Revisiting Delphi

Libertarian Papers

Contents:

Goddess Tyrant: A Study in Erotic Despotism by Isabel Willson on Apple Books

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Goddess Tyrant: A Study in Erotic Despotism by Isabel Willson on Apple Books

Would you like us to take another look at this review? Plato casts Glaucon, his elder brother, 75 in the role of Solon, the father of Athenian democracy, in order to destroy the political tyranny that Solon created and the spiritual enslavement from which he suffered. Thus Solon wrote that:. While riches change their owner every day. What Solon neglected to say, however, was that his own statecraft allowed the wicked to prosper, the righteous to starve, and riches to exchange owners. Solon hid his injustice behind spellbinding sophistry in which words meant their opposite.

In a calculated attempt to obscure his personal stake in eliminating debts, Solon purported to be the first to comply with his own law by forgiving a loan of five talents. They promptly took advantage of this confidence and anticipated the decree by borrowing large sums from the rich and buying up big estates. Then, when the decree was published, they went on enjoying the use of their property but refused to pay their creditors. Whereas Solon dishonestly diluted Athenian coins, Socrates refuses to exchange gold for bronze.

Just as, under conditions of imposed equality, bad money drives out good, Socrates warns that the city will come to ruin if natural social hierarchies are leveled, placing the corrupt on equal standing with the virtuous.

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Eliminating debts, Solon sowed the social strife upon which the state thrives. Similarly, by debasing the currency, Solon encouraged avarice and appetitive indulgence, thereby debasing the spiritual values that resist encroachments by political authority. Just as debased alloys displaced genuine silver, depraved lust displaced civilized self-restraint as the coin of the realm, with disastrous consequences for Athenian liberty. In order to deflect attention from his own debasement, Solon resorted to another poetic perversion of the language, cloaking his law discharging debts in liberationist rhetoric.

A debtor who defaulted on such a loan became a slave to his creditor. Fearing the whims of their masters, I set free. But abolishing slavery was simply rhetorical camouflage for recasting it in a more insidious form. Solon did away with debt slavery for the sake of unleashing a slavery of the passions.

Solon made sex slaves, literally, by founding tax-funded brothels in which the state owned the prostitutes, forcing them to sell their bodies and even fixing the price at which they did so. But you found a law for the use of all men; for you, they say, Solon, were the first to see this—a thing democratic, Zeus is my witness, and salutary yes, it is fitting that I should say this, Solon ; seeing our city full of young men, seeing, too, that they were under the compulsion of nature, and that they went their erring way in a direction they should not, purchased and stationed women in various quarters, equipped and ready for all alike.

They stand in nakedness, lest you be deceived; take a look at everything. Perhaps you are not feeling quite up to your form; maybe you have something that distresses you. But their door stands open. Price, one obol; hop in! There isn't a bit of prudishness or nonsense, nor does she snatch herself away; but straight to it, as you wish and in whatever way you wish. You come out; you can tell her to go hang, she is nothing to you. More figuratively, Solon made sex slaves of all Athenians by encouraging the unbridled indulgence of eros.

Knowing that intemperance leads to tyranny, he sought to enshrine pederasty, his own personal vice, as civic virtue. The slave master takes a naturally independent man and infantilizes him into dependency; the pederast takes a naturally dependent child and mis treats him as a free adult. Both the slave master and the pederast give themselves over to the desire to oppress the powerless, only to find themselves beholden to a merciless spiritual bondage.

As the festivities commence, Agathon, an effeminate, cross-dressing pederast, releases his slaves, inviting them to behave as if they were his masters. The unequal parts that properly rule and are ruled, the higher and the lower, are instead treated equally…. In Republic , Glaucon, playing the role of Solon, embodies the psychic disturbance common to both pederasty and political ambition. Like Solon and Agathon , Glaucon is a boy-loving politician who employs linguistic legerdemain to conceal his lust for power. Addressing the aspiring tyrant, Socrates rebukes him for his insatiable appetite for young boys: By indulging his hunger for young flesh, Glaucon would encourage the city to gorge itself on meat.

