The Kiss and the Soul

Abstract

An epigram attributed to Plato is the fountainhead of what was to become a widespread topos in Hellenistic and Roman poetry, namely the passage of the lover’s soul into the beloved through the kiss - a theme that extends to later literature too. Though it originated in connection with homoerotic love, the motif is later applied to heterosexual love too, and sometimes it is reversed, with the lover absorbing into himself the beloved’s soul. Lovers mutually exchange the soul through the kiss in Petronius, where the idea that transfusing the soul into the beloved produces a sort of amorous ‘death’ also appears. All these traits are further developed in the Greek novel and in the Greek and Roman literature of the imperial period. A Latin reworking of Plato’s epigram transmitted by Gellius is particularly interesting in this connection.