Symposium

Outline

The divisions follow the dialogue’s own joints, the speeches and the scenes between them. References are to Stephanus pages and sections, which stand in the margins of both pages of the text.

I. The frame (172a–174a)

172a–173b Apollodorus, “not unrehearsed”, tells how Glaucon hailed him on the road from Phaleron, “O man of Phaleron”, to hear about “the gathering of Agathon and Socrates and Alcibiades”; it took place “when we were still boys, when Agathon won with his first tragedy”, and Apollodorus has it from Aristodemus, “a small man, always barefoot”.

173c–174a Apollodorus is “glad beyond measure” at talk of philosophy and pities his companions for “the talk of rich men and money-makers”; the companion: “You are always the same, Apollodorus”. He will tell it “from the beginning, just as he told it”.

II. On the way, and the arrival (174a–176a)

174a–b Socrates, “bathed and with his slippers on”, is going “beautiful to a beautiful man”, and takes Aristodemus uninvited, to “ruin the proverb”: “to Agathon’s feasts, too, there go of their own accord the good”; Homer “even treated it with insolence”.

174c–d Aristodemus will go “as Homer says, a paltry man, uninvited”; “‘Two going together … on the way ahead’ we shall deliberate what we are to say.”

174d–175b Socrates falls behind, “paying attention somehow to himself”; Aristodemus arrives alone, “something laughable happened to him”; Socrates “has withdrawn into the neighbours’ porch”. “He has this habit, you see: sometimes he goes off wherever it may be and stands there.”

175c–e Socrates comes “about midway through their dinner”; Agathon would touch him to catch “the wise thing that came to you in the porch”; wisdom does not flow “from the fuller of us into the emptier”. “You are insolent, Socrates,” says Agathon; “with Dionysus as our judge”.

III. The proposal (176a–178a)

176a–e Pausanias and Aristophanes are the worse for “yesterday’s drinking”; Eryximachus, a doctor, finds that “drunkenness is a harsh thing for human beings”; they agree that “each should drink as much as he wants, and that nothing be compulsory”, and send the pipe-girl away.

177a–c Eryximachus’ proposal is Phaedrus’ complaint: “hymns and paeans have been made by the poets to some other gods”, but none to Love, while a wise man’s book praised salt.

177d–178a Each, “going to the right”, is to “speak a speech in praise of Love”, Phaedrus first, “the father of the speech”; Socrates says he knows “nothing other than matters of love”; Aristodemus did not remember all, and Apollodorus tells what seemed “most worth remembering”.

IV. Phaedrus (178a–180b)

178a–c Love is “a great god, and marvellous”, “among the very oldest”, with Hesiod, Acusilaus and Parmenides as witnesses, and “the cause of the greatest goods for us”.

178c–179b Love implants “shame at shameful things, and love of honour in beautiful ones”; an army “made of lovers and darlings” would defeat “all human beings”; Love makes a man “god-filled for virtue”.

179b–d “To die for another only those who are in love are willing”: Alcestis; the gods sent her soul up from Hades, and sent Orpheus away with “a phantom of the wife he had come for”.

179e–180b Achilles, sent “to the Isles of the Blessed” for dying after Patroclus, who was the lover, against Aeschylus; Love is “of the gods both the oldest and the most honoured and the most competent for the getting of virtue and happiness”.

V. Pausanias (180c–185c)

180c–181a There are two Aphrodites, Heavenly and Common, and so two Loves; “every action is like this: done of itself, on its own, it is neither beautiful nor shameful”.

181a–182a Those moved by the Common Love are in love with women no less than boys, with bodies rather than souls; those moved by the Heavenly, with boys “when they are already beginning to have sense”; “There ought to have been a law, too, against being in love with boys”.

182a–d The law about love: simple in Elis and Boeotia, shameful under barbarians “because of their tyrannies”, “intricate” at Athens and Lacedaemon; Harmodius and Aristogiton.

