A dialogue-essay defending married, heterosexual love against traditional Greek pederasty, framed by the true story of a widow who abducts the young man she wants to marry.
The Amatorius ("On Love") is one of Plutarch's dialogue-essays in the Moralia, cast as a conversation recalled years later by Autobulus to his brother Flavianus. The frame story is scandalous by the standards of classical Boeotia: Ismenodora, a wealthy widow of Thespiae, wants to marry a much younger man, Bacchon, and when his male admirers try to block the match on grounds of propriety and age, she simply has her friends seize him and carry him off to her house. While the town argues over the abduction, a group of Plutarch's father's friends -- Pisias, Anthemion, Zeuxippus, Plutarch's father himself, and the philosopher Pemptides -- debate a much larger question on the slopes of Helicon during a festival of Eros: is real erotic love only possible between an older man and a boy, as convention and much of Greek poetry assumed, or can a woman be the object of the same elevated, philosophical passion?
The debate becomes a sustained argument for married love. Pemptides voices the conventional pederastic position, that love of women is mere animal appetite while love of boys can rise to friendship and virtue; Plutarch's father and his allies answer that only a relationship between equals who can share a whole life -- which for them means marriage -- can mature into the lasting partnership Eros is supposed to produce. They bring in myth (the story of Eros and Anteros at Thespiae), Platonic ladder-of-love imagery reworked toward marriage instead of boy-love, and a startling defense of women's capacity for virtue, illustrated by extended examples such as the Galatian queen Camma, who avenges her murdered husband by poisoning his killer at their own wedding toast, and a Roman woman during the civil wars who hides underground with her fugitive husband and secretly bears his child there.
The dialogue ends by returning to the frame: word arrives that Bacchon has stopped resisting and is going through with the marriage to Ismenodora after all, and the company heads off, amused, to see it happen. The work matters both as a rare sustained ancient argument for companionate marriage as the highest form of Eros, and as evidence of how much room first-century Greek elite culture still gave to open debate about sexuality, gender, and whose love "counts."
“Leave out of your account, for now, the poetic meadows and shades, the intertwining of ivy and bindweed, and all the other things of that sort which those who seize upon such settings crave to inscribe”
— Amatorius · read this chapter →
“there was in Thespiae a woman, Ismenodora, splendid in wealth and family and, by Zeus, orderly i”
— Amatorius · read this chapter →
“a gymnasiarch rules, and a lover rules a youth, and once he has come of age, the law and a general rule him”
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“Just as there were once three factions at Athens—the Men of the Shore, the Men of the Highlands, and the Men of the Plain—harshly opposed and at odds with one another, and then all came together and, casting their votes, brought them all to Solon”
— Amatorius · read this chapter →
“Why, he has already given in to Ismenodora," Diogenes said, "and now, willingly taking up a garland and a white cloak, he is ready to lead the way through the marketplace to the god.”
— Amatorius · read this chapter →
It is a dialogue-essay arguing that true, philosophical Eros belongs in marriage between a man and woman, not only in the traditional Greek relationship between an older man and a younger boy. It is framed by a real incident: a wealthy widow, Ismenodora, has the young man Bacchon abducted so she can marry him, and the debate over that scandal becomes the occasion for the larger argument.
Ismenodora is a wealthy, respected widow of Thespiae who wants to marry the much younger Bacchon. When his other suitors and guardians object on grounds of propriety and her age, she has him seized and brought to her house, and the town's reaction to this abduction opens the dialogue's debate about love.
Through the character of Plutarch's father and his allies, the dialogue argues that only love between equals who can build a whole shared life -- meaning marriage -- can mature into the lasting, virtue-producing partnership that Eros is supposed to create, against the conventional view that only love of boys reaches that level.
Camma is a Galatian queen whose husband is murdered by Sinorix, who then forces her into marriage; she takes a fatal poison herself while giving Sinorix a poisoned toast at their wedding, dying content that she has avenged her husband. Plutarch cites her, along with a Roman woman who hid underground with her fugitive husband during Vespasian's proscriptions, as proof that women are capable of the highest devotion and courage in love.
Word reaches the company that Bacchon has stopped resisting and is going through with marrying Ismenodora, putting on a garland and white cloak to process to the god's shrine; the group heads off amused to watch, closing the dialogue on the note that the marriage the whole debate praised is actually happening.
Moralia: Ad Principem Ineruditum · Moralia: Adversus Colotem · Moralia: Amatoriae Narrationes · Moralia: An Recte Dictum Sit Latenter Esse Vivendum · Moralia: An Seni Respublica Gerenda Sit · Moralia: An Virtus Doceri Possit · Moralia: An Vitiositas Ad Infelicitatem Sufficia · Moralia: Animine An Corporis Affectiones Sint Piores · Moralia: Apophthegmata Laconica · Moralia: Aquane An Ignis Sit Utilior · Moralia: Bruta Animalia Ratione Uti · Moralia: Comparationis Aristophanes Et Menandri Compendium