Plato’s Cratylus begins with a quarrel about the etymology of names and then devotes many of its partly humorous analyses to personal names. Sedley has generally argued that Plato’s mature work ‘remained thoroughly committed to the principles of etymology’ but that ‘scholars of Plato have remained almost entirely deaf to similar [Cratylus-like] etymologies in his corpus’.Footnote ¹ This article provides further evidence for Sedley’s thesis by explicating a series of puns in Plato’s Symposium and concludes by finding a new etymological name pun with vulgar, sexual significance.

Two kinds of contextual evidence will play critical roles. First, Craik has argued in a series of papers that both Euripides and Plato pun on the sexual lore and terminology of the new Hippocratic literature sweeping through classical Athens, but that scholars seeking a clear literal sense for Euripides’ and Plato’s texts have often missed their subtle, erotic meanings.Footnote ² Second, Henderson’s The Maculate Muse (TMM) and his following series of Aristophanes’ translations transformed the academic study of ancient sexual humour, and will here provide a lexicon for elucidating various off-colour puns.Footnote ³

Though some are debatable, many scholars have already analysed various plays on names in the Symposium but have not collected these name puns together to show how central they are to the Symposium:

Agathon: Most interpreters have seen etymological puns on this name, especially in the passage where Socrates considers variations on the proverb ‘the good man goes uninvited to the dinner of the good man’ (174b3–c4). Hunter notes the same pun on Agathon’s name occurs in Aristophanes’ Frogs. Footnote ⁴

Aristophanes: This name might be glossed ‘appears to be the best’. Destrée sees puns on this meaning in the Symposium.Footnote ⁵

Diotima of Mantineia: Bury and many others suggest the roots of both these names are significant.Footnote ⁶ ‘Diotima’ may be glossed ‘Zeus-honour’ and this might be appropriate since her speech makes an ascent to divine mysteries. Diotima is called ‘Mantineian’ (Μαντινικῆς, 201d2, 211d1) which sounds like μάντις, a seer or prophet who is expert in μαντική or prophecy, which also would be appropriate.

Eryximachus: Craik says ‘The [doctor’s] name (lit. ‘combating retching’), was probably an auspicious one in a medical family (retching and vomiting being a regular part of medical symptoms and treatment) but is treated with bathos, as in the Symposium Eryximachus combats only a fit of hiccups.’Footnote ⁷ Bury also thinks ‘the etymological significance of the name … may partly account for the introduction of the λύγξ incident’ (n. 6, xxix).

Gorgias: Socrates says Agathon’s speech reminds him of the sophist Gorgias and is also like the head of a mythological Gorgon that turned onlookers into stone (198c1–3). This association between ‘Gorgias’ and ‘Gorgon’ is widely seen as a kind of pun.Footnote ⁸

Pausanias: After Pausanias (‘allayer of sorrow’, LSJ) finishes his speech, the narrator says ‘Pausanias paused’ (185c4), and the verb ‘to pause’ (παύω) appears many times soon afterwards, and these repetitions are generally seen as some kind of play on the root of Pausanias’ name.Footnote ⁹

Phalerum: In the dialogue’s frame, the narrator says an acquaintance ‘called out jokingly, “Hey you! You from Phalerum!”’ (172a4). The narrator remarks that his hometown was the port Phalerum, but the nature of the joke has puzzled many commentators. Sansone and Cotter have seen a crude reference to φαλλός or its alternate form φαλῆς, and compared it to passages in Aristophanes’ Acharnians.Footnote ¹⁰

Poros and Penia: The Symposium transparently plays with the roots of the names that Diotima gives to Eros’ supposed parents. The father Poros is ‘resourceful’ (πορισμός, 203d7) and the mother Penuria is ‘penurious’ (πένης, c6, ἔνδεια, d3) and ‘lacks resources’ (ἀπορία, b8). This is clearly wordplay.Footnote ¹¹ It is common to regard these characters as personifications of wealth and poverty,Footnote ¹² and personification is also perhaps a kind of pun since the names have a double meaning, both the character and the personified quality.

