Symposium

Introduction

The dialogue

The Symposium is told at two removes. In a short conversation in dramatic form, Apollodorus of Phaleron, a follower of Socrates, agrees to tell an unnamed companion about the dinner at which “the speeches on love” were made, as he had told it only “the day before yesterday” to an acquaintance, Glaucon, as they walked up to town from Phaleron (172a–173b). He was not there himself. The dinner took place “when we were still boys, when Agathon won with his first tragedy, on the day after the one on which he and the members of his chorus made the sacrifice for the victory” (173a), and Apollodorus has it from “a certain Aristodemus, of Cydathenaeum, a small man, always barefoot”, who “had been at the gathering”; he has asked Socrates about some of it, and Socrates “agreed with me that they were as that man told them” (173b). From 174a to the end Apollodorus reports what Aristodemus told him, much of it in reported speech, and he warns that “Aristodemus did not altogether remember all that each one said, nor again do I remember all that he told” (178a).

Aristodemus met Socrates “bathed and with his slippers on, which he seldom did”, on his way to dinner at Agathon’s, and came along uninvited at his bidding (174a–e). At Agathon’s house were the host; Phaedrus; Pausanias; the doctor Eryximachus; the comic poet Aristophanes; and others whom Aristodemus “did not remember very well” (180c). Socrates, who stopped on the way and stood in the neighbours’ porch, arrived “when they were about midway through their dinner” (175a–c). Since most of the company had drunk heavily the day before at the victory feast, they agree to drink as each wants, to send away the pipe-girl, and to spend the evening in speeches in praise of Love, as Eryximachus proposes in Phaedrus’ name (176a–177e). Late in the night Alcibiades arrives drunk with revellers (212c–e), and at the end a second band of revellers breaks up the order of the evening (223b).

Athenaeus, who quotes the frame (5.217b–c), dates the victory, at the Lenaea, to the archonship of Euphemus, 417/16 BC (5.217a–b); the Lenaea fell in midwinter, so the dinner falls early in 416. It is one of Plato’s longer works: fifty-two pages of Stephanus’ edition (172a–223d), seventy-two of Burnet’s. The ancient arrangement of the dialogues by Thrasyllus, which Diogenes Laertius preserves, puts it third in the third tetralogy, after the Parmenides and the Philebus and before the Phaedrus, with the subtitle “or On the Good”, and classes it as “ethical” (3.56, 3.58). The date of composition is not known. Aristophanes’ comparison of the cut halves to the Arcadians broken up “by the Lacedaemonians” (193a) seems to recall the Spartans’ breaking up of Mantinea into villages in 385 BC, and the dialogue is usually dated after that year (interpretation).

The question and the answers

The question is set by Phaedrus’ complaint, which Eryximachus reports: hymns and paeans have been made to other gods, “while for Love, a god so great and so mighty, not one of so many poets there have been has ever made any encomium” (177a–b). Each guest, “going to the right”, is to “speak a speech in praise of Love”, “the most beautiful he can”, Phaedrus first (177d). The word for love, erōs, is both the god and the passion, and the speeches pass between them; the English renders it “Love” where the god is named or praised and “love” for the passion, following Burnet’s capitals (see the Key Words).

Phaedrus praises Love as among “the very oldest” of the gods, with Hesiod, Acusilaus and Parmenides as witnesses, and as “the cause of the greatest goods for us”: shame at shameful things and love of honour in beautiful ones, so that an army “made of lovers and darlings” would defeat, “so to speak, all human beings” (178a–179b). Only lovers are willing to die for another, as Alcestis did for her husband, while the gods sent Orpheus away from Hades with “a phantom” because he would not die for love, and sent Achilles to the Isles of the Blessed for dying after his lover Patroclus (179b–180b). Love is “of the gods both the oldest and the most honoured and the most competent for the getting of virtue and happiness” (180b).

Pausanias answers that Love is not one: as there are two Aphrodites, “Heavenly” and “Common”, there are two Loves (180c–181a). “Every action is like this: done of itself, on its own, it is neither beautiful nor shameful” (180e–181a), and so with being in love. The Common Love loves women no less than boys, and bodies rather than souls; the Heavenly loves boys “when they are already beginning to have sense” (181b–d). The Athenian law about love is “intricate”: it encourages the lover and honours his excesses, yet fathers set tutors over their sons (182a–183d), because it wants to “test soundly and well” which lovers to gratify (183e–184a). The one gratification it allows is the “voluntary slavery” that concerns virtue: “it is wholly and in every way beautiful to gratify for the sake of virtue at least” (184b–185b).

