Describe how Plato, Sappho, and/or Catullus conceive of love (and/or friendship). You can choose to only discuss one of the three works or compare two or three of them. You can also choose to compare their views on love with The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, or Lysistrata. You can also choose to focus more specifically on either the lover or the beloved if you like.

Plato’s Symposium is an account of a conversation between men, including Socrates, on the greatness of Love. Most of the men participating in the conversation praise love passionately, but Socrates gives a slightly different speech on love. Contrary to what the others believe, Socrates says that Love is not a god but a spirit, which is in between a mortal and a god. Likewise, Love is in between good and bad, beauty and ugliness. Everyone loves things that are good and desires that they become his own in the present and the future. Socrates states plainly “love is wanting to possess the good forever.” He goes on to say that reproduction is truly love because through reproduction one lives forever through their children. So, in a sense reproduction would be a way of possessing the good- that is, life- forever. Parents love their children very much because it is their children that make them immortal. Other men, like Achilles, seek immortality of soul that will make their memory live on forever. They achieve this immortality of the soul through performing glorious acts instead of through reproduction.

The reading due Monday is Plato’s Symposium (and the introduction to it) and the entirety of the Sappho (pages 635-643) and Catullus sections (pages 940-959) in the Norton anthology. The following assignment will be considered part of your class participation grade for the semester.

Analyze a literary device–most likely an image or metaphor–or series of devices you find in Plato, Sappho, or Catullus.

Describe how Plato, Sappho, and/or Catullus conceive of love (and/or friendship). You can choose to only discuss one of the three works or compare two or three of them. You can also choose to compare their views on love with The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, or Lysistrata. You can also choose to focus more specifically on either the lover or the beloved if you like.

You are by no means required to write about Sappho, but if you’re up to it, you might find Emily Wilson’s review of Anne Carson’s translations of her (she is the translator for all but one of the poems by Sappho in the Norton) and other works about her in the UK paper The Guardian interesting: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/feb/02/classics

How do Catullus’s goals in writing his epyllion, or “little epic,” number 64 in the anthology, compare with those of Homer in The Odyssey? How and why are they similar or different?

The assignment consists of two parts: your response to one of these three questions in the form of at least five sentences due by midnight on Saturday (midnight between Saturday and Sunday); a response of at least three sentences to one of your classmate’s responses due by Sunday at 5:00 p.m.

Publish your response as a post to the blog and make sure to copy the text of the question you chose to answer at the top.

Publish your response to one of your classmates as a comment on their post.