Poseidon: When the heavily drinking Alcibiades swears by the name of the god of the sea (214d6), Bury and Rosen see an ‘ironical pun’ on πόσις, ‘drink’, ‘beverage’.Footnote ¹³

Whether we accept all these or not, it is at least clear that name puns are a theme of the Symposium. Turning now to the complex series of puns in the banter about hiccups and sneezes before and after the speech by Eryximachus, the following arguments will lead to another new and surprising name pun and some subtle, Hendersonian sexual puns. For brevity, I focus only on two short passages in the Symposium, and argue the first contains puns on ‘tickling’, ‘sneezing’, and παύω, while the second contains puns on ‘hiccups’ and κόγχη.

In the first passage, Aristophanes announces that his hiccups have stopped and Eryximachus oddly accuses him of joking (Symp. 189a1–8):

A surprising number of theories have been advanced to explain the obscurity of these jokes,Footnote ¹⁴ but previous accounts have missed Craik’s insight that this good-humoured banter clearly transports us back to the realm of Hippocrates. The verb ‘apply’, Craik rightly says, is the ‘mot juste of any [medical] treatment’ and the phrase ‘the orderliness of the body’, Craik says again, is ‘a grandiose expression with a scientific tone’.Footnote ¹⁵ I will examine three specific terms for their medical and sexual meanings in this passage and then advance to a broader interpretation.

The word translated by ‘tickling’ (γαργαλισμῶν) is so defined in LSJ and Dover’s commentary (112) but the Greek–Spanish DGE gives as a second meaning ‘sexual excitation’. Plato’s Phaedrus and the caricature of Agathon in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae clearly use this word to describe an especially sexual titillation (Phdr. 253e6; Ar. Thesm. 133). Given the connections between that play and the Symposium, the two most prominent literary portrayals of Agathon, this already suggests, as we will see, that the Symposium shares some of Aristophanes’ sexual vocabulary.

An essay by Berrey on the Hippocratic On Bones, however, translates γαργαλισμός more specifically as ‘orgasm’,Footnote ¹⁶ which seems correct there since it concerns the titillation that accompanies ejaculation.Footnote ¹⁷ I slightly adapt his translation to bring out the points relevant here:

Thus the word ‘tickling’ in the above banter may mean ‘orgasm’ and so has just the kind of ambiguity needed for a sexual pun.

The supposed connections or analogies between sneezing and orgasm have been a perennial theme in folklore and jokes, and in modern times have even become the subject of medical research.Footnote ¹⁸ At a basic level, both are caused by a kind of tickling and both relieve a kind of itch.

In the Hippocratic and Aristotelian corpora, the medical theories of sneezing and ejaculation are remarkably similar and closely related. Ejaculation was understood in the above passage from On Bones to be the emission through a πόρος (‘passageway’) of concentrated semen containing πνεῦμα (‘spirit’ or ‘breath’), and Aristotle also defines ‘the nose is a passageway for πνεῦμα … a sneeze goes through this passageway and is the emission of concentrated πνεῦμα …’Footnote ¹⁹ The Aristotelian Problemata investigates the physiology of sneezing at some length (961b9–963b9, 897a1–b13) and holds that the supposed suppression of sneezing during sleep diverts the πνεῦμα downwards away from the nose and so causes nocturnal emissions. This virtually identifies sneezing and ejaculation (963a5–11):

The Problemata also suggests, without much sense of romance, that diseases like colds that are caused by too much phlegm can be cured by sexual intercourse, since this will draw off the excess of phlegm-like sperm (865a32–34, 878b14–17).

To sum up various views in the ancient medical literature, both sneezing and ejaculation are expulsions of concentrated pneuma, from the brain’s moisture, through passageways, occasioned by tickling or titillation, or by heat and friction, requiring stuffiness or turgidity, and leading to ‘spasms’ (σπασμοί). Thus at a time when our bodies were full of mysteries, the medical literature that this banter in the Symposium parodies saw a surprisingly close resemblance between sneezing and ejaculation.

