Nathan Tilley: Sterile Virgins and Procreative Texts: Platonic Intertexts in Methodius’s Symposium

Although earlier generations heaped disdain on Methodius’s Symposium, recent work on the dialoguehas thankfully brought to light the dialogue’s achievements. However, because scholars previously judged Methodius against the art of Plato’s dialogues, much of his use of Plato remains to be examined – in particular, themes of procreation. Elizabeth Clark has argued that tensions in Methodius’s depiction of the virgins as both erotic, yet also chaste and sterile arise from conflict between his erotic Platonic exemplar and anxiety about ‘non-textual’ virgins. I argue, however, that we can also see these tensions within Methodius’s Platonic intertexts themselves. Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus both serve as intertexts for Methodius, but the former privileges chaste partnerships as mechanisms of psychic reproduction while the latter depicts texts as potential sites for procreation. Methodius reworks these intertexts such that the virgins remain sterile in one sense as they give birth in beauty before the ‘celibate Bridegroom’ and yet also fertile as they reproduce textually through the reader. To demonstrate this claim, I first consider how Methodius draws on Plato’s depiction of Socrates and Alcibiades in the Symposium as an instance of chaste birth in beauty. Second, I show how Methodius takes up Plato’s notion of fertile logoi in Plato’s Phaedrus (274c-278e) and writes a dialogue that could reproduce chastity in readers. By making visible Methodius’s creative use of Plato, I hope to add to our understanding of Methodius and of textual pedagogy in late antiquity.