By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
When worldly ambition fails to validate us, we often turn to romantic love. We rely on another person to lend our life weight and meaning. First, we ask the crowd; then, we ask one person.
The Greeks had several words for love: eros, philia, storge, and agape. Eros is passionate love, philia friendship, storge familial love, and agape universal love. But we reduce all these types of love into just one word, which we associate with romantic love.
The Rise of Romantic Love
What we don’t realise is that romantic love, unlike passionate love, is a fairly modern concept. If you think about it, romantic love barely features in the 73 books of the Bible. The Bible’s greatest love stories are David and Jonathan, Ruth and Naomi, and, above all the love of man for God. In the ancient world, passionate love was not seen as ennobling but as a dangerous affliction: think only of Helen and Paris, Dido and Aeneas, Antony and Cleopatra.
How, then, did this dangerous affliction become our highest ideal? As religion retreated, our need for religion remained. We still longed for meaning and transcendence. Gradually, the sacred seeped out of God and into romantic love. We stopped loving God and began loving love.
That’s why love speaks the language of religion: adoration, devotion, eternal union… We expect one person to provide us with everything: intimacy, friendship, intellectual stimulation—until death do us part.
What Love Really Is
But once a person is given the role of God, disappointment becomes inevitable. When things go wrong, we conclude that we chose the wrong person, or that love has died—not that we are asking far too much.
This brings us back to the original question: what is love? Beneath all its forms—philia, eros, storge, agape—love is a reaching out beyond ourselves towards someone or something that lends weight and meaning to our life. It is the force that enables us to cross the boundary between ourselves and the world—to shed our shell, like a lobster, and grow beyond it. That’s why people of little love are so small.
This definition of love is useful, in that it gives us a litmus test by which to distinguish love from mere dependency. We can ask: Is this person enlarging my world, or am I merely asking them to save me from myself? Are we growing together, or merely leaning against one another?
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
Pain Is a Feeling but not an Emotion. Love Can Be Both.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
In brief, an emotion is an enduring psychological state, while a feeling is a conscious experience. An emotion such as love can give rise to many different feelings, while some feelings, such as pain, are not emotions at all.
‘Emotions’ and ‘feelings’ are often confused and assimilated. Even when they are distinguished, psychologists disagree about what they are. This is more than a quarrel over words. Unless we get the distinction right, we cannot meaningfully discuss our emotional lives.
What Emotions and Feelings Are Not
Many people use ‘emotions’ and ‘feelings’ as if they were exact synonyms. But this obscures an important distinction between an emotion and the conscious experience, or ‘feeling’, of that emotion.
Some experts go almost to the opposite extreme, defining an emotion as an automatic bodily response and a feeling as the conscious experience or interpretation of that response. But this is to confuse an emotion with its physiological manifestations. A racing heart is no more an emotion than tears are grief. The same bodily changes can accompany very different emotions, or no emotion at all, as during exercise or illness. Conversely, it is not clear that every emotion need involve appreciable bodily changes.
Other experts distinguish emotions from feelings chiefly on the basis of consciousness, treating an emotion as unconscious and a feeling as its conscious counterpart. This is much closer to the mark, but still conflates an emotion with the experience of that emotion—and leaves unexplained the many feelings, such as hunger and pain, that are not emotions at all.
Much of the confusion arises because behind these two words lie not two concepts but four: emotional experiences, emotions or sentiments, traits, and feelings. If you’re a philosopher and didn’t want to get hung up on words, you could just call them A, B, C, and D.
The Example of Pride
If I say, ‘I am grateful’, I could mean one of three things: that I am currently feeling grateful for something; that I generally feel grateful for that thing; or that I am a grateful kind of person.
Similarly, if I say, ‘I am proud’, I could mean that I am currently feeling proud about something, that I generally feel proud about that thing, or that I am a proud kind of person.
Let’s agree to call the first instance (currently feeling proud about something) an emotional experience, the second instance (generally feeling proud about that thing) an emotion or sentiment, and the third instance (being a proud kind of person), a trait.
It is common to confuse these three instances, especially the first and the second. But whereas an emotional experience is brief and episodic, an emotion—which may or may not result from accreted emotional experiences—can perdure for many years, and, in that time, predispose to a variety of emotional experiences, as well as thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions. For instance, love can give rise not only to amorous feelings, but also to joy, grief, rage, longing, and jealousy, among others.
That’s why we can tell someone that we love them even while we are furious with them. In fact, the fury, which is the emotional experience, may arise out of the love, which is the enduring emotion. Whereas if love existed solely when we were consciously feeling it, we would fall in and out of love many times a day.
