, se intercambiaban productos en una sociedad de consumo en rápido desarrollo. Piense en gemas preciosas, oro y plata, hierbas y especias, perfumes y aceites, seda y lino, elefantes y esclavos, cereales como el trigo, la escanda y el arroz, el aceite de oliva y la salsa de pescado, el pergamino y el papiro, la cerveza y el vino.