Plutarch is well known as a generally even-tempered expositor of the great tapestry of Greek history, literature, and philosophy, and a benign counselor on questions of ethical conduct and social mores, but there is another side to him, that of the accomplished polemicist, primarily in the area of philosophy, but also concerning his predecessors in the craft of history, and on occasion the poets as well. In all of Plutarch’s polemics, we can discern common threads. While historians (especially Herodotus) and poets are criticized primarily for their flawed socioethical views, the Stoics, Epicureans, and even Plutarch’s predecessors in the Platonic tradition have the inconsistencies in their positions relentlessly skewered, and the most absurd consequences of their misguided arguments teased out. This essay surveys a selection of Plutarch’s critiques of previous historians, then casts a brief glance at his censure of the poets, before turning to an examination of his polemics against rival philosophical schools, and lastly rival views within the Platonist tradition.

A presentation of the defining characteristics of Platonic love, bringing in to focus those features which were most influential in subsequent ages. Of particular interest is the distinction between higher (‘ouranic’) and lower (‘pandemic’) love, as well as the notion of love as a mechanism for striving after the divine. The overarching narrative in which the development of Platonic love unfolds from the theological speculations of the Middle Ages to guides for the etiquette of conducting heteroerotic relationships during the Renaissance is presented.

Taking its start from Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, this essay explores various possible antecedents in the philosophical tradition, Platonist and Stoic. It argues for a process of formalization, in the Hellenistic era and later, of the criteria for ‘noble’, or philosophical, erotic relationships, to be derived from such dialogues as Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus, and, not least, Alcibiades I, based on Socrates’ claim, at the end of the Phaedrus, that he possessed an erōtikē tekhnē. Such a tekhnē would have theōrēmata, and these were listed as (1) selecting a suitable love-object, or axierastos; (2) commending oneself to him; and (3) guiding him to moral and intellectual self-improvement. I suggest that Polemon, in the Old Academy, may have been instrumental in developing such a theory, but we find it formalized only much later, in the Didaskalikos of Alcinous, while further information is forthcoming from the Platonic commentaries of Hermeias (on the Phaedrus) and Proclus (on the Alcibiades). I argue that the Alcibiades seems to assume a more central role than the other dialogues in later Platonist theory, and acknowledge the important role of the Stoics in its formalization.

This essay undertakes a study of the views of Pico della Mirandola on Platonic love, stimulated as they are by the publication of a poem on the subject published in the mid-1480s by Girolamo Benivieni, a friend of his and of Marsilio Ficino. In a discussion of the Renaissance background, the essay emphasizes the importance of defusing the homosexual element of Platonic love by substituting maidens for boys. It then provides an extended discussion of Pico’s commentary on Benivieni’s poem, in which he draws on, not only the Symposium and Phaedrus of Plato, but also Plotinus’ Ennead III 5: On Love, and Hermeias’ commentary on the Phaedrus. A number of passages from the poem itself are also quoted and discussed.