So What Is the Difference Between a Feeling and an Emotion?
Now that we have our terminology in place, we are in a much better position to distinguish between an emotion and a feeling.
An emotional experience, by virtue of being a conscious experience, is necessarily a feeling, as are physical sensations such as hunger, fullness, or pain.
Notice, however, that not all conscious experiences are also feelings, not, for example, believing or seeing—presumably because they lack a somatic, or bodily, dimension.
In contrast, an emotion, being in some sense latent, can only ever be felt, sensu stricto, through the emotional experiences to which it gives rise, even though it may also be discovered through its associated thoughts, beliefs, desires, and actions.
Thus, every emotional experience is a feeling, but not every feeling is an emotional experience. Pain is a feeling but not an emotion. Love can be both: we can be feeling love in the moment as a conscious emotional experience, while more enduringly being ‘in love’.
This is also why a feeling cannot simply be an interpretation of bodily changes: we do not have to interpret pain for it to hurt.
Now Let’s Start Talking
Now that we are conceptually clear about emotions, emotional experiences, feelings, and traits, we can start talking about our emotional lives without contradicting ourselves at every turn.
For example, because emotions need not themselves be conscious, some emotions, such as hating one’s mother or coveting one’s same-sex friend, might only be recognised after several years in psychotherapy.
If an emotion remains unconscious, this is often by repression or some more elaborate form of self-deception which builds upon repression.
Self-deception can also take place at the level of an emotional experience, commonly by misrepresenting the type or intensity of the emotional experience or misattributing its object or cause. Thus, envy is often construed as indignation, and Schadenfreude (pleasure derived from the misfortune of others) as sympathy. Fear of ghosts or ‘the dark’ is almost certainly fear of death, since people who have come to terms with death are hardly afraid of such things.
Thus, we can feel something without knowing quite what we are feeling, why we are feeling it, or even whom or what we are really feeling it about.
Emotions as Ways of Seeing
Beyond this, it could be argued that even the purest and most accurate of emotions is inherently self-deceptive in so far as it lends weight in our experience to one thing, or some things, over others, thereby clouding our perspective and the ‘bigger picture’. In that much, emotions are not objective or neutral perceptions, but subjective ‘ways of seeing’ that reflect our particular, contingent needs and preoccupations.
The lover notices what every other overlooks; the coward sees danger where another finds opportunity. To understand our emotions—and the relations between A, B, C, and D—is not merely to understand how we feel, but how we see the world—and ourselves in it.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Why an ancient institution may be outdated.
Human societies tend to various degrees of patriarchy, in which men hold primary power. Most anthropologists agree that, on the evidence, there have been no known unambiguously matriarchal societies. In the state of nature, man subjugated woman by being stronger, while woman was habitually handicapped by childbearing and childrearing.
With technological advances such as mechanisation, birth control, and long-range warfare, the male advantage has, like the peacock’s tail, become largely redundant. But still the patriarchy perdures, upheld by hoary ideology and vested interests. This ideology is manifest, among others, in the socialisation of children, which emphasises man as breadwinner and decision-taker, and woman as mother and homemaker. Boys are encouraged to be brave and strong, while girls are expected to be passive and pretty, through, among others, fairy tales, dolls, pastimes such as dressing up and baking, and, above all, the examples and attitudes of role models, including historical ones.
Marriage did not create patriarchy, but has long been one of its central instruments, regulating sex and reproduction, transmitting property and legitimacy, and reconfirming the respective roles of men and women.
The Marriage Market
From a young age, girls in particular are indoctrinated into the virtues of marriage, which itself contributes to maintaining and perpetuating traditional gender roles. Beyond a certain age, a man who remains unmarried is thought of as independent or intelligent, whereas a woman who remains unmarried is assumed to be desperate, at once a figure of pity and scorn. An unmarried man is called a bachelor, and you might even find him on a list of eligible bachelors, but aside from the vetust ‘maiden’ or ‘spinster’, there is, despite the renowned richness of the English language, no polite term for an unmarried woman.
A woman who is strong-minded enough to forgo marriage and live out her own life is constantly made to doubt her resolve:
Never say never…
You just need to find the right man…
There’s this great guy I’d like you to meet…
Maybe you ought to lower your standards…
Have you tried one of those dating apps?
