In his Symposium, Plato stages a dialogue between two male lovers— philosopher Socrates and military general Alcibiades— to reflect on tensions between a physical, baser love and a virtuous, nobler love. The latter is closer to a pure Form of Beauty. Throughout the Symposium, these two kinds of love are examined in a series of dialogues by banquet guests, who are distinguished men of Athenian society and many married to women:

For our purposes, what is remarkable about these dialogues is not so much their deep philosophical exploration of Eros but that such exploration is expressed in contexts of homoeroticism and the beauty of the male body. In fact, unlike most modern heterosexual men, these banquet men seem unconcerned about threats to their masculinity when publicly discussing same-sex desires or bisexual behaviors.

As other scholars have noted, one of the West's greatest ironies is that its first explicit philosophical reflection on love begins as a discussion of homoerotic love. In fact, in Archaic and Classical Greece male–female relations were rarely eroticized. The “romanticization” of male–female courtship develops later in Hellenistic and Roman times and flourishes in our Christian era with the troubadour literary phenomenon (Konstan, 1994). Eventually, in contrast to Ancient Greece where it could be signified as a virtue, in our modern West, male homoerotic desire became medically signified as a neurosis. To clarify, I am not claiming that homoerotic desires in Ancient Greece (typically intergenerational) and the modern West (typically among consenting adults) are of the same “kind.”