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The Eros problem in platonic research is here recognized to be that of abnormal homosexual love, particularly as between man and man, the well-known pederasty of ancient Greece. As is shewn by numerous quotations from his works, not only had Plato no understanding of woman, but love for a woman must have been absolutely foreign to him. When he accorded love so central a position in his works he had in mind homosexual love exclusively, and certainly not only the form of love we call friendship, but physical love, even when allied to highly spiritual conceptions. These views not only brought him into conflict with the Doric and Spartan cultures and with society as a whole, but also involved him in a moral conflict within his own person. This latter conflict drove him to an expansion of the Eros problem in the sublimated form of 'generation through the soul', and to an idealized conception of chastity, which he perhaps saw personified in Socrates.
The author shews us further how this instinct in its sublimated form as a hidden 'will to power' influenced Plato's philosophy in the Paedeia and Politeia, in which he saw himself as ruler. The inhibitions arising out of the moral conflict prevented Plato throughout his life from taking any active part in the destinies of his native land, and forced him into the realms of thought and philosophy instead of into those of action in which he would have taken greater pleasure.