On the marriage market, women are made to feel like low-value, perishable goods. To find a taker, whether for marriage or just for sex, they need, much more than men, to conform to sexist, ageist, and racist stereotypes, and do constraining things such as wear makeup and high heels, which become the visible symbols of their oppression—like the burqa made sexy. As they are encouraged to marry a man who is older, more educated, and better connected than they are, they often begin married life in a doubly subordinate position—which, of course, suits the man just fine.
Pop Culture
These double standards are all too evident in popular culture. Even seemingly innocuous pop songs, which on the surface are all about romantic love, are in fact inherently sexist, revealing love as little more than a tool of patriarchal oppression.
Here, picked almost at random, are the opening lyrics of You Can’t Hurry Love by the Supremes:
I need love, love to ease my mind/ I need to find, find someone to call mine/ But mama said you can’t hurry love/ No you just have to wait.
It would be hard to imagine these lines in the mouth of a man.
And here are the opening lyrics of Total Eclipse of the Heart by Bonnie Tyler:
Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit lonely/ And you’re never coming round/ Turnaround, every now and then I get a little bit tired/ Of listening to the sound of my tears…
Now consider these lyrics from Chris Brown’s Fine China:
It’s alright/ I’m not dangerous/ When you’re mine/ I’ll be generous/ You’re irreplaceable, a collectible/ Just like fine china.
‘Her Day’
The marriage ceremony itself is sexist beyond parody. The bride appears in a fussy dress that symbolises her virtue and virginity, and everyone keeps on remarking on how thin and beautiful she looks after she has spent three months starving herself. Her father walks her down the aisle to ‘give her away’, and she passes, like property, from one man to another. The minister, who is traditionally and still usually a man, gives the man permission to kiss the woman, as if that is in the minister’s authority and the woman has none of her own. The man kisses, the woman is kissed. At the reception, only men are given to speak, while the bride remains silent and seated, fluttering her eyelids and holding back the tears that threaten to ruin her makeup. Henceforth, the woman will adopt the man’s name, as will their eventual offspring.
Despite all this, the wedding day is said to belong to the woman. This, would you believe, is ‘her day’.
By now, you’ve probably crossed me off the guest list and saved me a lot of trouble.
In Bed with the Church and State
Why should two people who want to celebrate their love and live together put themselves through a wedding, or even get married at all? Or to turn the question round, what is the state, arm in arm with the Church, doing by sanctioning the private relationships of citizens?
By legitimising a particular kind of relationship and denying others, the state is entrenching monogamy and patriarchy while devaluing and disenfranchising other forms of life and the people who choose or are forced into them, including single people, people in open or polyamorous relationships, and groups such as African Americans and the poor who, for various reasons, are less likely to marry.
Two people may love one another, sleep together, live together, raise children together, and grow old together without the state taking much interest. But the moment they marry, their private relationship becomes a public and legal institution.
Anti-miscegenation laws that criminalised inter-racial marriages, and sometimes even inter-racial sex, remained in force in many US states until as late as 1967. Is this not the state telling us who is and isn’t fit to raise a family, and what that family ought to look like? Marital status is not merely a matter of social prestige, but is attached to myriad benefits in areas as diverse as immigration, healthcare, banking, taxation, and inheritance.
In addition, marriage benefits the economy by producing new workers and consumers, largely through the unpaid work of women, and by making it difficult for workers with families to support to withdraw their labour. A wedding generates spending equivalent to an annual income, and probably that again on the gift list and the travel and other expenses of the guests. And even that pales into insignificance compared to the cost of raising a child, let alone two or three. When people point out how much I spend on fine wine, I point out that it’s still much cheaper than having children. Plus I can sleep at night.
The laws that govern marriage are drafted by the state rather than the couple that has to abide by them, and while marriage is deceptively simple and straightforward to enter, it is, like the Hotel California, much more difficult to leave—and in two-thirds of cases, it is the woman who files for divorce. Divorce is a personal tragedy unnecessarily inflicted by the state on almost half of the marriages it sanctions. When a couple divorces, people ask what went wrong with their marriage, without ever questioning whether there is anything wrong with marriage itself.
Collusion
To partake in the institution of marriage today is also to condone the historical abuses perpetrated in its name.
Until recently, women faced a ‘choice’ between marriage and a life of poverty and stigma. In many parts of the world, they still do. In Marriage and Morals (1929), the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote that ‘marriage is for woman the commonest mode of livelihood, and the total amount of undesired sex endured by women is probably greater in marriage than in prostitution.’ Once married, a woman’s legal rights were subsumed under those of her husband, and the so-called marriage bar restricted her ability to work outside the home. Her husband could rape her with impunity, yet contraception, abortion, and divorce were all denied to her.