Aristophanes has the hiccup, and Eryximachus speaks in his place (185c–e). He extends Pausanias’ double Love to the whole of nature: in medicine, which is “knowledge of the body’s matters of love with regard to surfeit and emptying” (186c), in music, where he corrects Heraclitus (187a–c), in the seasons, and in divination, “the craftsman of friendship between gods and human beings” (188a–d).

Aristophanes, his hiccup stopped by a sneeze, tells a story (189a–193d). Human beings were once of three kinds, male, female and androgyne, each round, with four hands and four legs and two faces; they “made an attempt on the gods”, and Zeus cut them in two (189d–190e). Each half seeks its other half; and if Hephaestus offered two lovers “to fuse you together and forge you together”, no one would refuse (192d–193a). “So to the desire and pursuit of the whole, love is the name” (192e–193a).

Agathon says that the others have praised Love’s gifts, not Love himself (194e–195a). Love is “the youngest of the gods”, “tender”, “supple in form”, and dwells “among the softest of the things that are”, in characters and souls (195a–196b); he is just, temperate, courageous and wise, “a poet so wise as to make another one too” (196b–197a); since his birth “from being in love with beautiful things every good thing has come to be for gods and human beings alike” (197b). The speech ends in a cascade of short rhyming clauses (197d–e), and the company applauds “on the ground that the young man had spoken in a way befitting both himself and the god” (198a).

The argument’s main stretch

Socrates professes to be at a loss. He had thought that “one must tell the truth about each thing made the subject of an encomium”; the others, it seems, “attribute to the thing the greatest and most beautiful things possible, whether they are so or not” (198d–e). He will tell the truth, he says, “in my own way”, once he has asked Agathon “a few small things” (199a–b). Love is love “of something”, and desires what it is love of; but “what desires desires what it lacks” (199d–200b). If Love is of beautiful things, as Agathon said, “then Love lacks beauty and does not have it”, and so is not beautiful, nor good (201a–c). “It looks like, Socrates, I knew nothing of what I said then,” says Agathon (201b).

Socrates then tells what he learned from “a woman of Mantinea, Diotima”, who once questioned him as he has questioned Agathon (201d–e). What is not beautiful need not be ugly: there is something “between”, as right opinion is “between intelligence and ignorance” (201e–202a). Love is not a god, since the gods are happy and beautiful and Love lacks beautiful and good things; nor is he mortal, but “a great daimon”, a go-between of gods and human beings (202b–203a). He is the son of Resource and Poverty, conceived at the feast for Aphrodite’s birth: “always poor”, “barefoot and homeless”, but a plotter for the beautiful and the good, “loving wisdom through all his life”, “in the middle between wisdom and ignorance” (203b–204a). So Love is “a lover of wisdom” (204b); Socrates’ mistake was to think Love “the beloved, not what is in love” (204c).

What does the one in love with beautiful things want? “That they become his” (204d). Put “good” for “beautiful”, and the answer is happiness, which needs no further end (204e–205a). All human beings want good things to be theirs always, and “love is of the good’s being one’s own always” (205a–206a). Its work is “giving birth in what is beautiful, both in body and in soul” (206b): all human beings “are pregnant both in body and in soul”, and beauty releases them from their birth-pains (206c–e). “For love, Socrates,” she says, “is not of the beautiful, as you think”, but “of begetting and giving birth in the beautiful”, since for a mortal “begetting is everlasting and immortal” (206e). Mortal nature lives on only by leaving behind “another, new, in place of the old”, in the body, in the soul, and in “our pieces of knowledge” (207d–208b); and the love of honour, which makes men die for immortal fame, is the same desire (208c–e). Those “pregnant in their souls” beget intelligence and virtue, as Homer and Hesiod begot their poems and Lycurgus and Solon their laws (208e–209e).

Then come “the perfect rites and those of the beholding”, which Diotima doubts Socrates could follow (209e–210a). The lover begins with one beautiful body, then all beautiful bodies, then the beauty in souls, in “ways of life and in laws”, in “kinds of knowledge”; “turned towards the great sea of the beautiful”, he gives birth to “many beautiful and magnificent speeches and thoughts”, until he “catches sight of a certain single knowledge” (210a–d), and at the end “will suddenly catch sight of something beautiful, marvellous in its nature” (210e): always being, neither coming to be nor perishing, not beautiful in one respect and ugly in another, nor in something else, but “itself by itself, with itself, single in form”, in which all other beautiful things share (210e–211b). There, “if anywhere, life is worth living for a human being, as he beholds the beautiful itself” (211d); and the one who sees it will give birth “not to images of virtue”, but “to true virtue”; and to him who has given birth to true virtue and nurtured it “it belongs to become loved by the gods, and, if to any other human being, to him too to become immortal” (212a). Socrates says that he is “persuaded”, and tries “to persuade the others too” (212b).

