For Better For Worse: Essays on Sex, Love, Marriage, and More

by Neel Burton

Some people are pregnant in body and beget children to preserve their memory; but others are pregnant in soul and choose instead to beget wisdom and virtue. As their children are more beautiful and more immortal, people who are pregnant in soul have more to share with one another and a stronger bond of friendship between them. Everyone, says Plato, would rather have their children than human ones: Who when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory? Plato thereby distinguishes between the lesser immortality of leaving behind children and grandchildren, which is relatively easy to achieve but only preserves our memory for at most three or four generations; and the greater immortality of leaving behind a significant artistic, intellectual, or social legacy, which is more enduring but also harder to achieve. The childless Plato wrote the Symposium some 2,400 years ago, and here we are today still quoting from it.