More precisely, the implication is that Solon, founder of the democratic feast, cannibalized the demos.

Isabel Willson

The revolution eats its children. Socrates suggests as much when he recounts the myth of the Lycean Zeus, whose worshippers sacrificed men to their god. He banishes some, kills others, and drops hints to the people about the cancellation of debts and the redistribution of land. As Socrates demonstrates, Solon inflamed the passions of the people in order to slake his own blood lust. Before Solon seized power, Athenians had suffered incalculable death and debt in a vain attempt to conquer the island of Salamis.

Solon composed and performed an elegaic battle hymn, persuading Athenians to resume their war for Salamis, under his command. Cephalus, who appears briefly in Book I of Republic , was among those arms merchants who owed their fortunes to war profiteering. Not only did Solon fail to mind his own business, projecting a meddlesome influence on domestic and foreign affairs alike, but he passed a law that punished anyone who minded his own business rather than taking sides at a time of political revolution.

The tyrant is the most disordered and misfortunate man of all, afflicted by a lust for power that breaks his soul into multiple erotic afflictions. In fact, a man who will not live harmoniously with his fellow men is not a man at all. He is many men, a democracy of disintegrated psyches plunging into insanity as they struggle for control. Antigone , Oedipus Tyrannus , and Oedipus at Colonus. The implication is that Polemarchus, like Oedipus, has struck his father dead. By recalling that scene, Socrates suggests that Sophocles—like Oedipus, Cephalus, and Solon—never escaped the many mad masters that conquer and divide the tyrannical psyche.

Sophocles, after all, was not only a renowned writer of tragedies; he was another poet-warrior whose professions of piety masked pitiless acts of atrocity. After that murderous regime collapsed, and Sophocles was interrogated about his support for the ousted oppressors, he summoned the power of poetry to justify his complicity. Flattering the Athenian jurors with his afflatus, Sophocles read aloud the opening stasimon of the yet-unpublished Oedipus at Colonus , including the ode to Athens. It will commit any foul murder, and there is no food it refuses to eat.

Second, as we have seen, Socrates uses cannibalism to portray another unnatural, flesh-defiling appetite: Pederasty, in turn, was the root cause of the Oedipus tragedy. The crime of Laius, which doomed his house, was the rape of a young boy. In his youth, Laius, the future king of Thebes, was exiled to the court of Pelops, King of Pisa, while his cousins ruled in his absence.

King Lauis, the archetypal tyrant, allows eros to rule over reason. His sexual perversion is spiritual inversion. Chryssipus was penetrated by his father figure and murdered by his mother; Oedipus will murder his father and penetrate his mother. In this way, Socrates establishes himself as the anti-Oedipus. There are, of course, similarities. Despite these similarities, however, Socrates is the antithesis of Oedipus. In Symposium , Socrates, a foot soldier equally remarkable for his bare feet and bold feats, takes the unusual step of wearing shoes—fancy shoes—although his habit of standing still suggests he has no need for them.

Hence Oedipus is a prolific progenitor, whom the entire city calls father, whereas Socrates is but a philosophical midwife. And whereas Oedipus, like his father Laius, attempts to disprove the Delphic oracle in order to demonstrate the superiority of his own wisdom, Socrates attempts to disprove the Delphic oracle in order to demonstrate his own ignorance. The blind king, however, has no eye to see, no I to be. Socrates is a self-controlled individual; Oedipus is many people and, having no one self, has no self-control. But the similarity does not end there.

Like Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon, the first god to take a boy lover, Oedipus is the son of Lauis, the originator of pederasty. And like Polyphemus, Oedipus is a murderous, flesh-defiling monster blinded by no one but himself. That Oedipus does not know the crimes he has committed demonstrates the extent to which he has forgotten his own name, which signifies them.

