Symposium

Block V: 198a–203a (Burnet pages 36–43)

How it was made. Burnet pages 36–43 (scan pp. 200–207), 234 lines, from the applause for Agathon and Socrates’ alarm at having to speak after him, through his questioning of Agathon, which ends in Agathon’s admission that he knew nothing of what he had said, to the first part of what Diotima of Mantinea taught Socrates: that Love is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither a god nor mortal, but a great daimon, between the two. The block ends inside her account of the daimonic, at 203a6. The Greek was set line for line from the photographs of Burnet’s page, with his apparatus, in which a papyrus from Oxyrhynchus is cited from 201a on, and the English written and annotated in the approved voice; independent reviewers then checked the Greek and the apparatus against the photographs letter by letter, the English against the Greek clause by clause, and every note and the extended Editorial Note against their sources.

What the reviewers caught. In the Greek, the form the draft printed as δυκεῖς at 198a8, and listed as a misprint, has the same broken ο, its thin top stroke not printed, as the lemma οὐκοῦν at 200d8, which the draft had read as ο without remark; both are now printed ο. The stroke over η in the papyrus’ εφη̄ at 201e8 was confirmed as a straight bar, the papyrus’ sign for a final ν, and not a circumflex; the rest of the text, the margins and the apparatus were confirmed letter by letter on all eight pages, with the capitals for the god’s name, the quotation marks at 199e2–4, the blank lines and the letterspacing of the words from Euripides. In the English, the last words of Socrates to Agathon now say that Socrates is not hard to contradict, as the dative requires, where the draft had said that Socrates finds it easy, reversing the joke (201c9); Agathon’s words recalled at 201a5 are again a statement (“there was no love”), as at 197b, not a hypothesis; the adverbial τὸ δέ at 198d7 is “But in fact”, so that page 36 no longer carries a word of page 37; “or” is restored at 200a9; “the way of the praise” (199a) now recalls Agathon’s “one right way of all praise” (195a); θεός at 203a1 is “a god”, not “God”; a marker was moved (198e1) and four small words restored (199c2, 199d6, 200b7, 201c7); and six phrases that followed Lamb’s Loeb translation were reworded. In the notes, Odysseus fears that the Gorgon head may be sent out of Hades, not that it may come upon him in Hades; Aristophanes parodies the line of Euripides at Frogs 101–102 and turns it against him only at 1471; the papyrus’ φίλε, “friend”, at 201c8 is now recorded in the note on “my loved Agathon”; the interpretation in the note on “Hush!” is labelled; and Eryximachus’ words on divination are placed at 188d. In the Editorial Note, the printer’s signature line is shown to recur every sixteenth page; Burnet’s second abbreviation of the Vienna manuscript, Vind. 21 (198b4), is explained; the quotation marks inside quotation marks at 200d are described; the forms of the papyrus are described more exactly; and the key terms now give “lack” for endeēs and endeia, and “divination” and “prophecy” for mantikē and manteia.