Symposium

Introduction

The Symposium is Plato's dialogue on the nature of eros (love, erotic desire), structured as a sequence of seven speeches delivered at an Athenian drinking party hosted by the tragic poet Agathon in 416 BCE to celebrate Agathon's first prize at the Lenaia drama festival. It is one of the most literary of the Platonic dialogues — the speeches are sharply differentiated by character and rhetorical style, the dramatic action (entrances, interruptions, the late arrival of Alcibiades) is integral to the philosophical work, and the dialogue closes not with argument but with the drunken Alcibiades's praise of Socrates and the eventual departure of the participants.

The Symposium contains the most lyrically extended single passage of philosophical writing in the Platonic corpus: Diotima's speech, reported by Socrates, in which the ascent from the love of beautiful bodies to the love of the Form of Beauty itself is laid out as the highest reach of human aspiration.

Form, length, date, language

The Symposium is a narrated dialogue: Apollodorus tells the story of the symposium to an unnamed friend, several years after the event, having heard it from Aristodemus, who was present. The double layer of narration is significant — the speeches reach us through multiple memories, and Plato repeatedly highlights the gap between the original event and the reported version. The work is approximately 22,000 words in Greek and was composed in Plato's middle period, conventionally placed around 385–370 BCE. The original language is Attic Greek.

The seven speakers are: Phaedrus (the dialogue takes its name from him as proposer of the topic), Pausanias (Agathon's lover), Eryximachus (the physician), Aristophanes (the comic playwright), Agathon (the host), Socrates (the philosopher), and Alcibiades (the brilliant and notorious Athenian politician, who arrives drunk after the speeches are over and delivers an unscheduled eighth speech in praise of Socrates).

Why it was written

The Symposium engages two distinct philosophical projects. The first is the analysis of eros as a distinct human phenomenon — not the diminished modern love but the full classical Greek concept of intense desire and longing, primarily but not exclusively sexual, that organizes substantial parts of human life. The work asks what eros is, what it aims at, and what its place is in a properly philosophical life.

The second is the working-out of how the metaphysics of the Forms connects to the ordinary human experiences that animate non-philosophical life. The ascent passage proposes that eros, properly understood, is the motive force that draws the soul from particular beautiful bodies, through beautiful souls, through beautiful institutions and knowledge, finally to the Form of Beauty itself. This is the most fully developed Platonic account of how the metaphysics is supposed to connect to the lived life.

There is also a political dimension. Alcibiades's presence at the dialogue's close is freighted with historical irony: the brilliant, beautiful Alcibiades, who in 416 BCE was at the height of his Athenian power, would within a few years lead the disastrous Sicilian Expedition, defect to Sparta, return to Athens, defect again, and die in exile. His failure to be transformed by Socrates's love — his inability to ascend the ladder Diotima describes — is the implicit tragedy framing the entire dialogue.

Structure and argument

The frame (172a–178a). Apollodorus narrates how he came by the story and arrives at the meeting place. The original symposium is recalled.

Phaedrus's speech (178a–180b). Eros is the oldest of the gods and the greatest source of aretē (virtue) in those who love.

Pausanias's speech (180c–185c). A distinction between two kinds of eros: the Heavenly (directed at the soul, more philosophical) and the Common (directed at the body, more transient). The distinction is the foundation for a defense of the Athenian conventions surrounding male same-sex relationships of the philosopher-student type.

Eryximachus's speech (186a–188e). A medicalized account: eros is the cosmic principle of harmony between opposites, manifested across physical, biological, and astronomical domains.

Aristophanes's speech (189c–193d). The most famous of the speeches: the myth of the original androgynes, spherical beings with four arms, four legs, two faces, who were split in half by Zeus and now wander seeking their other half. Eros is the longing for the original wholeness. The speech is presented as comic but carries a serious phenomenological claim: that the experience of intense love is the experience of recognizing a missing half of oneself.

Agathon's speech (194e–197e). Rhetorically elaborate but philosophically thin: eros is the youngest, most beautiful, and most virtuous of the gods.

