P l at o ’s

Symposium
 Ox f o r d A p p roac h e s t o

c lassical L iterature

se rie s e ditor s
Kathleen Coleman and Richard Rutherford

Ovid’s Metamorphoses
e laine fantham

Plato’s Symposium
richard hunte r
 P l at o’s
Symposium
R i c har d H u n t e r

1

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 Editors’ Foreword

The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen a mas-
sive expansion in courses dealing with ancient civilization and, in
particular, the culture and literature of the Greek and Roman
world. Never has there been such a flood of good translations avail-
able: Oxford’s own World Classics, the Penguin Classics, the Hack-
ett Library, and other series offer the English-speaking reader access
to the masterpieces of classical literature from Homer to Augustine.
The reader may, however, need more guidance in the interpreta-
tion and understanding of these works than can usually be provided
in the relatively short introduction that prefaces a work in trans-
lation. There is a need for studies of individual works that will
provide a clear, lively, and reliable account based on the most up-
to-date scholarship without dwelling on minutiae that are likely to
distract or confuse the reader.
It is to meet this need that the present series has been devised.
The title Oxford Approaches to Classical Literature deliberately puts the
emphasis on the literary works themselves. The volumes in this se-
ries will each be concerned with a single work (with the exception
of cases where a “book” or larger collection of poems is treated as
one work). These are neither biographies nor accounts of literary
movements or schools. Nor are they books devoted to the total oeuvre
of one author: our first volumes consider Ovid’s Metamorphoses and
Plato’s Symposium, not the works of Ovid or Plato as a whole. This
is, however, a question of emphasis, and not a straitjacket: biogra-
phical issues, literary and cultural background, and related works by
the same author are discussed where they are obviously relevant. The
series’ authors have also been encouraged to consider the influence
and legacy of the works in question.
As the editors of this series, we intend these volumes to be ac-
cessible to the reader who is encountering the relevant work for the
first time; but we also intend that each volume should do more than
simply provide the basic facts, dates, and summaries that handbooks
generally supply. We would like these books to be essays in criticism
and interpretation that will do justice to the subtlety and complex-
ity of the works under discussion. With this in mind, we have in-
vited leading scholars to offer personal assessments and appreciation
of their chosen works, anchored within the mainstream of classical
scholarship. We have thought it particularly important that our au-
thors be allowed to set their own agendas and to speak in their own
voices rather than repeating the idées reçues of conventional wisdom
in neutral tones.
The title Oxford Approaches to Classical Literature has been chosen
simply because the series is published by Oxford University Press,
USA; it in no way implies a party line, either Oxonian or any other.
We believe that different approaches are suited to different texts, and
we expect each volume to have its own distinctive character. Ad-
vanced critical theory is neither compulsory nor excluded: what
matters is whether it can be made to illuminate the text in question.
The authors have been encouraged to avoid obscurity and jargon,
bearing in mind the needs of the general reader; but, when impor-
tant critical or narratological issues arise, they are presented to the
reader as lucidly as possible.
This series was originally conceived by Professor Charles Segal,
an inspiring scholar and teacher whose intellectual energy and range
of interests were matched by a corresponding humility and gen-
erosity of spirit. Although he was involved in the commissioning of

vi | Editors’ Foreword
a number of volumes, he did not — alas— live to see any of them
published. The series is intended to convey something of the ex-
citement and pleasure to be derived from reading the extraordinar-
ily rich and varied literature of Greco-Roman antiquity. We hope
that these volumes will form a worthy monument to a dedicated
classical scholar who was committed to enabling the ancient texts
to speak to the widest possible audience in the contemporary world.

Kathleen Coleman, Harvard University

Richard Rutherford, Christ Church, Oxford

Editors’ Foreword | vii

This page intentionally left blank
 Preface

This volume is an introductory and explanatory study of the Sym-

posium. I hope that it will be found useful by those who have already
read or are in the process of reading the Symposium; my most fer-
vent hope, however, is to persuade those who fall into neither cat-
egory that they should become acquainted with Plato’s marvelous
work without delay.
I am very much indebted to the encouragement and advice of
the general editors of this new series, Kathleen Coleman and Richard
Rutherford. Earlier versions of the entire typescript were also read
by Nicholas Denyer, Demetra Koukouzika, Frisbee Sheffield, and
Anthony Verity; all saved me from error and pointed me in fruitful
directions. I am very grateful to them.
When I first accepted an invitation to contribute to this series,
one of the general editors was Charles Segal. It is a matter of great
sadness to me that I was unable to benefit from his criticism. I have
no idea what he would have thought of this little book, but it is
nevertheless dedicated to the memory of this extraordinary scholar:
no one did more to show why classical literature still matters, and
there are very few works that still matter more than Plato’s Symposium.
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