Odysseus, by contrast, remembers his true name, just as Socrates remembers his true nature. The secret to the identities of both Oedipus and Odysseus lie in their scarred feet—but only Odysseus understands this. Sophocles tells us that Oedipus is a multiplicity of men when Creon says that Lauis was killed not by one brigand, but by a whole company of them. But if he says it was a traveler journeying alone, why then, the burden of guilt must fall on me. The second actor plays the priest, the shepherd, and Jocaste; the third actor plays Tiresias, Creon and the two messengers; but the first actor plays only Oedipus.

The tyrant speaks with one voice. Answering the Sphinx requires the very self-awareness that Oedipus lacks. Her famous riddle, which Sophocles leaves unspoken, states: But when it goes propped on most feet, then is the swiftness in its limbs the weakest. But man is not the only answer to the riddle. Oedipus does not know himself—does not know that he is the answer the Sphinx is looking for and at. From the beginning, Oedipus is already a blind man, who cannot see the truth about himself, or his interlocutor, because, like his father, he has refused the light of Apollo.

Oedipus fulfills the prophecy by striking a much older man and sharing his bed with a much older woman. These are the crimes of a supremely tyrannical soul—one that recognizes no authority beyond itself. Whereas Socrates hears divine commands, Oedipus is deaf to Apollo, the voice of reason, and hears only the demands of his own deformed libido.

Apollo, who speaks through an oracle, has two voices, and so the god that Oedipus repressed returns twice, once for each of his crimes. In his first return, Apollo disguises himself as the Sphinx, an unnatural admixture of human and beast, to show Oedipus what he has become. In his second return, Apollo disguises himself as the blind foreigner Tiresias, to show Oedipus what he will become. The answer to both of their lofty riddles lies in the lowliest of places: Oedipus is the parricide. Their transgressive sex is reflected in both the Sphinx and her riddle.

In name and in nature, the Sphinx represents an exposed posterior. According to a recently-discovered epigram by Nicarchus: When he stands, he is two-footed. And supporting himself on his two hands, head down to the ground, he is four-footed. But with his phallus he is three-footed, and his anal sphincter is like explains the name of? Plato takes up these materials—wood and rock—as another means of constructing Socrates as the anti-Oedipus. The motif of wood and rock is already present in the works of Homer and Hesiod, where wood and rock symbolize the phallus and the anus.

Like wood and rock, the pederast has no progeny. From this point of view, Oedipus is as barren as the dead timber and cold crags of the mountainside on which he was cast as an infant. Plato preserves its pederastic overtones, however, by replacing the riddle of the foot with a riddle of wood and rock. In Republic Book V, Socrates presents the following riddle: Like the man who throws a stone that is not a stone, Oedipus strikes his father with a staff that is not a staff, and pierces his mother with a foot that is not a foot.

And like the man who is not a man, Oedipus is both many men and no one. Socrates unmans the tyrant, showing him to be no man at all. Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the ruler of Lydia. There was a violent thunderstorm, and an earthquake broke open the ground and created a chasm at the place where he was tending his sheep.

Studies in Pessimism by Arthur Schopenhauer

Seeing this, he was filled with amazement and went down into it. There were windowlike openings in it, and, peeping in, he saw a corpse, which seemed to be of more than human size, wearing nothing but a gold ring on its finger. He took the ring and came out of the chasm. He wore the ring at the usual monthly meeting that reported to the king and the state of the flocks. And as he was sitting among the others, he happened to turn the setting of the ring towards himself to the inside of his hand. When he did this, he became invisible to those sitting near him, and they went on talking as if he had gone….

If he turned the setting inward, he became invisible; if he turned it outward, he became visible again. When he realized this, he at once arranged to become one of the messengers sent to report to the king. The Oedipal undertones in this story are unmistakable. Just like Oedipus, a man who must have his way in all things, Gyges kills the king, rapes the queen, and takes over the kingdom. But although Gyges commits the same crimes as Oedipus, he does so in reverse order, suggesting a reversal of the Oedipus myth.