182d–183d At Athens the lover is encouraged and allowed what would be shameful in any other pursuit, “an oath of Aphrodite, they say, is no oath”; yet fathers set tutors over the beloved.

183d–184c “Done well it is beautiful, and done shamefully, shameful”; the common lover is “in love with the body rather than the soul”; the law wants “to test soundly and well”, and is left with “one road”: the “voluntary slavery” that “concerns virtue”.

184c–185c The two laws “brought together into one”; even to be deceived for virtue’s sake is beautiful; “it is wholly and in every way beautiful to gratify for the sake of virtue at least”.

VI. The hiccup, and Eryximachus (185c–188e)

185c–e “When Pausanias had paused” Aristophanes has the hiccup; Eryximachus prescribes holding the breath, gargling, and a sneeze, and will “speak in your turn”.

185e–186e Love is double in all things, as medicine knows; medicine is “knowledge of the body’s matters of love with regard to surfeit and emptying”, and the doctor must “make the things in the body that are most hostile friends”.

186e–187e Music too: Heraclitus’ harmony “of a bow and a lyre” is better said as agreement of what “differed before and afterwards agreed”; “the Love of the Heavenly Muse” and Polyhymnia’s.

188a–e The seasons, plagues and astronomy; divination, “the craftsman of friendship between gods and human beings”; “it is your work, Aristophanes, to fill it in”.

VII. Aristophanes (189a–193e)

189a–c The hiccup “stopped at once when I applied the sneeze”; Eryximachus will be “a guard over your own speech”; Aristophanes fears saying things not “laughable” but “ridiculous”.

189c–190b Human beings have not perceived “the power of love”; our nature was once different: three kinds, male, female and androgyne, round, “two faces on a rounded neck”, rolling “swiftly round in a circle”.

190b–191b They “made an attempt on the gods”; Zeus cuts them in two “as people cut sorb-apples”, and Apollo turns their faces to “the cut”; the halves die “of hunger” in each other’s arms.

191b–d Zeus moves their genitals “round to the front” so that they beget in one another; “love of one another is inborn in human beings”; “each of us, then, is a tally of a human being”.

191d–192c The three kinds of lovers from the three kinds; the halves of males “are the most courageous by nature”; when they meet their halves “they are marvellously struck with friendship and affinity and love”.

192c–193a Hephaestus’ offer, “to fuse you together and forge you together”; “So to the desire and pursuit of the whole, love is the name”; we have been “broken up by the god, as the Arcadians were by the Lacedaemonians”.

193a–e Piety, “with Love as our leader and general”, may restore “our ancient nature”; Eryximachus is not to make comedy of the speech; “Agathon and Socrates are left”.

VIII. Before Agathon, and Agathon (193e–198a)

193e–194e Socrates is “very much afraid indeed”; Agathon’s “courage and pride” on the platform; the few who “have their wits about them” and the many; Phaedrus stops Socrates conversing.

194e–195a The others have praised the god’s gifts; “there is one right way of all praise about anything”: first Love himself, “of what kind he is, and then his gifts”.

195a–196b Love is “the happiest” of the gods, “most beautiful and best”: “the youngest of the gods”, “tender”, walking “among the softest of the things that are”, “supple in form”, living “among flowers”.

196b–197b His virtue: he “neither does wrong nor suffers wrong”; he is temperate, since he masters pleasures; courageous, since “Love … holds Ares”; and wise, “a poet so wise as to make another one too”, and the teacher of the gods’ crafts.

197b–e Since Love’s birth “every good thing has come to be for gods and human beings alike”; Love makes “peace among human beings, and on the sea a calm”; the speech ends in short clauses: “pilot, marine, comrade and saviour, the best”.

IX. Socrates and Agathon (198a–201c)

198a–199b Applause; Socrates fears “the head of Gorgias”; he thought “one must tell the truth about each thing made the subject of an encomium”; “the tongue promised, but the mind did not”; he will tell “the truth” “in my own way”.

