In my case, gentlemen, the laws have not only acquitted me of crime but have actually commanded me to exact this penalty. It is for you to decide whether the law is to be powerful or worthless. In my opinion, every city enacts its laws in order that when we are uncertain in a situation, we can go to them to see what to do, and in such cases the law commands the victims to exact this penalty. So I ask you now to reach the same verdict as the law does. If not, you will be giving adulterers such immunity that you will encourage burglars to call themselves adulterers too. They will realize that if they describe adultery as their object and claim that they have entered somebody else’s house for this purpose, nobody will dare touch them. Everyone will know that we must say good-bye to the laws on adultery and take notice only of your verdict—which is the sovereign authority over all the city’s affairs.

1 On the Thesmophoria, a women’s festival, see Story 23.

2 The Areopagus (consisting of former Archons) was the most famous Athenian homicide court.

THE POWER OF LOVE

Symposium

Plato

Translated by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

In this philosophical dialogue by Socrates’ most celebrated pupil, Plato (420s–340s BC), Socrates, Alcibiades, Aristophanes and a number of others are invited to a symposium or party at the house of Agathon. The guests eat, pour libations to the gods, and sing hymns. The conversation then turns to love. In this extract, the comedian Aristophanes (author of Story 23) playfully expounds his understanding of human sexuality. While Plato wrote a great many dialogues in the fourth century BC, this speech from his Symposium has to be one of the most entertaining. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who turned his hand to a number of classical texts in his lifetime, brought out the liveliness of the original in this translation from 1818.

“You ought first to know the nature of man, and the adventures he has gone through; for his nature was anciently far different from that which it is at present. First, then, human beings were formerly not divided into two sexes, male and female; there was also a third, common to both the others, the name of which remains though the sex itself has disappeared. The androgynous sex, both in appearance and in name, was common both to male and female; its name alone remains, which labours under a reproach.