2.1 Diotima's Dance

THE NAME OF the heroine of Hyperion offers another hint of dance’s significance. In the final version she is known as Diotima. But in the Fragment of Hyperion she is named Melite. And in the Waltershausen paralipomenon, part of an even earlier version, Hyperion's lover, following Horace, is called Glycera—“the sweet one”—a name often used for hetaerae during the Hellenistic age. Taken together, these names suggest a constellation of associations. A long-standing tradition links Diotima with Aspasia, the cultured, educated, and brilliant courtesan who was Pericles's mistress. Born in the Ionian city Miletus, Aspasia was sometimes also rumored to be the mistress of Socrates. By calling attention to a Milesian birth, the name Melite subtly identifies Diotima with Aspasia, and Socrates's mistress with Pericles’s. This is especially significant if we consider that Hölderlin's Hyperion draws on, and indeed seeks to unite both the democratic politics of the ancient Athenians and Plato's philosophy. Despite their apparent opposition, both could perhaps be traced back to the Ionian intellectual currents that Aspasia herself helped introduce into Athens. And thus we might envision here the prospect of their reconciliation—a reconciliation that depends on reintroducing into the male-dominated polis, centered on the outdoor, public space of the agora, the domestic, interior, “female” space that had been excluded and marginalized. Miletus, moreover, was not only known for philosophy but for its dancing girls—Théophile Gautier, the nineteenth-century French poet and balletomane, invokes them in his description of Fanny Elssler. Indeed, as Thoinot Arbeau notes in his 1588 Orchésographie (Orchesography), Aspasia is said to have taught Socrates to dance. And if both tendencies grew corrupt when male philosophers and politicians failed to grasp the wisdom divulged by a woman, then perhaps it is by appreciating the dance of a woman, even learning to dance from a woman, that a less errant reception of this wisdom could be possible.

In the final version of Hyperion dance appears both times in Diotima’s summonses to the eponymous protagonist of the novel.