199b–200a Is Love “love of something, or of nothing?” As a father is “father of a son”, “of something”; and does Love desire that of which it is love?

200a–e “What desires desires what it lacks”; one who has health and wishes to be healthy wants it “in the time to come as well”.

200e–201c Love, then, is of what he lacks; Agathon said Love was of beautiful things; “then Love lacks beauty and does not have it”, and lacks good things too. “It looks like, Socrates, I knew nothing of what I said then.”

X. Diotima: Love between (201d–204c)

201d–e “A woman of Mantinea, Diotima”, “who was wise in these things and in many others”, taught Socrates “the matters of love”; she “refuted me” with the same arguments.

201e–202b “Hush!”: what is not beautiful is not therefore ugly; right opinion is “between intelligence and ignorance”; so Love is “between these two”.

202b–203a Love is not a god, since he lacks beautiful and good things; “a great daimon”, “interpreting and ferrying across” between gods and human beings.

203b–e His birth from Resource and Poverty at the feast for Aphrodite’s birth; “always poor”, “hard and squalid and barefoot and homeless”, yet “a formidable hunter”, “loving wisdom through all his life”.

204a–c “No god loves wisdom”, nor the ignorant; Love is “a lover of wisdom”, between; Socrates had thought Love “the beloved, not what is in love”.

XI. Diotima: love’s work (204c–207a)

204c–205a What does the one in love with beautiful things want? “That they become his”; with good things, “that he will be happy”, and there the answer “seems to have reached its end”.

205a–d All want good things to be theirs always; as “making” is the name of one part of making, so “love” is given to one form of love.

205d–206a Not the half nor the whole, “unless … it is in fact good”; “love is of the good’s being one’s own always”.

206b–e Its work is “giving birth in what is beautiful, both in body and in soul”; all are “pregnant”; Beauty is “Moira and Eileithyia at the birth”; “For love, Socrates,” she said, “is not of the beautiful, as you think”, but “of begetting and giving birth in the beautiful”.

206e–207a Begetting is “everlasting and immortal” for a mortal; love must be “of immortality too”.

XII. Diotima: immortality (207a–209e)

207a–c The beasts “disposed by love” fight and die for their young; “Can you tell?”

207c–208b Mortal nature “seeks, so far as it can, to be always and immortal”, leaving behind “another, new, in place of the old”, in body, soul and “pieces of knowledge”; “By this device … the mortal shares in immortality”.

208b–e “Like the perfect sophists”: the love of honour, “laying up immortal fame for all time”; Alcestis, Achilles and Codrus.

208e–209e Those “pregnant in their souls” beget “intelligence and the rest of virtue”; the lover educates the beloved, and they rear their children together; the children of Homer, Hesiod, Lycurgus and Solon.

XIII. The ascent (209e–212c)

209e–210c “The perfect rites and those of the beholding”: from one beautiful body to all, then to the beauty in souls, then “the beautiful in ways of life and in laws”.

210c–e “The kinds of knowledge”, “the great sea of the beautiful”, “a certain single knowledge”; at the end he “will suddenly catch sight of something beautiful, marvellous in its nature”.

210e–211b Always being, “not beautiful in one respect and ugly in another”, not in anything else, “but itself by itself, with itself, single in form”.

211b–d The steps summed up, “as if using steps”, from bodies to ways of life to studies, “and that at the end he may know that very thing, what beautiful is”; “if anywhere, life is worth living for a human being, as he beholds the beautiful itself”.

211d–212a “Pure, clean, unmixed”; seeing it he will give birth “not to images of virtue”, “but to true virtue”, and become “loved by the gods”.

212b–c “These things, then, Phaedrus and you others, Diotima said, and I am persuaded”; Socrates honours matters of love and urges others to.

XIV. Alcibiades arrives (212c–215a)

212c–213a Aristophanes tries to speak; a knocking; Alcibiades, “very drunk”, “wreathed with a kind of thick wreath of ivy and violets”, comes to wreathe “the wisest and most beautiful”.