The rape of an unmarried woman was construed as a property crime against her father, robbing him of his daughter’s precious virginity—with, in some cases, the woman forced to marry her rapist. Rape of a married woman by a man other than her husband was construed as a crime against the husband, with little concern or regard for the woman herself. Only from the middle of the twentieth century did evolving social norms lead to the criminalisation of marital rape, but there are still many jurisdictions in which it remains a private matter, or in which the law is not enforced.
Forced marriage is still practised all over the world, including, albeit illegally, in the UK and US; and if marriage does not require consent, then, following that logic, neither does any subsequent sexual intercourse. Many married women cannot even leave the home without their husband’s permission. Women who protest or try to escape, or so much as talk to another man, risk being beaten or murdered in an ‘honour killing’. In 2010, a twelve-year-old Yemeni girl, Elham al-Assi, died from internal bleeding three days after being made to marry a man twice her age; according to her mother, her husband had tied her up and raped her.
Marriage Today
When I was a child, it was customary for a woman to sit in the passenger seat when there was a man in the car, or in a back seat if there were two men, because everyone assumed that men ought to be in charge, do most of the talking, and enjoy the better view. Things have improved since then: women have much more economic and political clout than they did just thirty or forty years ago, and men are much more egalitarian in their approach to matrimony.
But women still shoulder the bulk of the housekeeping and childrearing, even when working full-time. A married man is likely to pursue his career as though he were still single, while a married woman is expected to forfeit her public life to follow her husband and care for the young, the old, and the infirm of the family.
In the workplace, employers look favourably upon married men, who are deemed to be more mature and responsible, while married women may be passed over for fear that they will go off to have babies or, worse, refuse to collude with the patriarchy. A vicious circle sets in. Because the man brings in more money, his time is prized and prioritised, while the woman’s unpaid contributions, which she fits around the man, remain largely invisible. The more the man earns, the more the woman can afford to slip into subordination, with the middle classes leveraging their privilege to entrench the old gender stereotypes.
Marriage has undoubtedly changed for the better. But this raises an awkward question. If marriage has been stripped of so many of its traditional assumptions—female obedience and dependence, division of labour, indissolubility, compulsory heterosexuality—what is it that we are still clinging on to?
Is It Really Love?
The hard truth is that a lot of people tie the knot because they are terrified of loneliness, or buckle under the social and psychological pressure that bears upon the unmarried state. But in the longer term, marriage might be even lonelier than its alternatives, and that’s before it breaks up. ‘The trouble,’ mused the writer Charlotte Brontë (d. 1855), ‘is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.’
There is also an argument that marriage is detrimental to community, undermining ties with neighbours, friends, and relatives. ‘Families, I hate you!’ wrote André Gide in Fruits of the Earth (1897), ‘bolted homes, shut doors, jealous repositories of happiness.’ There is of course the intimate relationship with the spouse, but, like eating the same meal every day, sex can quickly lose its appeal when it becomes a habit, or when it is taken for granted, or when the man, being married, lets himself go—wherefore the proliferation of sex manuals aimed at married women.
In the spring of its rapture, romantic love seems to enclose the germs of freedom and fulfilment, but, with the turning of the seasons, yields nothing but failure and frustration—and it is worth remembering that man had no time for romantic love back in the day when woman was his possession. Romance took the form of ‘What’s for dinner?’ followed by a grump and a stiff drink.
Equality Is Not Liberation
The gay rights movement fought long and hard for gay marriage, and still carries on the fight. But ironically, this obscured the feminist message by making marriage seem like the crowning glory of love and a fundamental human right. David Cameron as Pater Patriae (a Roman honorific meaning ‘Father of the Fatherland’) declared that he supported gay marriage because he was a conservative, not in spite of it: and marriage, even gay marriage, or especially gay marriage, is a profoundly conservative institution.
Equality in marriage as in everything is of course to be welcome, but equality in this case should not be confused with liberation. To have the right to do something because others have it is one thing, to exercise that right is quite another.
In The Second Sex (1949), the feminist and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote that ‘marriage is obscene in principle insofar as it transforms into rights and duties those mutual relations which should be founded on a spontaneous urge’.
At a time of such unparalleled social freedom, why, say many feminists, should we limit ourselves to an inauthentic, monotonous, and potentially calamitous life of state-enforced monogamy?
Are we really so brainwashed, and so cowered, that we cannot rise up to a freer way of living? And could the state please stop penalising those who do?
