Madness Restrained: The Erotics of Sôphrosunê in Plato’s Phaedrus

This article elucidates a disturbing enigma of Plato’s thought: the idea that the happiest homoerotic lovers are the ones that do not consummate their love. An analysis of the central speech of the Phaedrus (243e–257b) reveals that Plato expressed that idea in the form of the paradox of “madness restrained.” It is a love without sex because the soul of the philosophic lover, upon being reminded of the Form of Beauty by the sight of the beloved, is rationally possessed by the Form of Sôphrosunê (“Self-Restraint”), which induces, instead of bodily pleasure, the divine practice of care. In order to justify such altruistic abstinence, the dialogue disambiguates sôphrosunê in a series of agonistic speeches, and thus subtly illustrates how this ancient Greek value could be variously co-opted in the field of erotics. I conclude that despite a prominent strand of interpretation, Plato’s rhetorical paradox amounts to not much more than a sublimation of repression, and that this view was probably well received by his aristocratic audience because it is opposed to the liberal but decadent sexuality of the Athenian democratic ethos.