Editors’ Foreword v

Preliminary Note xiii


Setting the Scene 3


Erôs before Socrates 38


The Love of Socrates 78


The Morning After 113

Bibliography and Further Reading 137

Index of Passages Discussed 145

General Index 147

This page intentionally left blank
 Preliminary Note

Translations from the Symposium which are set off from the main
body of the text are taken from Plato, Symposium, translated by Robin
Waterfield (Oxford ). In-text translations are usually my own.
Where not otherwise acknowledged, all translations from other
Greek and Latin works are my own.

xiii
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 P l at o ’s
Symposium
This page intentionally left blank
 •1•
Setting the Scene

 | Symposia and Symposium

lato’s Symposium is the account of a (presumably fictional) gath-

P ering in the house of the Athenian tragic poet Agathon to cele-
brate his first victory in  bc in one of the great dramatic festivals
of the city;1 the work itself was probably composed in the period
–  bc, and belongs to the same broad period as some of Plato’s
other most famous works, such as Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Republic.2
The Symposium looks back to a remarkable period in Athenian his-
tory, shortly before the city undertook a major military expedition
to Sicily which was to end in disaster and which, at least with hind-
sight, could be seen to have ushered in the era which culminated in

1 The date presumably goes back ultimately to official Athenian records. Our

source for the date (Athenaeus, Deipnosophistai .a) records that the victory was
at the Lenaian festival, but Plato magnifies the occasion by a number of suggestions
of the more glorious Great Dionysia; cf. Sider ().
2 For more detailed discussion of the date of composition of the Symposium, cf.

Mattingly () and Dover (). Scholarly consensus makes Xenophon’s Sympo-
sium imitate Plato, not vice versa; cf. Huss ()  –.


catastrophic Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War ( bc); as
we shall see, Plato in various ways foreshadows the storm which
would a year later engulf some of Agathon’s most prominent guests.
The story is narrated by one Apollodorus, a follower of Socrates, to
a group of acquaintances, apparently “wealthy business men” (c);
Apollodorus’s source for his account is another follower of Socrates,
Aristodemus, who had been present himself at Agathon’s symposium.
When the conversation between Apollodorus and the anonymous
acquaintances is imagined to have taken place is left somewhat hazy.
Socrates is still alive (he was executed in ), but the symposium
was clearly some time ago (a), and Agathon has not lived in
Athens “for many years” (c); the poet is usually thought to have
left Athens for the court of Archelaos of Macedon in or close to
. We are clearly then at the very end of the fifth century.
The final part of the Symposium is illuminated by the brilliant
figure of Alcibiades, who dominated Athenian political life in the
closing years of the Peloponnesian War.3 Coming from the highest
and richest echelons of Athenian society, Alcibiades, who would
probably have been in his early thirties at the dramatic date of the
Symposium, used his social and rhetorical power to persuade the
Athenians to undertake the expedition to Sicily and to have himself
elected as one of its generals. Summoned back from the expedition
to answer charges of profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries (see p. ),
he escaped to Sparta where he did signal service for Athens’s ene-
mies. More than once the Athenians recalled him, but the relation-
ship between the democracy and its most wayward son was never to
be an easy one; there can be little doubt that Socrates’ association
with such a man counted against him at the philosopher’s trial in
. Alcibiades was murdered in Asia Minor in , and a setting
for the Symposium shortly before then, when there was intense
Athenian interest in his intentions (perhaps dramatized in the Sym-
posium’s opening frame), or just after would make good sense. There
is in fact no compelling reason to think of Alcibiades as still alive at

3 For Alcibiades cf. Gribble () and Nails () –, both with earlier

bibliography.