Continue Exploring
If this essay spoke to you, you might look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
Plato’s ladder of love: from the beauty of the body to Beauty itself.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 19 August 2026.
The Man Who Coined ‘Platonic Love’
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the knowledge of Greek was lost in the West. In around 321 CE, the philosopher Calcidius had published a Latin translation of the first part of Plato’s Timaeus, which for almost 800 years remained the only substantial section of Plato available to the Latin West.
Fortunately, the study of Plato continued in the Byzantine Empire and Islamic world. At the 1438-39 Council of Florence, the Byzantine scholar George Gemistos Plethon reintroduced Plato to the West as part of a failed attempt to repair the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western Church and present a united front to the Ottoman Empire (Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans in 1453).
While in Florence, Gemistos Plethon made an impression on the banker, politician, and patron of the arts Cosimo de’ Medici, who had, among others, commissioned the David of Donatello, the first freestanding male nude sculpture since antiquity. He persuaded Cosimo to establish an institute and informal discussion group, now known as the Platonic Academy of Florence, which, under Cosimo’s protégé Marsilio Ficino, went on to translate all of Plato’s extant works into Latin. This, in turn, ignited and inflamed the humanist Renaissance.
It is also Ficino who coined the term ‘Platonic love’ (amor platonicus), which first appears in a letter that he wrote to Alamanno Donati in 1476. In 1492, he published a series of Platonic love letters to Giovanni amico mio perfettissimo (‘Giovanni my most perfect friend’), the poet Giovanni Cavalcanti.
Today, ‘Platonic love’ means what Ficino, who lived in a much more closeted time, intended it to mean: a close relationship from which sex and sexual desire are absent, or not acted upon. Whatever it was, Ficino presented his love for Giovanni not as sexual but as elevating. But Plato’s vision of love is a lot more radical and ambitious than Ficino’s idea of it. We glimpse it in dialogues such as the Greater Alcibiades, in the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades, and in the Phaedrus, in the relationship between Socrates and Phaedrus. It also appears in other dialogues such as the Lysis, the Meno, and the Charmides, in which Socrates sees inside Charmides’ cloak and ‘catches fire’. Then, in the Symposium, Plato literally spells it out.
Socrates and Alcibiades
Socrates was remarkably full-blooded for an ascetic philosopher. In Xenophon’s Symposium, he says, ‘For myself I cannot name the time at which I have not been in love with someone.’ By all accounts, his greatest love was with the famously handsome Alcibiades (450-404 BCE), who was by some twenty years his junior.
In 432, Socrates and Alcibiades fought in the Battle of Potidaea, where the middle-aged plebeian and the young aristocrat became unlikely tent mates. In his Life of Alcibiades, Plutarch relates that ‘all were amazed to see [Alcibiades] eating, exercising, and tenting with Socrates, while he was harsh and stubborn with the rest of his lovers’. In Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades reports that Socrates singlehandedly saved his life at Potidaea and, even after that, let him keep the prize for valour.
Plato’s Symposium is set in 416, some 16 years after the Battle of Potidaea, and just before the fateful Sicilian Expedition that led Alcibiades to defect to Sparta. The setting is a drinking party hosted by the playwright Agathon. After each of the guests, including Socrates, has made a speech in praise of love, a drunken Alcibiades stumbles in supported by a flute-girl. When Alcibiades entreats everyone to drink and match him in his drunkenness, the other guests object to ‘drinking as if we were thirsty’ and suggest that Alcibiades instead make a speech in praise of Socrates.
Alcibiades says that Socrates always makes him admit that he is wasting his time on his political career while neglecting his several shortcomings. So he tears himself away from him as from the song of a siren and once again lets his love of popularity get the better of him. Socrates may look like a satyr and pose as ignorant, but, like the busts of Silenus (the tutor of Dionysus), he hides bright and beautiful images of the gods within him. Attracted by his wisdom, he tried several times to seduce him, but each time without success. Eventually, he turned the tables round and began to chase the older man, inviting him to dinner and on one occasion persuading him to stay the night. He then lay beside him and put it to him that, of all his lovers, he was the only one worthy of him, and he would be a fool to refuse him any favours if only he could make him into a better man.
Socrates replied in his usual, ironical manner:
Alcibiades, my friend, you have indeed an elevated aim if what you say is true, and if there really is in me any power by which you may become better; truly you must see in me some rare beauty of a kind infinitely higher than any which I see in you. And therefore, if you mean to share with me and to exchange beauty for beauty, you will have greatly the advantage of me; you will gain true beauty in return for appearance—like Diomedes, gold in exchange for brass.