Socrates's speech (199c–212c). Socrates dismantles Agathon's account through brief elenctic questioning (eros, being love of something, must lack what it loves; therefore eros is not beautiful but rather desires beauty). Socrates then reports a conversation with the priestess Diotima of Mantinea (the only female teacher in the Platonic corpus), in which Diotima developed a positive account of eros as the soul's pursuit of immortality through the production of offspring — biological children for ordinary lovers, intellectual and political works for souls of higher capacity. The speech culminates in the ascent passage (210a–212a): the soul that loves rightly progresses from the love of one beautiful body, to the love of all beautiful bodies, to the love of beautiful souls, to the love of beautiful institutions and laws, to the love of beautiful knowledge, finally to the vision of Beauty itself — the eternal, unchanging Form. This vision is the highest reach of human life.

Alcibiades's speech (215a–222b). Alcibiades arrives drunk and is invited to give a speech in praise of Socrates rather than of eros. He describes Socrates as a silenus (a hollow statuette of the satyr Silenus, ugly outside, containing golden images of gods within); recounts how he attempted to seduce Socrates and was rebuffed; and praises Socrates's character as singular among the men of the age. The speech is one of the most vivid character portraits in the philosophical tradition.

The closing (223b–223d). As the night wears on, the participants depart or fall asleep. Socrates remains awake, arguing into the morning with Agathon and Aristophanes that the same person should be able to write both tragedy and comedy.

Key passages

• 189c–193d — Aristophanes's myth of the original androgynes.
• 199c–201d — Socrates's refutation of Agathon: eros lacks what it loves.
• 201d–209e — Diotima's developed account of eros as longing for immortality.
• 210a–212a — the ascent passage, from particular beautiful bodies to the Form of Beauty.
• 215a–222b — Alcibiades's portrait of Socrates.
• 223d — the closing image of Socrates departing for the Lyceum at dawn.

Reception history

The Symposium has shaped the Western philosophical and literary traditions of love almost continuously. The Neoplatonist tradition (Plotinus especially) treated the ascent passage as a foundational text for the soul's return to the One. Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium (1469) defined Renaissance Platonism's theory of amor Platonicus (Platonic love), which shaped Italian Renaissance art, poetry (especially the dolce stil novo tradition through Petrarch and beyond), and the broader European understanding of romantic love.

The dialogue has also been a continuous reference in the history of sexuality. The Greek conventions of male same-sex relationships described in Pausanias's speech have been the subject of an enormous modern literature, especially after the work of Michel Foucault (History of Sexuality, vol. 2, 1984) and David Halperin (One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 1990). The Symposium is one of the foundational texts for understanding ancient sexuality and for the modern academic field of queer classical studies.

The twentieth century produced influential literary and dramatic responses. The dialogue is one of the inspirations for Iris Murdoch's novels (especially The Black Prince) and her philosophy of love (in The Sovereignty of Good, 1970). Anders Nygren's Agape and Eros (1930–1936) used the Symposium's account of eros as the foil for a contrasting Christian account of agape.

Contemporary engagement

The standard scholarly editions include the Loeb (W.R.M. Lamb), R.E. Allen's Yale translation with commentary, Christopher Rowe's Aris and Phillips edition (1998), and the Hackett edition by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff. Major recent scholarly monographs include Stanley Rosen's Plato's Symposium (1968), Frisbee Sheffield's Plato's Symposium: The Ethics of Desire (2006), and the relevant chapters in the Cambridge Companion to Plato. Active scholarly debates concern the philosophical seriousness of the non-Socratic speeches (do they advance the argument or merely set it up?), the relation between Diotima's account and the surrounding speeches, the interpretation of the ascent passage (allegorical or developmental?), and the political reading of Alcibiades's intrusion.

Further reading

• Plato — the author
• Socrates — the philosophical protagonist
• Platonism — the tradition
• Neoplatonism — the tradition that most extensively developed the ascent doctrine
• Eudaimonia — the human end that the ascent claims to reach
• Virtue — the ethical concept the dialogue's various speakers connect to eros

The most literary of the Platonic dialogues. The classical Western text on the nature of love.