 | Plato’s Symposium
the dramatic time of the fictional conversation, and death is a very
powerful provocation to anecdotal memory.
The symposium (drinking together) in private houses is one of
the most familiar features of the male social culture of archaic and
classical Greece. After the part of the gathering principally devoted
to eating, guests would wash and pour libations to the “Agathos
Daimon” (Divinity of Good Fortune) and to “Zeus the Savior” (cf.
a); the host or a “ruler of the symposium” chosen by the guests
(symposiarchos; cf. e; Plutarch, Sympotic Questions .) would then
decide how much wine was to be drunk and in what strength —
Greeks drank their wine heavily (by our standards) diluted with
water. Agathon’s guests come to a mutual and “democratic”4 deci-
sion that no one is to be compelled to drink anything (b – e) —
“good order” (kosmos) is to be a watchword of this party, at least
until Alcibiades enters and, in a jestingly autocratic spirit, but one
appropriate to someone whose excesses were thought to suggest de-
signs on tyranny,5 elects himself symposiarch (e). As the “fa-
ther of the logos” (d), that is, the person responsible for sug-
gesting the subject of the speeches, Phaedrus takes some of the role
of symposiarch (cf. d, b – c), and Eryximachus too helps to
keep the company to their agreed scheme of encomia, but mutual-
ity is a hallmark of the self-effacing Agathon’s guests. The newly ar-
rived Alcibiades, however, already “very drunk” (d), seeks to
impose a new order of hard drinking (a – b), and this is one of
the ways in which his entry will mark a new start for the sympo-
sium (see p. ).
Another crucial decision for the conduct of the symposium was
how the guests were to pass the time and what entertainment was to
be offered. Conversation, music (e), games, and sexual banter
were, along with wine, the basic material of any symposium. One
common form of sympotic verbal game, the “likeness” — “Why is
X (usually one of the symposiasts) like Y (usually something non-
human)?”—is played out in Alcibiades’ description of Socrates as a
4 Eryximachus’s
language at e – —“now that this has been agreed . . .”—
may perhaps gesture to the language of public decrees.
5 Thucydides ..; Plutarch, Alcibiades ., .

Setting the Scene | 

carved Silenus. The performance and discussion of poetry, whether
by a recognized poet or by the guests themselves (each often required
to cap the preceding presentation), were also standard features of
such gatherings.6 Agathon’s performance (cf. below, pp. – ) and
Alcibiades’ “satyric drama” (cf. below, pp. –) are the principal
“poetic” offerings with which Plato entertains his guests/readers,
though the other performers also liberally sprinkle their speeches
with references to and quotations from the poets. In Plato’s day the
recitation of famous speeches from Attic drama would have been a
standard sympotic entertainment.
The symposium was an “alternative society,” conducted by its
own rules and rituals, which both reflected upon and often inverted
the conventions of ordinary society; within the sealed space of male
exchange and under the liberating influence of Dionysus and his
wine, many of the conventional constraints imposed by the public
gaze could be relaxed and festive license given free rein. The alter-
ity of sympotic space will be a crucial factor in many of the speeches
we will hear. Moreover, from the very earliest period the conduct
of the symposium itself is an important topic of sympotic literature;
the overriding interest in their own procedures which characterizes
the members of many modern clubs and societies found an ancient
counterpart in sympotic reflections upon symposia. Plato’s Sympo-
sium is to be seen within an evolving fourth-century tradition of
prose sympotika, which develop the themes of the sympotic poetry
of the earlier archaic period.7 One of the most famous of such ide-
alizing reflections upon behavior at the symposium is from Xeno-
phanes of Colophon (second half of sixth – early fifth century):
For now the floor is clean and clean the hands of everyone
and the cups; [one servant] places woven garlands round [the
heads of the guests], and another offers sweet-smelling per-

6 Helpful surveys and further bibliography are in Stehle () chapter  and

Ford () chapter .

7 In addition to Xenophon’s Symposium, important parts of the Cyropaideia are

also relevant; note also Plato, Protagoras c–e, Laws books  – ; Tecusan ().
The standard treatment of the symposium in literature is Martin ().