After this, Alcibiades crept under the older man’s threadbare cloak and held him all night in his arms—but in the morning arose ‘as from the couch of a father or an elder brother’.
All this, says Alcibiades, took place before Potidaea. But how much of his drunken account is true, and how much invented by Plato to rehabilitate the reputation of Socrates? Socrates—remember—was put to death, in part, for ‘corrupting the youth’.
In the little-known Alcibiades of Aeschines, Socrates relates a conversation that he once had with Alcibiades. Socrates tells his companion that, if he was at all able to improve Alcibiades, this was not through any knowledge or art that he possessed, but only by the force of the love (eros) that the enfant terrible had aroused in him.
The relationship turns the conventional hierarchy of beauty on its head. Alcibiades possesses youth and physical beauty, not to mention birth and position, but it is the old, ugly, and plebeian Socrates who possesses the inner beauty that Alcibiades, when he dares, most desires.
Socrates and Phaedrus
The ostensible theme of Plato’s Phaedrus is love and pederasty, and the dialogue is full of flirtatious banter and sexual innuendo. Socrates persuades the young Phaedrus to pull out the speech on love that he is hiding under his cloak… The grass on which they lie down to read the speech is ‘like a pillow gently sloping to the head’ … After Phaedrus has read the speech, Socrates says, ‘the effect on me was ravishing. And this I owe to you Phaedrus, for I observed you while reading to be in an ecstasy … and like you, my divine darling, I became inspired with a phrenzy.’
But although the Phaedrus appears, especially at first, to be about love, it is more properly about the education of the soul, which might be led to wisdom by the power of love or dialectic (reasoned discourse), although not, as Socrates argues, oratory (rhetoric) or the written word. Just as the Phaedo used to be called, On the Soul, so the Phaedrus might have been called, On the Education of the Soul.
Despite his emphasis on Apollonian reason, Plato recognises that the original impulse for philosophy arises out of something as irrational and Dionysian as love. However, this love, although most fertile, is not of the reproductive kind, and must be reined in if it is to serve its purpose. For Plato, the body with its needs and pleasures is a source of distraction and confusion that holds us back from wisdom. In particular, the needs and desires of the body are why we waste our substance going to work and to war, focussing always on particulars rather than the universals that are the objects of wisdom.
Although Socrates and Phaedrus openly flirt with each other, Plato has them sit beneath a chaste tree. According to Pliny the Elder, the matrons of Athens, at the time of the Thesmophoria (the festival of Demeter and Persephone), used to place the stems and leaves of the chaste in their bedding to temper their lust.
When, at the end of the dialogue, Socrates prays to the gods of the place, he calls himself ‘a temperate man’; and when he asks Phaedrus to complete the prayer, Phaedrus responds, ‘Ask the same for me, for friends have all things in common.’ Thus, it is not as pederastic lovers but as friends and equals that they leave.
The genius of Plato is that the relationship between Socrates and Phaedrus is the very embodiment of the pure, ameliorating, elevating love of which they speak. And if this love begins as lust, this lust can be refined and sublimed on the ladder of love.
The ladder of love is the heart of Plato’s theory of love. To learn what it is, we must return to the Symposium and Agathon’s drinking party.
Diotima and the Ladder of Love
After Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and the host, Agathon, it is the turn of Socrates to speak in praise of love (at this point, Alcibiades has not yet barged in). Socrates slips into his famous dialectic mode and gets Agathon to agree that if love is not of nothing, then it must be of something, and if it is of something, then it must be of something that is desired, and therefore of something that is lacking.
Socrates then relates a conversation that he once had with a mysterious priestess, Diotima of Mantinea, who, he says, taught him the art of love. This Diotima (the name means, ‘Honoured by the gods’)—who may have been a foil for Aspasia of Miletus—told him that the something that Love lacks and desires consists of beautiful and good things, and especially of wisdom, which is both extremely good and extremely beautiful.
If Love lacks and desires beautiful and good things, and if all the gods are good and beautiful, Love cannot, as most people think, be a god. In truth, Love is the child of Poverty and Resource, always in need but always inventive. He is not a god, but a great spirit (daimon) who intermediates between gods and men. As such, he is neither mortal nor immortal, neither wise nor ignorant, but a lover of wisdom (philosophos).
No one who is wise wants to become wise, just as no one who is ignorant wants to become wise: ‘For herein lies the evil of ignorance, that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless satisfied with himself…’ The aim of loving beautiful and good things is to possess them, because the possession of good and beautiful things is called happiness, and happiness is an end in itself.
