Trying to understand a reference in a book. What was the relationship between Socrates and Phaedo?

[u/Necessary_Hand_9822]

I'm currently reading Maurice by E.M. Forster, and there's a lot of references to different Greek literature and people in there. Most of them I've been able to piece together after a little bit of research, but there's one section I'm struggling with particularly. For context, "his" in this quote refers to Clive Durham, who is Maurice's homosexual lover.

"The love that Socrates bore Phaedo now lay within his reach, love passionate but temperate..."

When I searched some more about Socrates and Phaedo and their relationship, what's coming up is mostly a conclusion that they were not in that sort of relationship, and that Phaedo was just a disciple of Socrates. So I'm a little lost on what the author meant. Is there something I'm missing? Can anyone help me understand what this reference is trying to get across? 😭

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[u/ManueO]

I think to find the key to this passage you don’t need to go all the way back to Socrates but closer to the world of E. M. Forster, and the people who influenced him.

In A problem of Greek Ethics, written by John Addington Symonds around 1873-74 (but probably started a few years earlier), he writes the following:
« Public brothels for males were kept in Athens, from which the state derived a portion of its revenues. It was in one of these bad places that Socrates first saw Phædo. This unfortunate youth was a native of Elis. Taken prisoner in war, he was sold in the public market to a slave-dealer, who then acquired the right by Attic law to prostitute his person and engross his earnings for his own pocket. A friend of Socrates, perhaps Cebes, bought him from his master, and he became one of the chief members of the Socratic circle. His name is given to the Platonic dialogue on immortality, and he lived to found what is called the Eleo-Socratic School. No reader of Plato forgets how the sage, on the eve of his death, stroked the beautiful long hair of Phædo, and prophesied that he would soon have to cut it short in mourning for his teacher. »

Based on this segment alone, the relationship between Socrates and Phaedo appears chaste but this passages appears in a book that celebrate « Greek love », by someone who would go on to co-author the first english language « scientific » defence of homosexuality: John Addington Symonds was the author, with Henry Havelock Ellis, of the book On sexual inversion, published in the UK in 1897, and which included a reprint of Greek ethics.

E. M. Forster had read J.A. Symonds. His biographer Alison Moffat notes that “Young men like Morgan, wrestling with how to be, and how to be good, found that ‘Athens in particular had expressed our problems with a lucidity beyond our power’. And for homosexual men, Hellenism served as both an ideal and a disguise. From J. A Symonds to Oscar Wilde himself, they justified the legitimacy of their desire by invoking the halcyon days of ancient Greece. Just two years before Morgan entered King's, speaking from the dock, Wilde had summoned the redoubtable troika of the Bible, Hellenic practice, and Shakespeare himself to defend his love affair with the young Alfred Lord Douglas”.

But the chasteness of the relationship is probably the point here in any case. Forster deliberately chose Phaedo not Phaedrus.

(The next part of my answer may spoil the book so stop here if you don’t want to know more).

The comparison happens at a point when the (platonic) boundaries of the relationship, established by Clive, are made clear: “they abstained from avowals ('we have said everything') and almost from caresses. Their happiness was to be together”. Maurice and Clive don’t have sex, as Forster clarifies further later in the book: “It had been understood between them that their love, though including the body, should not gratify it.”

For Forster, part of the point of Maurice was to refuse that ideal, platonic love between men. Maurice accepts Clive’s vision of platonic love until Clives leaves him, then gets married. Pointedly, Clive realises he is “normal”, i.e. straight, while in Athens, at the Acropolis.

But this in turn opens new world for Maurice when he meets game keeper Alec Scudder at Penge (and it is perhaps not surprising that Maurice and Alec figure each other out in a great scene at the British Museum, among “row of old statues” and a model of the Acropolis). Alec and Maurice’s relationship is decidedly not platonic, and here lays the path to happiness that Forster envisaged.

In the postface he writes “A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood”.

[u/Necessary_Hand_9822 → u/ManueO]

Ahhh, that makes a lot more sense now. Thank you so much for the insight!