 | Plato’s Symposium
 fume in a saucer; the mixing-bowl stands filled with good
cheer; on hand is additional wine, which promises never to
run out, mellow in its jars and fragrant with its bouquet; in
the middle incense sends forth its pure and holy aroma and
there is water, cool, sweet, and clear; nearby are set golden-
brown loaves and a magnificent table laden with cheese and
thick honey; in the centre an altar is covered all over with
flowers, and song and festivity pervade the room.
For men of good cheer should first hymn the god with
reverent tales and pure words, after pouring libations and
praying for the ability to do what is right (dikaia) . . . not
commit deeds of violence (hybreis); one should drink as much
as you can hold and come home without any attendant un-
less you are very old, and praise that man who after drink-
ing reveals noble thoughts, so that there is a recollection and
striving for excellence (aretê); one should not recount the
battles of the Titans or Giants or Centaurs, creations of our
predecessors, or violent factions — there is nothing useful in
them; and one should always have a good regard for the gods.
(Xenophanes fr. ; trans. Gerber, adapted)
The composition of such a poem is a highly elite activity, charac-
teristic of a socially and politically privileged group. There has been
much debate as to how elite an institution the Athenian symposium
itself, which presumably existed in many different degrees of formal-
ity, was felt to be, at least by the late fifth century (or indeed the time
of Plato).8 Broadly speaking, Plato’s Symposium depicts a well-to-
do, elite class, such as indeed seems to have been Socrates’ regular
circle, and it is likely enough that such ritualized and rather self-
conscious symposia, as opposed to less-formal communal drinking,
could indeed be felt to be an institution of the “upper classes,” rather
remote from the practical concerns and limited time and domestic
space available to ordinary, working people. Socrates both is, and is
not, part of that elite.
8 The debate may be tracked through Murray (b); Bowie () ; Fisher

(); Wilkins ()  –.

Setting the Scene | 

 Modern historians of the symposium rightly distinguish the feast-
ing and entertainment of Homeric banquets from the archaic and
classical symposium, where for example the guests reclined on shared
couches rather than, as in Homer, sitting alone. Nevertheless, it was
principally the hospitality described in the Odyssey (Nestor at Pylos,
Menelaus at Sparta, Alcinous on Scheria) which provided the au-
thorizing Homeric pattern after which post-Homeric symposiasts
could model themselves, just as the Cyclops and Penelope’s suitors
provided the antimodel to be avoided. Odysseus’s “golden verses”
offer the ideal:
It is a lovely thing to listen to a bard such as this whose voice
resembles that of the gods. Indeed, I think that there is noth-
ing more delightful (lit. having more charis) than when fes-
tivity (euphrosynê) reigns over all the people, the banqueters
in the palace sit in orderly sequence and listen to the bard,
the tables near by are laden with bread and meat, and the
wine-pourer draws wine from the mixing-bowl and pours it
into the cups. This seems to me the very loveliest thing. (Ho-
mer, Odyssey . –)
So too, the Olympian feast of the gods highlights laughter and
Apolline music, even though divisive strife is never far away (cf. Iliad
.– ). Among Demodocus’s songs to the feasting Phaeacians
in Odyssey , it is the story of Hephaestus catching Ares in bed with
his wife, Aphrodite, which is most important for the later symposium.
Hephaestus traps the lovers with invisible chains spread over his wife’s
bed and then summons the other gods to witness the couple’s shame.
This “naughty” cautionary tale of desire, clearly designed for a male
audience (cf. vv. –), itself orchestrates the response of laughter
(vv. , ) and pleasure (v. ) which is appropriate to the sym-
posium, and which also greets Alcibiades’ account of his “sexual rela-
tions” with Socrates (c). There is not a little in common between
the story of Ares and Aphrodite, bound fast in bed by Hephaestus’s
magic chains in a fate which both Apollo and Hermes would give
anything to enjoy (Odyssey . – ), and Aristophanes’ tale in the

 | Plato’s Symposium
Symposium of how Hephaestus offers to weld a happy couple together
so that their two bodies are fused into one.
The so-called seriocomic (spoudaiogeloion) was recognized as the
mode most appropriate both to individual contributions to sym-
potic performance (cf. Agathon’s conclusion at e and Alcibi-
ades’ introduction at a– ) and to the symposium overall,9 and
no reader can fail to appreciate this in the Symposium. Xenophon
too offers a picture of the sympotic Socrates— a model of modera-
tion in the best traditions of Xenophanes— explicitly interpreting
Homer in this mode:
Whenever [Socrates] accepted an invitation to dinner, he re-
sisted without difficulty the common temptation to exceed
the limit of satiety; and he advised those who could not do
likewise to avoid what was set out to make one eat when not
hungry and drink when not thirsty; for he used to say that
such things ruined the stomach, the brain and the soul. He
said in jest that he thought that it was by offering a feast of
such things that Circe turned men into pigs; Odysseus had
survived this fate partly through the advice of Hermes, but
also because he was self-restrained and avoided excessive in-
dulgence in such things. This was how he spoke on such sub-
jects, half joking (paizôn), half in earnest (spoudazôn). (Xeno-
phon, Memorabilia .. –)
There are, however, two very particular points to Plato’s use of the
seriocomic mode. The Symposium contains some of Plato’s most bril-
liant parodic and self-parodic writing; the latter is particularly found
in Socrates’ hilarious account of his cross-examination by Diotima