Love is rather like the philosopher himself: neither a god nor a mortal, but a channel between the two; neither wise nor wholly ignorant, but aware of his lack and driven by it. For Plato, desire and philosophy are aspects of one and the same impulse, one and the same love: the love that seeks to know.
Love and Immortality
Wild animals, said Diotima, enter into a state of love because they seek to reproduce and make themselves immortal. People too seek to make themselves immortal, and are prepared to take great risks, even to die, to attain fame and honour. Some people are pregnant in body and beget children who will preserve their memory, but a few are pregnant in soul and instead beget wisdom and virtue. As their children are more beautiful and more immortal, people who are pregnant in soul have more to share with one another, and a stronger bond of friendship between them.
Who when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory?
For Diotima as for Plato, love is something much larger than sexual or romantic attachment. It is the transcendent force that drives mortal beings to reach beyond their limited selves for the things they lack. It is the engine of art, philosophy, and, of course, of life itself.
The Ladder of Love
Diotima then told Socrates the proper way to learn to love beauty:
A youth should first be taught to love one beautiful body so that he comes to realize that this beautiful body shares beauty with every other beautiful body, and thus that it is foolish to love just one beautiful body. In loving all beautiful bodies, the youth begins to appreciate that the beauty of the soul is superior to the beauty of the body and begins to love those who are beautiful in soul, regardless of whether they are also beautiful in body.
Having thus transcended the physical, he gradually finds that beautiful practices and customs and the various kinds of knowledge also share in a common beauty.
Finally, on the highest rung of the ladder of love, he is able to experience Beauty itself, rather than its various apparitions. By exchanging the various apparitions of virtue for Virtue herself, he gains immortality and the love of the gods.
This is why love is so important, and why it deserves so much praise.
The beautiful youth is not the destination, but only the first rung of the ladder. He is only the apparition of beauty. But if we keep on climbing, we will arrive, first, at the Form of Beauty, and, finally, at the Form of the Good, which is the ultimate source of wisdom, virtue, and happiness. This close association of wisdom, virtue, and happiness is the seed of Aristotle’s virtue ethics.
How the Ladder of Love Changed Love
Before Plato, and for a long time after, people did, of course, fall in love, but they did not believe that this love might in some sense save them, as we tend to today. When, in the Iliad, Helen eloped with Paris, neither she nor he thought of their attraction as pure or noble or exalting. In the Odyssey, Penelope’s commitment to Odysseus is better understood in terms of dutiful love, or connubial fidelity, than modern, madcap romantic love. When, in the Aeneid, Dido falls in love with Aeneas, Virgil portrays her passion as a divine affliction that distracts both lovers from their duties and ends in ruin and death. Other models of love in antiquity include the ‘perfect friendship’ of Plato’s student Aristotle and the naturalism, or ‘beastliness’, of the Roman poets Lucretius and Ovid.
On the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, the Jewish and Christian models of love evolved alongside the Greco-Roman ones. In the Old Testament, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his precious son Isaac. But as Abraham is about to slay Isaac, an angel stays his hand. The Sacrifice of Isaac highlights that, although love and morality are important principles, unquestioning obedience to God is more important still, for God is morality, and God is love.
The New Testament, in contrast to the Old, elevates love for one another into the supreme virtue. More than a commandment, love becomes the royal road to redemption. One must even turn the other cheek to love one’s enemies. It is a far cry from the law of retaliation of the Old Testament: ‘…thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth…’
Even so, the Bible, which contains more named characters than Game of Thrones, contains not a single Bridget Jones story. Its greatest human love stories are between two women and two men: Ruth and Naomi, and David and Jonathan.
Jesus may have spoken Greek and might have come under the direct or indirect influence of Platonism. But even if he did not, the later Church sought to align Christian theology with classical philosophy—and Christian love, more properly called charity, and originally directed at God, began to blur with something much more individualistic.
The blending of Christian love with Platonism prepared the ground for the troubadour tradition that began in eleventh century Occitania (broadly, the southern half of France). A troubadour extolled refined or courtly love, which he directed at a married or otherwise unattainable lady, often of a superior rank, as a means of exalting himself and attaining to higher virtue. For the first time, love did not ultimately aim at, or depend on, God—and the Church duly condemned courtly love as a heresy. In a radical cultural reversal, the daughter of Eve turned from devilish temptress to sublime conduit of virtue, an earthly goddess in the place of God.