Long before Freud taught us to see the nose as a phallic symbol, West concluded the sixth-century poet Hipponax had used the nose as a symbol for the penis.Footnote ²⁰ Davies claimed to find evidence in a Greek inscription on a fifth-century wine cup by Douris that ‘nose’ and ‘sneeze’ were used as euphemisms for penis and orgasm, and even anticipated my thesis that Aristophanes’ ‘sneezing’ in the Symposium should be interpreted as another example of the same wordplay.Footnote ²¹

One further insight about an undetected name pun places the sexual nature of the jokes in the banter about hiccups beyond question. Several scholars have noted that the two brief exchanges between Aristophanes and Eryximachus about hiccups contain a cluster of instances, ten by my count, of the verb ‘to stop’ or ‘to pause’ (παύω).Footnote ²² As above, their first exchange is preceded by the narrator’s interjection that concludes Pausanias’ speech, ‘And so Pausanias paused’ (185c4), which similarly draws attention to the same verb. Rettig thought Aristophanes deliberately expressed his relief that Pausanias’ immoral speech had finally reached its end by pointedly repeating this verb (157). Hooper’s paper correctly argued that the cluster implied some critique of Pausanias’ speech but did not see the sexual puns.Footnote ²³

This repetition of παύω in the Symposium has not been compared to a similar cluster in an obviously bawdy context in Aristophanes’ Peace that will provide the key to the joke here.Footnote ²⁴ Immediately before the cluster in Peace, the protagonist explicitly refers to masturbation (289–91):

Olson’s commentary translates δεφόμενος as ‘while jerking off’Footnote ²⁵ but Henderson’s remark on this passage will be relevant below: ‘the middle voice of the [last three] verbs implies self-gratification … Other appearances of masturbation … suggest that the motif was popular in stage-business and farcical jokes …’ (ΤΜΜ 221, n. 47).

If we apply Henderson’s insight that the middle voice, signifying actions that agents do to themselves, denotes self-gratification in sexual contexts, we can unravel the humour in Peace that follows these lines, which depends throughout on recognizing that ‘to stop’ in the middle can have a specifically sexual sense. παύω most often has the causal sense ‘to make to end, to make an end of’ (LSJ). In the following scene, ‘to stop myself’ is better translated by the exact equivalent in colloquial English, ‘I finish myself off’, that is, ‘I masturbate until orgasm is reached’. It is possible to find published instances of the colloquial ‘to finish off’ with the meaning of ‘to have an orgasm’.Footnote ²⁶

In the following excerpt from Peace, the jokes emerge if we translate both the active and middle of παύω ambiguously either as ‘to stop’ or as ‘to finish myself off’, since Aristophanes himself is playing with that ambiguity. Here the leader of the chorus eagerly imagines getting his ‘hands’ on a female statue (perhaps longer than it was wide and so with a vaguely phallic shape) representing the Goddess of Peace and gets so carried away he begins ‘dancing’. The verb ‘to dance’ is sometimes used in Aristophanes as a euphemism for sexual acts (TMM, 125.75), and his complaint that his ‘legs’ are moving on their own indicates the actor’s exaggerated, leather phallus (sometimes depicted as nearly as long as a leg) is somehow becoming erect (TMM, 110.6). ‘Raising legs’ also sometimes referred to sex acts (TMM, 173.317). To enjoy the humour here it is important to know, as Henderson also helpfully tells us, that in ancient comedy ‘The ability to perform the sex act thrice in succession was apparently considered proof of great virility’ (TMM, 121.49).

The protagonist in this scene only half-heartedly tries to prevent the chorus leader from masturbating (321–36):

The key point here is that the cluster of instances of the verb ‘stop’ clearly coincides with a scene of masturbation, and παύω clearly refers to ‘finishing off.’ Once this is seen, it is also clear that the joke in Plato’s Symposium shared by Aristophanes and Eryximachus turns on the same sexual sense of παύω.

Thus three terms packed together in the banter between Aristophanes and Eryximachus can have sexual meanings. ‘Titillation’ can be sexual titillation or even orgasm. ‘Sneezing’ is analogous to ejaculation in the medical discourse they are parodying and perhaps too in ancient popular lore. ‘To stop’ in the middle voice can be a pun for having an orgasm by ‘finishing off’. The jumble of jokes in the Symposium’s banter can now be revealed in a paraphrase of the first passage quoted above (189a1–6):

Eryximachus was right that Aristophanes was joking.

The puns on the two meanings of παύω, ‘stopping’ and ‘finishing off’, were preceded by the narrator’s sophistical jingle ‘Pausanias paused’. We can now see that Plato was connecting a dot or two to make sure we get the joke. That is, the jingle links the name to its root just before the banter gives that root its sexual meaning. Pausanias becomes a ‘jerk’ because his name is equivalent to the vulgar ‘jerk off’.

