So rather than contest the insights of an Althusser or Derrida, I hope to engage them dialogically: to explore the chemistry between discursive subjects without ignoring ruptures in the discursive continuum, to understand authorship as a process simultaneously structured and subverted by the concordia discors of social reality—as itself concordia discors. At times I shall focus on rhetoric, especially, its ideological grounding, at times, on substance. But one needs to be careful not to draw too strict a distinction; at best, rhetoric and substance are only different ways of looking at the same thing. So, too, the distinction between an author’s depiction of the world and that world’s intrusions into his or her text, between dissonance represented and dissonance reproduced, will not always hold, not if texts do neither more nor less than record an author’s struggle to grasp and convey what he or she sees.

Of course, Socrates’ point is not just that he and Callicles love differently, but that Socrates, because he loves wisdom, not the Athenian body politic (the dêmos), loves better. Thus he uses erôs as an evaluative grid to show that Callicles’ conduct does not, in fact, measure up. But erôs here represents more than an instrument by which to gauge same and different, better and worse. Through erôs, Socrates taps into the Athenian imaginary, that great sea of images and feelings swimming within the Athenian unconscious. In so doing, Socrates exteriorizes and reifies feeling; he seeks to create a sense that all who share certain basic notions of masculine dignity and civic autonomy have their eye on Callicles and do not like what they see.

We have seen that, for Athenian citizen-men, Aristogeiton’s victory over his rival could carry political resonance. But what if we reverse the terms? Does, in other words, this narrative and its reception suggest a sexual side to the average citizen’s sense of his autonomy, privileges, and powers? Since others have already argued as much (p. 11n43 above), I shall leave it at that. But I would still like to elaborate on the erotics of civic empowerment and self-actualization, though in contexts outside the Tyrannicide legend.

Put simply, tyranny posed a threat to the polis and to the citizen’s franchise—a threat from within. That schema, tyranny as systemic dysfunction, finds expression in one Presocratic thinker’s metaphor for bodily health. We are told that Alcmaeon described physical illness as “monarchy” (monarkhia, “rule by one”), where just one of the body’s elements or “powers” (the hot, the cold, etc.) rules over the others. Health, by contrast, he explained in terms of equality or isonomia, a balanced mixture of those same powers (fr. 4 D-K). Again, Alcmaeon will have been addressing bodily health, not politics. But his language—dunameis (“powers”), isonomia, monarkhia—suggests he was working from a political analogy.

To sum-up, Aristogeiton, lover and supposed tyrant-slayer, became a touchstone for a civically and sexually empowered masculinity, a cynosure for social dialogue expressing male-Athenian desire. Still, desire as one might, to actualize empowerment in self-interested ways, to be seen using one’s right of free speech to push policy benefiting not the many but just a few or even one—that prospect summoned misgivings lest ambition develop into a rapacious kind of erôs. For individualism, once it entered the public sphere, found itself face to face with a rival value: communitarianism.

In what follows, we shall look at that process and its reflection in the literature of classical Athens. Our focus: the dissonance between communitarianism and individualism, consensus and conflict, in the works of authors for whom erôs, passionate, destabilizing desire, symbolized that dissonance with a powerful expressiveness. Thus in chapter two, we explore the Periclean Funeral Oration as response to a crisis in persuasion, a way to unite a fractious and fragmented citizenry behind a controversial war policy. To that end, Pericles bids listeners “gaze upon the city’s power and become lovers—erastai—of it.” But does he mean lovers of the city or of its power? That, I suggest, Pericles leaves unclear. And so this image of the citizen as lover, while it encourages patriotic self-sacrifice, also appeals to the self-centered motivations of citizens. But that dissonance works in the orator’s favor. In telling listeners to become lovers of the city (or of its power), Pericles calls on them to abandon the logic of day-to-day for the “logic” of erôs. That logic lifts them up and out from routine deliberation and puts them in touch with a higher discourse-community, the heroic dead, whose self-sacrifice becomes not just commendable but positively irresistible, the fulfillment of a citizen’s deepest desires.

Turning from funeral oratory to comedy, I argue in chapter three that the politician-as-lover conceit in Aristophanes’ Knights presents us with a comic twist on the “demophilia topos,” the charge that one’s opponent in court or assembly is trying to seduce listeners with specious claims of affection. Staging demophilic politics as sexual courtship, Aristophanes foregrounds tensions between benevolence and its “evil twin,” flattery, in the leadership-styles of the city’s politicians. But Aristophanes does not stop there. Demos, the Athenian people personified and a virtual prostitute complicit in his leaders’ efforts to con and “bugger” him, pursues self-interest no less passive-aggressively, cynically, or covertly than they do. Hence value-reversals suggesting stasis, “strife” or “discord,” in relations between leaders and led.

In chapter four, we consider how the “music” of democratic consensus, antidote to stasis, plays against that of civic-phallic autonomy, bulwark against antidemocratic hubris, in Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen. That counterpoint, I suggest, builds on similar themes in the same playwright’s Lysistrata, likewise a drama in which women take on the male establishment. Both comedies play the ideal of homonoia and koinônia, concord and fellowship, off against fears of civil strife and socio-political emasculation. And both press the dissonant implications of civic erôs—its integrative aspects versus its divisive aspects—to their illogical extreme.

In chapter five, we turn to Socrates’ literary portrait, how it models the dialogical self as a sort of boundary phenomenon, a negotiation between speaker and listener, teacher and pupil, leader and led. That view may come across as counterintuitive. Socrates’ apologists pay tribute to the sage as one-of-a-kind, a man so uncompromising in his morality and habits, a lover so resistant to the temptations of love, as to seem utterly apart, what the Greeks called atopos (“place-less,” “strange”), in relation to his fellow human being. Yet Alcibiades’ image of the man as god in a satyr’s skin (Symposium 215a–222b) suggests a more complex creature, one whose outer layers express connection with, as well as disconnection from, the outside world. That complexity, I argue, finds expression in works manifesting tension between the simple, singular Socrates privileged by Plato, Xenophon, and Aeschines Socraticus, and a more multi-faceted and ambivalent Socrates deviously working his way into Socratic apologetic.

In closing, I consider the methodological and ethical implications of my findings, and their relevance for today’s world.