9
Cf. Xen. Symp. .; the song of Ares and Aphrodite is described by Athe-
naeus as a “tale mixed with jesting, which offers advice to Odysseus on the killing
of the suitors” (.d). For programmatic statements of this ideal, cf. Plutarch,
Sympotic Questions . (Moralia a), . (Moralia d); Hermogenes – 
Rabe; Martin () – . Spoudaiogeloion was not, of course, restricted to the sym-
posium, cf., e.g., Aristophanes, Frogs – (Aristophanic comedy); Plut. Mor.
b – c (Menander); Horace, Satires .. – (satire).

Setting the Scene | 

(see p. ). This parodic element corresponds to the half-serious,
half-jesting “role playing” which could be inherent in the enter-
tainment of a real symposium, in which the guests “performed” for
the entertainment of their fellow guests. Eryximachus, Agathon,
and Socrates (at least) all perform as constructed exaggerations of
themselves—the theorizing doctor, the rhetorical poet, the Platonic
Socrates. If these characters never let down their guard and thus
role play to the end, the Platonic Alcibiades too, despite the com-
mitment to truth which drunkenness imposes, exploits and plays up
to the anecdotal tradition of “what Alcibiades was like.” Unlike
Ares and Aphrodite in Demodocus’s song in Odyssey , Agathon’s
guests themselves both orchestrate and join in with the laughter
they provoke. This aspect of sympotic excess, and how Plato has
harnessed it, has too often eluded the moralizing critics of both an-
tiquity and the modern day. Thus one of the guests in Athenaeus’s
Sophists at Dinner (c.  ad) observes that “Plato ridicules and mocks
Agathon’s balanced clauses and antitheses and brings on Alcibiades
saying that he wants to be penetrated anally” (.c); what is im-
portant is not whether Alcibiades is here misrepresented or not, but
rather the critic’s willful misunderstanding of the nature of Plato’s
literary representation.
Second, in his role as a Silenus, neither man, beast, nor god (cf.
below, p. ), Socrates— funny on the outside (“throughout his
whole life ironizing [eirôneuomenos]10 and playing with people”), su-
premely serious on the inside (e–)—embodies the coexistence,
indeed the interdependence, of the spoudaion and the geloion. More-
over, Alcibiades’ description of how Socrates talks suggests that more
is at stake than just an image:
The first time a person lets himself listen to one of Socrates’
arguments (logoi), it sounds really ridiculous. Trivial-sounding
words and phrases form his arguments’ outer coating, the
brutal satyr’s skin. He talks of pack-asses, metal-workers,
10 The interpretation of this verb is hotly disputed; for the different views which

have recently been taken, cf. Vlastos ()  – and Nehamas ()  – .

 | Plato’s Symposium
 shoemakers, tanners; he seems to go on and on using the
same arguments to make the same points, with the result
that ignoramuses and fools are bound to find his arguments
ridiculous. But if you could see them opened up, if you can
get through to what’s under the surface, what you’ll find in-
side is that his arguments are the only ones in the world
which make sense. And that’s not all: under the surface, his
arguments abound with divinity and effigies of goodness
(aretê). They turn out to be extremely far-reaching, or rather
they cover everything which needs to be taken into consid-
eration by someone on the path to true goodness (lit. who is
going to be kaloskagathos). (e –a)

The charge against Socrates is a familiar one (cf. Gorgias a; Hip-
pias Maior c–a): irony, which invites us to interpret language
in more than one way, to remove an outer layer of meaning to get
at a deeper truth, is indeed one potent manifestation of the serious-
playful mode. Nevertheless, we may be tempted, particularly in a
work of the tone of the Symposium, to see this not merely as Alcib-
iades’ enthusiastic reaction to Socratic discourse, but also as one pro-
grammatic image for the reading of Socratic dialogues as a whole,
and most notably the Symposium itself. Alcibiades’ words are an in-
vitation to interpretation, a half-teasing come-on from Plato to his
readers to find the spoudaion behind the amusing dress in which it has
been clothed. What Alcibiades’ image does not give us, of course,
is a key to unlock “the meaning” of the Symposium: we are simply
being told that reading this or any work of Plato requires effort and
thought, requires us in fact to “get inside” Socrates’ words (a).
Alcibiades also holds out the promise that such effort will be more
than worthwhile.
Alcibiades’ image for the act of reading and interpretation was
to have a long history (cf. below, pp. –). In his essay “The Sileni
of Alcibiades,” Erasmus applied the Silenus image to both Socrates
and other ancient philosophers in the Socratic mold — Antisthenes,
Diogenes the Cynic, Epictetus — but, most potently of all, also to