The ending

As Aristophanes tries to reply, a knocking at the door brings in Alcibiades, “very drunk”, wreathed with ivy and violets, with ribbons to wreathe Agathon for his victory; he finds Socrates beside Agathon, wreathes him too, and makes himself “ruler of the drinking” (212c–213e). Told that he must make a speech, he will praise no one but Socrates, and only “through likenesses”, “for the sake of the truth” (214c–215a). Socrates is like the sileni in the carvers’ shops, which open to show “statues of gods inside”, and like the satyr Marsyas, whose pipe-tunes possess those who hear them; Socrates does the same “with bare words” (215a–d). Before him alone of human beings Alcibiades is ashamed, and he runs from him “as if from the Sirens” (216a–c). Inside, Socrates is full “of temperance”; he despises beauty and wealth, “being ironic and playing with human beings” all his life (216d–e). Then Alcibiades tells “the whole truth” (217b) about how he tried to make Socrates his lover: alone with him, at the gymnasium, at dinner, and at last a whole night under one cloak (217a–219c), after which, he swears, “I had slept with Socrates nothing more out of the ordinary than if I had been sleeping with my father or an elder brother” (219c–d). He adds Socrates’ endurance and courage on campaign at Potidaea and in the retreat from Delium (219e–221c), and returns to the likeness: Socrates’ speeches too are “most like the sileni that are opened”, laughable outside, “most divine” within (221d–222a). He ends with a warning to Agathon (222a–b).

The company laughs; Socrates says Alcibiades has spoken all this to set him and Agathon at odds; they quarrel in fun over the places on the couch (222c–223a). Then “very many revellers” burst in, and order is lost (223b). Eryximachus and Phaedrus and others leave; Aristodemus falls asleep and wakes towards day to find only Agathon, Aristophanes and Socrates awake, drinking from a large bowl, while Socrates compels them “to agree that it belongs to the same man to know how to make comedy and tragedy” (223b–d). Aristophanes falls asleep first, then Agathon; Socrates, “having put them to sleep”, goes to the Lyceum, washes, and passes the day “as at any other time” (223d).

What is most exposed

A first-time reader is likely to be troubled at six points. The first is the setting of the speeches in Athenian pederasty. The love the guests praise is, for most of them, the love of a grown man, the “lover”, for a youth, his “darling” or “beloved”, and the question Pausanias argues is when it is “beautiful” or “shameful” for the youth “to gratify” his lover (182a–185b), where “gratify” (charizesthai) means to grant sexual favours. The English keeps the word throughout, and the Key Words say what it meant. The speakers do not agree about the practice, and the dialogue does not simply endorse it: Diotima’s ascent begins from the love of one beautiful body and leaves it behind (210a–b), and Alcibiades’ story is of a youth who offered himself and was refused (217a–219d).

The second is the word erōs. The speakers praise a god and describe a passion with one word, and their arguments move between the two. Socrates’ questioning ends by showing that Love, so described, is neither beautiful nor good (201c), and Diotima denies that he is a god at all (202b–d), so that the series of praises is overturned by the speech that ends it. The capitals of the English follow Burnet’s, and where he prints the god’s name the English has “Love”.

The third is Diotima. No source independent of the dialogue mentions her. Socrates says that she postponed the plague for ten years (201d), presents himself as her pupil, and has her answer “like the perfect sophists” (208c). Whether she is a historical person or Plato’s invention the text does not settle; it gives her the speech in which the dialogue’s argument is made.

The fourth is the turn at 206e: “For love, Socrates,” Diotima says, “is not of the beautiful, as you think”, but “of begetting and giving birth in the beautiful”. Socrates’ questioning had made Love the love of beautiful things (201a–b); Diotima makes beauty the medium of a begetting whose end is immortality (206e–207a), and the ascent then makes the beautiful itself the end (210e–211d). How these fit is the dialogue’s hardest question (interpretation), and the reader should notice where each step is taken.

