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.
Love is the feeling that we perceiving on daily basis but most of us are not able to give a convincing definition. The love that mentioned in Plato’s symposium is demonstrated well in Homer’s Odyssey. In Plato’s symposium, Phaedrus brought up an intriguing point in which he split general love into common love and heavenly love. Common love is basically depicting human’s vulgar desires, which mostly reflect on possession of body. In Odyssey, Calypso imprisoned Odysseus for ten years because she “love” Odysseus in “common” way, however, it is questionable that the passion that Calypso had on Odysseus is real love. Therefore, Phaedrus followed up by talked about heavenly love in which described as the passion that beyond sexual desire. Heavenly love could be knowledge, spirit, or other characteristics that bring one person to the another without the involvement of body’s desires. For example, the love that Calypso had on Odysseus may not be classified as heavenly love from my personal perspective because her imprisonment is very likely violated his will. Penelope’s love, nevertheless, shall be called heavenly love. She rejected the chance to select one of the suitors to become new King in order to receive both sexual desire and luxury life. Same as the love that Odysseus had on Penelope, he encountered various difficulties through his venture in order to go back to his city for his family. His heavenly love is demonstrated by his responsibilities and bravery.
Phaedrus has an interesting definition of love that goes back to some of the points in my post. In one definition he describes love as, one of a mindless desire that is amoral, not good or bad, and that Socrates later states is the way most people describe love in the symposium. Socrates believes that people focus on the subject of love, the thing being desired, and not the desire (love) itself. The second definition is that love is a higher thing that is good and in your case brings Odysseus and Penelope back together despite the long period of time they spent apart, yet Socrates would say that this definition focuses too much on object receiving the love, whether knowledge, spirit, or faithfulness and not love itself.
Also I can’t get to and read the other posts that people made so I’ll just copy and paste what I wrote in my post below if other people are having the same problem as me.
The term “love” is not an easy thing to define or talk about and in Plato’s Symposium the reader is presented with many ideas of what love can be and why those ideas can be misleading. During the symposium, Phaedrus suggests that love is one of the oldest and strongest forces and that it inspires people to behave with good morals. Eryximachus picks up saying that love inspires order in not only people but in the arts and sciences as well. Aristophanes and Agathon say that love is young, wise, and beautiful inspiring people to search for their other half. Socrates however, does not buy into their speeches and instead says that love is not all of these good things (beauty, wisdom, virtue, etc) but it is instead the desire for those good things, and that in their speeches the other men confused the topic with the things they love. Desire that in Socrates mind isn’t bad or good. This conflict shows suggests that Plato sees love as a concept that is hard to grasp for people, since they talk instead about the thing they love and not love itself when they talk.
Oops, never mind. Don’t comment on this post. Look for other posts found from the “dashboard” on “Great Works of literature” on “my sites” found on top left of this page. You should be able to view them there. Sorry for any inconvenience.