Setting the Scene | 

Christ and the Christian Scriptures, on the model of Socrates and
writing about Socrates:
[S]cripture too has its own Sileni. Pause at the surface, and
what you see is sometimes ridiculous; were you to pierce to
the heart of the allegory, you would venerate the divine wis-
dom. Let us take the Old Testament. If you looked at noth-
ing beyond the story; if you heard how Adam was made out
of clay and his poor wife taken secretly out of his side while
he slept, how the serpent tempted the woman . . . Yet under
these wrappings, in heaven’s name, how splendid is the wis-
dom that lies hidden! The parables in the Gospels, if you
judge them by their outward shell, would be thought, surely,
by everyone to be the work of an ignoramus. Crack the nut-
shell and of course you will find that hidden wisdom which
is truly divine, something in truth very like Christ Himself.11
In the preface to Gargantua, Rabelais too borrowed the Silenus image
from both Plato and Erasmus to contrast the apparently jesting titles
of his works with the allegedly valuable subject matter concealed
within. Like Plato, Rabelais expected his desired reader, whom he
compares to a dog searching for the marrow in a bone, to work
quite hard at his task.
Laughter can, of course, arise from jesting and personal mock-
ery. The sympotic rule was that such jesting should not pass over
into insulting abuse (a species of hybris),12 which results not in the
shared laughter which ties the whole group together but in the harsh
laughter which separates the victim from his mockers. The ideal,
along with the appropriate admixture of the serious, is well ex-
pressed in an anonymous poem of perhaps the later classical period:
Hail, fellow drinkers. . . . Whenever we friends gather for
such an activity, we ought to laugh and joke, behaving prop-

11 Collected Works
of Erasmus. Adages II vii  to III iii , translated by R. A. B.
Mynors (Toronto: ) .
12 For the jesting appropriate to symposia, cf. Plutarch, Sympotic Questions .

(e – b), ..

 | Plato’s Symposium
 erly (lit. using aretê), take pleasure in being together, engage
in silly talk with one another, and utter jests such as to
arouse laughter. But let seriousness (spoudê) follow and let us
listen to the speakers in their turn: this is the best form of
symposium (lit. the aretê of the symposium). And let us obey
the symposiarch: this is the conduct of good men and wins
praise. (Adespota Elegiaca  West; trans. Gerber, adapted)
Alcibiades’ jesting about Socrates’ physique clearly falls well within
acceptable limits, and the contrast he draws at the start of his
speech, “The likeness [of Socrates to a Silenus] will be made for the
sake of truth, not to raise a laugh” (a), is a version of the ideal
of spoudaiogeloion. This kind of jesting unites rather than dissolves
the group. When Alcibiades humorously accuses Socrates of “con-
tempt, ridicule, and hybris” in passing the night in Alcibiades’ arms
without (apparently) any sexual arousal at all (c), we are not to
take the charges too seriously. An anecdote in Plutarch has Socrates
responding to someone who asked him whether he was not upset at
the hybris (Plutarch’s word) directed against him in Aristophanes’
Clouds with the words: “No, certainly not; I am teased (skôptomai)
in the theater as at a large symposium” (Moralia c– d). The story
is told to illustrate the philosopher’s calm temperament — here is a
man who collapses the distinction between public ridicule and the
jesting inherent in male bonding. What the anecdote also illustrates
is that the symposium is in fact private theater (cf. b – c) in which
all the guests are both actors and appreciative audience.
More elaborate sympotic entertainments included mimes and
playlets, often of an erotic and/or farcical kind.13 The guests in Xe-
nophon’s Symposium are entertained by an arousing mime of the
love-making of Dionysus and Ariadne. Agathon’s guests, by con-
trast, must be content with Alcibiades’ narration of his failed at-
tempt to seduce Socrates, though this account, with its included ex-
change of direct speech, certainly offers plenty of scope for mimetic
action; it is easy enough to imagine it as a performed “playlet” for
two actors (as it might well, at some time, have been). Here, how-
13
Cf. Davidson ().