The fifth is the ascent itself. The lover comes to “believe” first his vehemence for one body “small”, and then “the beautiful concerning the body to be something small” (210b–c), and the beautiful itself is “single in form” and “pure, clean, unmixed” (211b–e). Whether the person one loves is left behind, or loved better, the text does not say in so many words (interpretation).

The sixth is Alcibiades’ speech. It praises the man whose speech has just ended, and in his story Socrates seems to live as Diotima taught, master of himself and indifferent to beauty and wealth (interpretation). The speech is also a drunk man’s, and Socrates calls it a “satyr and silenus play” with a purpose of its own (222c–d). How it bears on Diotima’s teaching is left to the reader. The dialogue’s last argument, that “he who is by craft a maker of tragedy is a maker of comedy too” (223d), is reported only in its conclusion.

Several of Burnet’s choices change the sense, and the notes say where: his own readings and punctuation at 180a, 213e, 214e and 217d; the conjectures of other scholars at 174b, 174c, 183c, 187c, 190d, 194a, 209a and 209b; the papyrus, which he cites from 201a on, against all the manuscripts at 205c, 206b, 209a, 213b and 219c; and, among the witnesses, B’s “the Soft” at 173d and Stobaeus’ “piety” for the manuscripts’ “impiety” at 188d.

The manner

The Symposium is one of Plato’s most comic works, and its comedy is in its persons. Apollodorus, called “the Soft”, pities his rich companions (173c), and one of them tells him that he believes “absolutely everyone is wretched except Socrates, beginning with yourself” (173d). Socrates has made himself beautiful, he says, “so that I may go beautiful to a beautiful man” (174a), and twists a proverb so that the good go uninvited to “Agathon’s feasts” (174b). He stops on the way to dinner and stands in the neighbours’ porch (175a–b), and when Agathon hopes to catch his wisdom by touching him, he answers, “It would be well … if wisdom were the sort of thing to flow from the fuller of us into the emptier, if we touch each other, as the water in cups flows through the wool” (175d). Aristophanes’ hiccup, cured by a sneeze, interrupts the speeches, and he mocks the doctor’s “orderly” Love by wondering whether “the orderly part of the body” desires the noises and ticklings of a sneeze (188c–189a). Pausanias “paused”, and Apollodorus points out his own jingle: “the wise teach me to say equal things like this” (185c). Socrates says he was afraid that Agathon “might send the head of Gorgias, formidable at speaking, in his speech against my speech, and make me myself a stone with speechlessness” (198c), and lets “the tongue” promise, “but the mind” not (199a). Diotima silences him with “Hush!” (201e) and tells him that the answer “is plain by now even to a child” (204b). Alcibiades, drunk, wreathed with ivy and violets, calls for a wine-cooler as his cup (213e–214a), and turns his praise of Socrates into a trial, “gentlemen of the jury; for you are the jury on Socrates’ haughtiness” (219c), and swears “by the gods, by the goddesses” that nothing happened (219c–d). The quarrel over the couch ends in Agathon’s “Hurrah, hurrah!” (223a), and the evening ends with Socrates putting the poets of tragedy and comedy to sleep (223d).