It could be argued that the meaning ‘finishing off’ is just a particular application of the usual middle-voice meaning of παύω. But given the prominence of its sexual sense in two extended passages in Aristophanes and Plato, and the many pages of commentary that have gone astray, future interpreters would appreciate finding in their dictionaries a definition such as:

This definition and the above glosses make it possible to backtrack and read the jokes in a second passage of banter a little earlier in the Symposium, for it is now probable that ‘hiccups’ too is a double entendre.

In ancient Greek, hiccups like ejaculation were said to cause ‘spasms’ (for example Thuc. 2.49.4). As with ejaculation, the Problemata also attributed hiccups to an excess of πνεῦμα breaking through: ‘and this spasm is called a hiccup’ (962a11). Galen actually compared the ejaculation of sperm to hiccups. When discussing various kinds of bodily spasms, he said:

Since both ejaculation and hiccups involve rhythmic spasms and pneuma, and since the ancient medical literature treated them in analogous ways, it seems the concepts were near enough for the purposes of a double entendre.

Eryximachus had earlier also recommended ‘gargling’ as a cure for hiccups but the word he uses is rare in classical literature (ἀνακογχυλίασον, 185e1). Apart from this passage, it is used only in Aristophanes’ Wasps (583–9) where it is a double entendre. The verb can be heard as ‘put it up your κόγχη’ and LSJ defines this last, a cognate of the English ‘conch’, as ‘anything like a mussel-shell, especially [a] shell-like cavity’. Although words may often, of course, simply have their literal meaning, Henderson explains that in bawdy contexts this is ‘a double entendre meaning “vagina” … [and] κόγχη is common in this obscene meaning …’ (142.160).

Though usually translated as something like ‘strong’ or ‘intense’, ἰσχυρός could also mean ‘hard’ (LSJ).Footnote ³¹ Thus while in English we can say that an erect penis is ‘hard’ or ‘stiff’, in Greek it is likely they could say it was ἰσχυρός.Footnote ³²

It therefore seems that Eryximachus was joining in the joking already in a second passage that takes place at the beginning of his banter with Aristophanes (185d7–e3):

These sentences can now be seen as rather brilliant if not entirely logical wordplay, as this paraphrase shows:

As in Peace, Eryximachus thus generously allows that Aristophanes may be in need of several ejaculations.

Unravelling all these puns brings into view some larger perspectives on the Symposium. Recognizing the etymological pun on ‘Pausanias’ brings that name into line with the other name puns in the Symposium. The pun, moreover, shows how Plato’s characters interpret Pausanias’ speech. The double entendres start right after Pausanias has given a moralistic and philosophical justification for having sex with young men, where he in essence proposed exchanging a course in ethics for sex (184c4–e4). The banter that follows is clearly and repeatedly associating Pausanias with ejaculation or orgasm. We can imagine Aristophanes grinning and sharing a laugh with Eryximachus, but their sly jokes have a sharp point. They are saying Pausanias is highly-sexed or lascivious, and that his real object is sex.

Aristophanes is thus calling Pausanias’ bluff and saying all his high-flying rhetoric was just a hypocritical way of rationalizing his relationship with Agathon. This is doubtlessly the correct way to interpret Pausanias’ speech. It cannot just be an accident that a preacher of morals intent on edifying the young men of Athens with sex ended up with the kind of strikingly beautiful, sexually voracious boyfriend satirized in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae.Footnote ³⁵ Thus Aristophanes and Eryximachus already anticipated some later reactions to Pausanias’ speech. Xenophon’s Symposium characterized Pausanias’ speech as a ‘defence of those wallowing in debauchery’ (ἀκρασίᾳ, 8.32 Marchant) and, for a modern example, Bury’s comment is still apt (n. 6, xxvi):

The banter and puns make the same point: Pausanias’ whole speech is sophistical special pleading for licentiousness, a euphemistic defence of exploitative sex.

In sum, Craik’s pointer toward the contemporary medical literature and Henderson’s readings of Aristophanes help us see that the banter after Pausanias’ speech contains a series of sophisticated puns. Several of these allude to orgasms and ejaculation, and they all lead to turning Pausanias’ name into a vulgar, sexual pun. This clarifies how Pausanias’ name belongs to the long list of other names in the Symposium involved in probable wordplay, and further confirms Sedley’s thesis that Plato’s mature dialogues remain committed to etymology.