Setting the Scene | 

ever, we are also to think of another sympotic entertainment in
which Alcibiades was involved. In the period before the Athenian
expedition to Sicily, Alcibiades was implicated in charges that the
Eleusinian Mysteries had been profaned “in private houses” and the
secrets revealed to those who had not been initiated;14 it is a rea-
sonable inference that what was meant was that the Mysteries had
been staged as entertainment during an elite symposium.15 Alcibi-
ades introduces his account of the attempted seduction of Socrates
in his own house (where he was charged with holding the profane
ceremony) with repeated warnings that it is only for the ears of
those “initiated” into Socratic rites (b).16 This is not only a com-
ically down-to-earth analogy to the metaphysical “mysteries” into
which Diotima begins to initiate Socrates (see pp. – ) but also
an allusion to the serious charges which contributed to Alcibiades’
loss to the Athenian cause. It is hard to see how any Athenian could
fail to be reminded of such painful history, in which Phaedrus,
Eryximachus, and perhaps also Eryximachus’s father had all also
been denounced.
Moralizing reflections and advice upon the human condition are
often set within a sympotic context; much archaic poetry and var-
ious episodes in, say, Herodotus fit this pattern. The symposium
was a natural setting in which to place memories of encounters
with famous men: the Epidêmiai (Visits) of Ion of Chios (mid –fifth
century bc) were first-person narratives of such meetings, and the
sparse fragments suggest that a sympotic setting was common in that
work. The fictional “symposium of philosophers,” which gives, as
Alcibiades is to do, new meaning to the proverbial wisdom that
“wine reveals truth,” should be seen in part as a development of this

14 Cf. Thucydides .; Lysias .; Andocides, On the Mysteries ; Plutarch,
Alcibiades .
15 For Alcibiades’ performance as sympotic entertainment, cf. explicitly Plutarch,

Sympotic Questions . (Mor. c); Pseudo-Heraclitus, Homeric Problems .. Mur-
ray (b) – seems to wish to deny this, though it is unclear what other kind
of “performance” he actually envisages.
16 The “actions” (prachthenta) and “sayings” (legomena) of b perhaps also re-

flect mystic terminology (the later distinction between drômena and legomena).

 | Plato’s Symposium
tradition; the extant works of Plato and Xenophon were followed
by Symposia of Aristotle, Speusippus, and Epicurus, to name only
the best-known philosophers. Whether Plato had immediate fore-
bears is a more difficult question.17 The tradition of a “symposium
of the Seven Sages” (the famous “wise men” of archaic Greece),
best known from a work of Plutarch (which itself echoes Plato’s
Symposium), cannot certainly be traced before Plato, though Plato
himself makes Socrates claim that the Sages “came together” to
make dedications at Delphi (Protagoras a – b). However that may
be, later sympotic literature treated Plato’s work as the classic found-
ing text of the genre, and it certainly eclipsed whatever predeces-
sors it may have had; above all, it showed that, at a symposium, phi-
losophy was to be served with a light touch (cf. Plutarch, Sympotic
Questions d).
The symposium was, however, a central site for the transmission
of a shared cultural and intellectual heritage, in other words for
(male) education in the broadest social and political sense. Thus, for
example, much of the elegiac poetry of Theognis of Megara (sec-
ond half of sixth century bc) is set at a symposium and offers mor-
alizing social, sexual, and political advice to a young man. It is at
symposia that membership in a privileged group is both tested and
acted out. Philosophical education will turn out to be at the very
heart of Plato’s work: the sympotic setting is thus not as frivolous as
we may be tempted to believe; it is very serious indeed.

 | erôs

B y its very nature, the symposium and the poetry and literature
it generated were inseparable from erôs and from Eros, the god
who presides over and is made manifest in erôs. Greeks did not have
our conventions of distinguishing capital and lowercase letters,
which does not of course mean that they did not perceive the po-

17 For the possibility of “rival accounts” of a symposium at Agathon’s house, cf.

below, p. .