On reading this edition

Each left-hand page is one page of Burnet’s Greek, line for line, with his margin and apparatus; the right-hand page opposite translates it. The letters in the margins of both pages (a–e) mark the sections of Stephanus’ pages, by which Plato is cited; the numbers (173, 174 and so on) mark where each of his pages begins. The small numbers 5 and 10 in the Greek margin count Burnet’s lines, by which his apparatus is keyed. The dialogue opens with a short conversation in dramatic form between Apollodorus and a companion who is not named; the speakers’ names stand at the head of their speeches (in the English, Apoll. and Comp.), and inside Apollodorus’ speeches Burnet sets in quotation marks the words of the conversation he reports, his own as well as Glaucon’s. From 174a Apollodorus tells, in his own voice, what Aristodemus told him of Agathon’s dinner; Burnet then marks a speech by a capital at its opening, and uses quotation marks only for the slave’s message (175a7–9), a few phrases of Homer and Heraclitus (174c1, 174d2, 183e3–4, 187a5–6), the exchange over Aristophanes’ hiccup (185d–e), the words of Zeus and Hephaestus in Aristophanes’ speech (190c–d, 192d–e), a phrase that Aristotle quotes from the orator Alcidamas and words from two tragedies, which Agathon quotes or adapts (196c–e), a question that Socrates imagines putting to Agathon (199e2–4), and the words of Homer that Socrates quotes in Alcibiades’ story (219a1). Burnet also letterspaces the words of poets and sayings that a speaker quotes or adapts (174b4–5, 174c1, 179b1, 196d1, 196e2–3, 197b3, 199a5–6, 205d2–3, 208c5–6, 219a1, 221b3–4), some of them inside quotation marks as well. The English sets every speech in quotation marks, with Diotima’s words inside Socrates’ speech and the conversation Alcibiades reports inside his in single marks, and sets all such quoted words in quotation marks too. A blank line in the Greek marks where this narration begins (174a3) and where the speeches begin (Phaedrus’ at 178a6, Pausanias’ at 180c1, Eryximachus’ at 185e6, Aristophanes’ at 189c2 and Agathon’s at 194e4, with the interludes at 185c4 and 189a1 and Aristophanes’ last words at 193d6), where Socrates begins to question Agathon (199c3), where he turns to what Diotima taught him (201d1), where the narration resumes after his speech (212c4), where Alcibiades’ speech begins (215a4), and where the narration resumes after it (222c1). Burnet sets verse on lines of its own (178b, 195d, 197c, 214b, 220c), and so does the English. Letters and words in angle brackets ⟨ ⟩, which B, T and W lack, are added by Burnet from a later hand, a later manuscript or another scholar’s conjecture (176b7 Vahlen, 182a5 a later hand in T, 184d7 Baiter, 223d5 Vind. 21, 223d10 Hermann), and are translated; a dagger † marks a word he judges corrupt (183a1). The notes are numbered afresh on each page. At the back of the volume are an Outline of the dialogue, an Editorial Note on Burnet’s text, his apparatus and the translation, a Glossary of the key terms with the places where they occur, and a Note on how this edition was made.

A note on the persons

What the text itself establishes is this. Apollodorus lives at Phaleron, has spent his time with Socrates for less than three years, and before that, he says, “ran around wherever chance took me” (172c–173a); he is called “the Soft” (173d). Aristodemus is of the deme Cydathenaeum, “a small man, always barefoot”, and, Apollodorus thinks, “a lover of Socrates as much as any man of that time” (173b). Agathon is young (175e), has just won “with his first tragedy” (173a), and is “the wisest and most beautiful”, Alcibiades says (212e). Aristophanes suggests that Pausanias and Agathon are among the lovers who have found their own halves: “perhaps they too are in fact of that number” (193b–c). Eryximachus is “the son of Acumenus” (176b) and a doctor (185d, 186a). Phaedrus is “of Myrrhinus” (176d), the “father of the speech” (177d). Aristophanes’ “whole pastime is with Dionysus and Aphrodite” (177e). Alcibiades heard Pericles speak (215e), was given the prize for valour after a battle in the campaign at Potidaea and was on horseback in the retreat from Delium (220d–221a), and admits, under Socrates’ compulsion, that “I neglect myself and manage the affairs of the Athenians” (216a). Of Socrates the text tells that he seldom wears shoes (174a, 220b), stands lost in thought (175a–b, 220c–d), served at Potidaea and Delium (219e–221c), and drinks without becoming drunk (214a, 220a, 223c–d).

Outside sources add more, and some of it is disputed. Athenaeus gives the date of Agathon’s victory (5.217a–b). Agathon’s Antheus invented both its events and its names, as Aristotle notes (Poetics 9, 1451b21), and Aristophanes mocks him in the Women at the Thesmophoria (411 BC). In the Protagoras Pausanias and the young Agathon sit together beside Prodicus (315d–e), and in Xenophon’s Symposium Socrates says that “Pausanias, the lover of the poet Agathon”, defending those who wallow in licentiousness, claimed that the bravest army would be one of darlings and lovers (8.32), the argument Plato gives to Phaedrus (178e–179a). Eryximachus and Phaedrus appear together in the Protagoras (315c), and Phaedrus gives his name to the Phaedrus. Apollodorus is present at Socrates’ death in the Phaedo (59a–b, 117d). Xenophon has Socrates talk with “Aristodemus called the Little” (Memorabilia 1.4.2). Alcibiades, the ward of Pericles (Plutarch, Alcibiades 1.1), was elected a general of the Sicilian expedition in the year after the dinner and recalled to stand trial for profaning the Mysteries (Thucydides 6.8, 6.28, 6.53, 6.61); the dialogue’s readers knew it, and the language of the mysteries in Diotima’s teaching (209e–210a) and in Alcibiades’ “profane and boorish” (218b) can be read in its light (interpretation). Diotima is known from this dialogue alone.