Oedipus accuses others of polluting the city, never looking at himself; Gyges turns inward, so that others cannot look at him. Oedipus is the king whom a shepherd destroyed; Gyges is the shepherd who destroyed a king. Oedipus subjects himself to his own decree, attempting to demonstrate that, under his rule, all men are equally subject to the law; Gyges shows that the reverse is true.

He had an appetite to look at them but at the same time he was disgusted and turned away. Leontius is a stand-in for Oedipus. He is an outsider to the city, to himself, and to the moral order. Like Oedipus, Leontius is one man acting like another. Fittingly, Socrates reveals the truth through role reversal: Oedipus is witness to crimes of his own commission; Leontius is witness to the crime of another. Or so it seems. Socrates hints that what appears to lie outside Leontius may in fact lie within—he looks out on dead bodies, but he takes his fill of them, too.

The killings that Leontius attributes to an anonymous public executioner actually belong to him. Like Oedipus, Leontius is the uni denti fied assassin—he is, so to speak, both jury and executioner. In this way, Leontius is one man and many. Once more, Plato presents Socrates as the anti-Oedipus by uniting him with Odysseus. Unlike Leontius, who succumbs to his horrible desires, Odysseus subdues them.

Not coincidentally, this is precisely the challenge Socrates poses in his allegory of the cave. Before he can explore that strange, otherworldly image, however, Socrates must withstand three waves of paradox. Once again, Socrates will hold up Oedipus as the model politician, that is, the embodiment of injustice, and invert his corrupt character by aligning himself with Odysseus.

Odysseus, in an effort to avoid the Trojan War and remain at home with his wife and son, feigned madness by plowing his field with salt. It is significant that it is the pederast, Glaucon, who perverts natural family relations by subordinating procreation to the demands of political power.

Socrates shows Glaucon the proper order of things by inverting the crimes of Oedipus.

Smashed and atomized, uprooted from all family relations, the citizens lose their very identities. The rulers subordinate everyone to their desires, abandoning themselves to the desire for mastery. That self-surrender is the price of political power is a theme to which Socrates returns in the allegory of the cave:. Imagine human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling. Light is provided by a fire burning far above and behind them.

Also behind them, but on higher ground, there is a path stretching between them and the fire. Imagine that along this path a low wall has been built, like the screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets. Then also imagine that there are people along the wall, carrying all kinds of artifacts that project above it—statues of people and other animals, made out of stone, wood, and every material. The prisoners cannot see anything of themselves and one another besides the shadows that the fire casts on the wall in front of them.

They believe that the shadows passing in front of them are talking whenever one of the carriers passing along the wall was doing so.

The prisoners believe that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of those artifacts. Consider, then, what being released from their bonds and cured of their ignorance would naturally be like. Eventually, however, he would be able to see that the sun governs everything in the visible world. This allegory, perhaps the most enduring image in the entire Platonic corpus, depicts the philosopher turning toward the truth by turning the Oedipus myth on its head.

In familiar fashion, Plato identifies Oedipus with the unruly masses and identifies Socrates with the self-composed individual. Thus Oedipus, a cave-dwelling killer who has looked upon the sun for the last time, serves as the model for the murderous mob that remains imprisoned in subterranean darkness. Socrates, by contrast, represents the liberated individual who overcomes blind desire and opens himself to the light of reason.

Oedipus is the secret source of moral pollution, the king who must conceal his illegitimacy. Socrates is a lover of wisdom; having been freed from his bonds, he attempts to restore his fellow men to their rightful places in the natural order. Like the invisible puppeteers who take a privileged position behind the fire and manipulate the shadows it throws on the wall, Oedipus is false and deceptive in all his deeds.

By transposing Oedipus with Polyphemus and Socrates with Odysseus, Plato reveals the tragedy of political power and the redemptive possibility of abandoning it.

