The Crier

Palio and Plato: Your V-Day Guide to Faking the Classics

This Valentine’s Day, why not impress your date with the classics?

Michael Butterscotch · Cultured · Feb 12, 2007

Valentine’s Day.

Maybe you believe the whole buy-the-chocolates, buy-the-flowers idea of the holiday is the correct one. You succumbed to American commercialism or a pushy, high school girlfriend’s insistence on a “perfect” Valentine’s Day, and realized that $30 or so spent at Hallmark was the easiest way to guarantee a night without arguing — or at least some decent head.

More likely, you were the kid who was more than happy that your elementary school teachers required everyone to drop off little valentines into the brown paper mailboxes of every student in the class — somehow, you felt that the cutesy, Jon-Benet clone wouldn’t have left “U R Foxy” conversation hearts for you otherwise.

For both camps, and everyone in between, college is different. And a surprisingly little used, yet LS&A appropriate, approach to procuring and wooing a honey? Using your knowledge of the classics. Or at least faking enough that they won’t notice.

There’s surely enough freshmen girls, cute (or at least lonely) enough, fresh out of Great Books 192, all flushed with Virgil’s verse, and identifying a little too much with Queen Dido. Win her over as you quote Lysistrata. Tell her she reminds you of Briseis. Or was Chriseis the pretty one? Either way, who needs the bow of Eros when you can recite Aristophanes’ theory of human love from memory?

And if the object of your affection reacts well to the line, “I want to flay you like Xerxes did the Hellespont?” Well, it doesn’t get much kinkier than that.

Memorize the following passage. Trust me, it’s just about all you’ll need to either spark a conversation with a Classics major at Ashley’s, or re-ignite the spark with your current mate.

From Plato’s The Symposium (translated by Christopher Gill, Penguin Classics)

“The Speech of Aristophanes:” Aristophanes, one of the guests at Socrates’ fun Greek mixer, presents the concept that humans were once double what we were (four arms, two hearts, two brains, etc), and an angry Zeus split us in two “just as the Arcadians have been by the Spartans.”

“Each of us is a matching half of a human being, because we’ve been cut in half like flatfish … and each of us is looking for his own matching half … When a lover of boys, or any other type of person, meets that very person who is his other half, he is overwhelmed, to an amazing extent, with affection, concern and love. The two don’t want to spend any time apart from each other … ‘love’ is the name for the desire and pursuit of wholeness.”