The troubadour tradition, which had remained an elite and minority movement, died out around the time of the Black Death in 1348, but prepared the ground for the modern conception of romantic love as the only thing left that might save us.
Continue Exploring
If you enjoyed this essay, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships. For a broader exploration of love, desire, jealousy, and the emotions that shape our lives, see Heaven and Hell: The Psychology of the Emotions.
Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep touching noses in their shared tomb at Saqqara, c. 2400 BCE.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Essay substantially revised on 8 September 2026.
Ancient Egyptian sources are largely silent on the subject of same-sex love. Our insights into the matter come from just three areas:
A myth about the gods Horus and Seth
A historical tale about Pharaoh Neferkare and his general Sasenet, and
The tomb of court officials Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep.
Horus and Seth
In the Contendings of Horus and Seth, a myth with several versions, Seth and his nephew Horus vie for the throne of Egypt. Seth keeps on trying to get the better of Horus. At last, uncle decides to subjugate nephew by inebriating, seducing, and inseminating him.
‘How beautiful are your buttocks, how vital!’ This line, used by Seth on his nephew, is without a doubt the oldest chat-up, gay or straight, in all of recorded history.
In the event, Horus is not all that drunk, and succeeds in catching Seth’s semen in his hand. The next day, he shows his manky hand to his mother Isis, before washing it in the Nile. Together, Horus and Isis plot their revenge over Seth…
Horus finds Seth’s lunch and masturbates into his lettuce. After enjoying his dressed salad, Seth puts his domination case before the tribunal of the gods—but, of course, Horus disputes his claim. When Thoth calls forth their semen, that of Seth rises from the Nile, while that of Horus pours out of Seth’s mouth.
The myth suggests that, in Ancient Egypt as in Ancient Rome, the sticking point, if you’ll forgive the pun, was not so much with same-sex love per se, as with a male playing a passive or receptive role.
In 46 BCE, Julius Cæsar was rumoured to have submitted to Nicomedes IV of Bithynia, and mocked as ‘Queen of Bithynia’. A popular quip ran: Gallias Cæsar subegit, Cæsarem Nicomedes (Cæsar subjugated Gaul, and Nicomedes Cæsar).
It is notable that Horus had no qualms about being seduced by Seth, or even with bedding him, but only with being penetrated or inseminated by him.
Pharaoh Neferkare and General Sasenet
From three extent fragments, it is possible to reconstruct the twenty-third century BCE story of Pharaoh Neferkare (the long-reigning Pepi II) and his secret nightly visits to General Sasenet.
One night, a spy observed Neferkare going, on his own, from the royal palace to Sasenet’s house. Having arrived at the house, Neferkare ‘threw a brick after stamping with his foot. Then a ladder was lowered to him (and) he climbed up.’ Neferkare spent four hours in the house with Sasenet, leaving only ‘after his majesty had done that which he had wanted to do with him’. One fragment specifies that there was no woman, or wife, in Sasenet’s house, and the same incomplete sentence also contains the word ‘love’. The story ends with the spy confirming to himself that ‘the rumours about [Neferkare] going out at night are true’.
Although the tale is censorious of Neferkare’s conduct, this is more because it does not befit a king and god than because it involves same-sex love.
Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep
In the twenty-fifth century BCE, Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep shared the title of ‘Overseer of the Manicurists’ at the court of Pharaoh Nyuserre Ini. As with the Gentleman of the Bedchamber at the royal court of England, the title was much more prestigious than it sounds, since the pair would have been granted the rare privilege of touching the person of the pharaoh and would have had unrivalled access to him.
When they died, Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep were buried together in a mastaba tomb. In this tomb, they are severally depicted embracing and, in one instance, even touching noses, which in Egyptian culture generally signified kissing.
That their wives and children also feature in the tomb has led some to conclude that they were brothers rather than lovers—but having a family of their own need not have precluded them from being lovers, and in the tomb they are represented in the same mode as husband and wife.
So far as the written record goes, Nyankhkhnum and Khnumhotep are, I think, the oldest gays in history.
Like other ancient peoples, the Egyptians valued fertility and dominance, and disapproved of men who played a passive role. But they did not have a rigid convention of sexuality as either heterosexual or homosexual, and, at least in certain periods, and in certain strata, may have tolerated and even celebrated same-sex love.
I was interviewed on ‘the oldest gays in history’ by PRIDE:
If this essay spoke to you, you might also look into For Better For Worse, an unconventional exploration of romantic love, marriage, and lasting relationships.
You must be logged in to post a comment.