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Polyphemus loses not only his captives, but himself as well, while Odysseus finds his way home again. This contrast between self-negation and self-fulfillment reemerges in the allegory of the cave, where the prisoners cannot see their own bodies. These spectral spectators are like Oedipus, who sees nothing of himself, because he is himself nothing.

Unlike Socrates, who shares the organic unity of the natural world that grows in the light of the sun, Oedipus is like those statues of men that populate the cave, made of wood and stone. There is no real substance to the tyrant. The suggestion that everyone in the cave, whether ruler or subject, is simply a shade reveals something about the cave. Only in death are all men equal. And where political power reigns, all men, rulers and ruled alike, are equally dead. That is why Socrates quotes Achilles, whose shade Odysseus encountered on his descent into Hades. Achilles, whose feet were his undoing, and who is now just a shadow of a man, is another Oedipus.

But he is also another Socrates, because he has learned what Oedipus has not: Er once died in a war. Preparations were made for his funeral. But, when he was already laid on the funeral pyre, he revived and, having done so, told what he had seen in the world beyond. He said that, after his soul had left him, it traveled together with many others until they came to a marvelous place, where there were two adjacent openings in the earth, and opposite and above them two others in th heavens, and between them judges sat.

Those souls who came up from Hades weeped as they recalled all they had suffered and seen on their journey below the earth, while those who came down from the heavens told about how well they fared and about the inconceivably fine and beautiful sights they had seen. Those, for example, who had caused many deaths by betraying cities or armies and reducing them to slavery or by participating in other wrongdoing, they had to suffer ten times the pain they had caused to each individual.

But if they had done good deeds and had become just and pious, they were rewarded according to the same scale. There a Speaker arranged them in order, took from the lap of Lachesis a number of lots and a number of models of lives, mounted a high pulpit, and spoke to them. Your daemon or guardian spirit will not be assigned to you by lot; you will choose him.

The one who has the first lot will be the first to choose a life to which he will be bound by necessity. Virtue knows no master; each will possess it to a greater or less degree, depending on whether he values or disdains it. The responsibility lies with the one who makes the choice; the god has none.

There were more models of lives than there were souls present, and they were of all kinds, for the lives of animals were there, as well as all kinds of human lives. There were tyrannies among them, some of which lasted throughout life, while others ended halfway through in poverty, exile, and beggary. The first soul to come up chose the greatest tyranny. When he examined at leisure, the life he had chosen, however, he beat his breast and bemoaned his choice. And, ignoring the warning of the Speaker, he blamed chance, daemons, or guardian spirits, and everything else for these evils but himself.

Now, it chanced that the soul of Odysseus got to make its choice last of all, and since memory of its former sufferings had relieved its love of honor, it went around for a long time, looking for the life of a private individual who did his own work, and with difficulty found one lying off somewhere neglected by the others. Oedipus, after all, is the model for the unjust soul that Socrates urges Glaucon to avoid.

Like Oedipus, these miserable souls will end in poverty, exile, and beggary. The tyrant destroys others, only to find that he is fated to destroy his own children. And although the tyrant blames chance, or even the gods themselves, for his demise, the responsibility lies with the one who makes the choice; the god has none. The tyrant has only himself to blame for not even having himself, because he has chosen to enter another cycle that will end in death. With the myth of Er, Socrates accomplishes his final, and most complete, reversal of the Oedipus myth. Previously, in the allegory of the cave, Socrates identified himself with Odysseus, another strong-minded hero, and he identified Oedipus with Achilles, another weak-footed killer.

Odysseus, who renounces his love of honor and contents himself with minding his own business as a private individual, is blessed with enduring life. Sophocles, the poet, spoke through his subjects, and Sophocles, the politician, spoke for them. That Oedipus is just a mask for Sophocles is nowhere more evident than in Oedipus at Colonus , the play with which Sophocles vindicated himself in court.