213a–e He sits down between Agathon and Socrates without seeing him; “Heracles! What’s this here?”; Socrates asks Agathon to defend him from “his madness and his love of lovers”; Alcibiades wreathes Socrates too, and makes himself “ruler of the drinking”.

213e–214e The wine-cooler; “Against Socrates, gentlemen, my trick is nothing”; Eryximachus explains the speeches; Alcibiades will praise only Socrates, and only “the truth”.

XV. Alcibiades: the likenesses (215a–216e)

215a–c Socrates is like the sileni “that sit in the shops of the carvers of herms”, which open to show “statues of gods inside”, and like “the satyr Marsyas”; “You are insolent; or not?”

215c–216a Marsyas’ tunes “alone make people possessed”; Socrates does “this same thing” “with bare words”; Alcibiades’ “heart leaps far more than the Corybants’”.

216a–c He stops his ears “as if from the Sirens”; before Socrates alone he is “ashamed”; “So I play the runaway slave from him and flee”.

216c–e Socrates “is disposed by love towards the beautiful ones” and “knows nothing”; inside, he is full “of temperance”, despising beauty and wealth, “being ironic and playing with human beings”.

XVI. Alcibiades’ attempt (216e–219e)

216e–217c The statues inside were “so divine and golden and all-beautiful and marvellous”; Alcibiades thought Socrates was “in earnest about my youth”, and sent away his follower; “But nothing of this at all happened”; they exercised and wrestled.

217c–218b The dinner, “exactly like a lover laying plots for his darling”; “wine, both without children and with children”; “the speeches of philosophy”, “more painful” than a viper’s bite.

218b–219b The night: “Socrates, are you asleep?”; the offer; Socrates’ “very ironically”: “you mean to get the better of me by no small amount”, “to exchange ‘gold for bronze’”; Alcibiades: “you yourself deliberate”.

219b–e Under the cloak the whole night; “gentlemen of the jury; for you are the jury on Socrates’ haughtiness”; he rose as if from “my father or an elder brother”; “So I was at a loss”.

XVII. Socrates at war (219e–221c)

219e–220b At Potidaea Socrates “surpassed not only me but all the others” in toils, drank without being drunk, and walked “barefoot … across the ice”.

220c–d “What a thing this was, again, the strong man did and bore”: he stood in thought from dawn to dawn, and “went off and away, having said a prayer to the sun”.

220d–e In battle he kept Alcibiades safe when he was wounded, and was more eager than the generals that Alcibiades should have the prize for valour.

220e–221c In the retreat from Delium, Socrates and Laches; “‘swaggering and casting his eyes sideways’”; those so disposed “they do not even lay a hand on”.

XVIII. The sileni opened (221c–222b)

221c–d Socrates is like “no one among human beings, either of the ancients or of those living now”; Achilles has his Brasidas, Pericles his Nestor and Antenor; Socrates only “the sileni and satyrs”.

221d–222a “His speeches as well are most like the sileni that are opened”: “pack-asses and smiths of some sort and shoemakers and tanners” outside; inside, “most divine”, “the most statues of virtue”.

222a–b He has done the same to Charmides and Euthydemus, “whom this man deceives as though he were a lover”; “do not, as the proverb has it, learn by suffering, like a fool”.

XIX. The ending (222c–223d)

222c–d Laughter “at his frankness”; Socrates: “You seem to me to be sober, Alcibiades”; “this satyr and silenus play of yours has become quite plain”.

222d–223b The places on the couch: “O Zeus … what I suffer again at this person’s hands!”; Socrates must “praise the man on my right”; “Hurrah, hurrah!”; “the usual thing”.

223b–c “Very many revellers” come in; Eryximachus and Phaedrus leave; Aristodemus sleeps, and wakes “with the cocks already crowing”.

223c–d Socrates compels Agathon and Aristophanes “to agree that it belongs to the same man to know how to make comedy and tragedy”; “having put them to sleep”, he goes to the Lyceum, and “towards evening he rested at home”.