According to Socrates, the man who would be god receives nothing of immortality and loses everything of his own humanity. The super-human, after all, is the inhuman. Only the philosopher, who practices dying, will find his life worth living, whereas the tyrant, in denying death, will discover that he never truly lived. Socrates is not swayed by the spell of the state. He is an enemy of the state—and a friend of ours. By recognizing this friendship, we gain a valuable ally in the fight for freedom. Moreover, we gain a valuable strategy.

As we have seen, Plato has a unique method for dispelling the state. He demonstrates that it is a source of misery not only for its subjects, but also for its rulers. When a tyrant perverts the natural order, the natural order perverts him, afflicting him with the most revolting and unnatural appetites. He becomes a pederast, a parricide, and a self-mutilated exile from convivial society.

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Plato does not tell the powerless what they already know: Instead, Plato shows the powerful that, by unchaining their subjects, they can liberate themselves as well. To reclaim the happiness and wholeness that is naturally theirs, politicians must release their grip over persons who are not. Libertarian Papers , Vol. View the discussion thread.

Skip to main content. Rescuing Speech, Recovering Natural Law: Thus Solon wrote that: Often the wicked prosper, while the righteous starve; Yet I would never exchange my state for theirs, My virtue for their gold. For mine endures, While riches change their owner every day. To Athens, to their home of divine origin, I brought back many who had been sold, Some justly, some unjustly, And some who had fled out of dire necessity, Who no longer spoke the Athenian tongue After wandering in many places. Others, who were subjected here to shameful slavery, Fearing the whims of their masters, I set free.

As Socrates tells the story: And so do the rulers. When the souls arrived at the light, they had to go before Lachesis right away. See Republic Book I da. Complete Works , ed. Hackett Publishing Company, An Economic and Sociological Analysis , translated by J. Liberty Fund, , p. Thus his next sentence: The Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science: Foundation for Economic Education, , p.

The University of Chicago Press, , p. Ludwig von Mises Institute, , p. Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production , ed. Hans-Hermann Hoppe Auburn, Alabama: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, , p. Arlington House Publishers, , p. See also Liberty or Equality: Christendom Press, , p.

Kevin Dowd and Richard H. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, , p. Black Rose Books, , p. The liberating possibility of self-realization is dramatically depicted in Meno. In portraying the tyrant as miserable and unfulfilled, Plato does not rely on interpersonal comparisons of utility. Indeed, Plato underscores their impossibility when Socrates suggests a facetious formula according to which the tyrant is precisely times more miserable than the just man. Republic Book IX, d-e. Rather than deploy a dubious utilitarianism, Socrates demonstrates to Glaucon that his own beliefs, properly clarified, imply that happiness and tyranny cannot co-exist.

Harvard University Press, , 1: Chesterton was the rare scholar who understood this. Inkling Books, , p. It is seldom noticed that Aristotle makes this same point—appropriately enough, with knowing indirection. The Basic Works of Aristotle , ed. Richard McKeon New York: Moreover, and tellingly, Aristotle does not attribute this regime to Plato, the author of Republic , but rather to Socrates, its protagonist. In that way, Aristotle acknowledges the ironic distance between Plato and his dialogic characters. See b, d, a, and a. Complete Works , p.

Socrates not only opposes legislation; he also suggests that the act of legislating is self-negating. That is why he refers to documents that are called laws. Socrates implies that what are called laws are not necessarily the genuine article. If we can give laws effect by decree, we can just as well decree them void. See Platonic Writings, Platonic Readings , ed. The Pennsylvania State University Press, In Republic, for example, Socrates struggles against Thrasymachus, whose attempts to steal his voice.

See also Book II, b. Aristophanes, The Clouds , line Jacob Howland, The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, , p. The Clouds , lines See The Clouds , lines Hubbard, The Mask of Comedy: Aristophanes and Intertextual Parabasis Ithaca: Cornell University Press, Howland, The Republic , p.