Setting the Scene | 

tential for ambiguity, and it will become clear that this fluidity of
reference will prove useful to more than one speaker in the Sympo-
sium. Symposiasts pursued beauty and pleasure, and women and
boys were on hand to slake the desires which come with such pur-
suits: “savories, perfumes, incense, prostitutes, and pastries” is how
the Platonic Socrates elsewhere refers to some of what made up a
symposium (Republic .a –). Toasts were offered to Eros as the
god who could intercede with the object of one’s desire, and erôs
and its consequences are everywhere in the poetry of the brilliant
symposium culture of the archaic period. The chorus of Sophocles’
Ajax laments that the first inventor of war put an end to both sym-
posia and erôtes (vv. – ).
Erôs in archaic poetry may, in the broadest terms, be thought of
as an invasive force or emotion which drives one to wish to satisfy
a felt need. Erôs demands a response; it is not an ongoing state, such
as “contentment.”18 In Homer, “erôs for food and drink” may be
easily satisfied, but the prolonged absence of food would of course
lead to wasting and ultimate death. So too, in Greek poetry, erôs
for another human being leads to physical wasting and mental dis-
traction: erôs may be figured as a disease, and Aphrodite and her in-
carnation, the destructively beautiful Pandora, produce “longing
which is hard to bear and limb-wearying cares” (Hesiod, Works
and Days ). Such erôs or himeros (desire) requires rapid satisfaction
in sexual release, as when Paris is seized with desire instantly to
make love with Helen (Iliad .– ) or Zeus with Hera (Iliad
.– ). For the less violent “love, affection,” as, for example,
in the romantic modern ideal of husband-wife relationships, Homer
(cf. Iliad . – ) and later literature normally use not erôs and
its cognates, but philia. In the “Ariadne and Dionysus” mime with
which Xenophon’s Symposium concludes, the sexual arousal of the
couple is plain to see, but Dionysus asks his bride whether she
“loves” (philein) him, and the guests are convinced that the couple
“love (philein) each other” (Xenophon, Symposium .). The mod-
18 The
account here must, necessarily, be very broad-brush. A useful introduc-
tion to many of the issues is Calame (); for a larger-scale study of the seman-
tics of erôs, cf. Ludwig ().

 | Plato’s Symposium
ern English “I love you” is normally philô se, though the statement
itself may be prompted not by philia but by erôs. When in book  of
Herodotus, King Candaules “felt erôs for his own wife,” this ex-
traordinary infatuation leads to his death and loss of the throne
(Hdt. .). Erôs is very often a response to visual beauty — another
idea which the Symposium will turn to its own ends— but in turn
it affects the very way we see: Sappho’s declaration that “whatever
one loves is most beautiful (kalon)” (fr. . – ) was to have a very
long afterlife in proverbial wisdom.
As erôs is an invasive force from outside, its presence can be
shaming and disorienting, in that it takes away one’s better judgment
and one’s sense of independence; erôs forces us to confront our lack
and need, ideas which are to be fundamental to the Symposium.
Erôs, moreover, regularly forces people to do things which they, in
more considered moments, know to be wrong or socially disap-
proved; it is traditionally an irrational power which works against
the better counsels of reason. The catastrophic outcome of the
Athenian expedition to Sicily is foreshadowed in the fact that the
citizens felt a powerful erôs for the venture (Thucydides ..). In
Euripides’ Medea, the self-serving Jason argues that Medea can take
no credit for saving the Argonautic expedition because she was act-
ing under the compulsion of erôs, which takes the place of personal
responsibility (Medea  – ), and in the Trojan Women Helen uses
a similar argument to exculpate herself for having left Sparta with
Paris (vv.  –). Before Plato, Attic tragedy had indeed explored
the destructiveness of erôs with particular power. “Terrible desire”
for a beautiful girl (v. ) led Heracles to sack her city and set
in motion the chain of events of Sophocles’ Trachiniae; both Hera-
cles’ wife herself and the chorus must acknowledge that everyone,
including the gods, is defenseless before the power of erôs (vv. –,
 –; cf. Antigone – ). In Euripides’ Hippolytus, Phaedra
explains her doomed attempts to overcome by self-control (sôphro-
synê, v. ) the “terrible erôs” (v. ), whose ravaging, “body-
untying” (v. ) effects are all too clear as she is first carried in. It
is Phaedra’s knowledge of her own predicament (cf. vv. – ) and
her ability to reason about it which construct her tragedy.

Setting the Scene | 

 Erôs, of course, is also responsible for the continuation of the
human race (cf. Euripides, Hippolytus – ) and can bring great
pleasure, but one must pray to avoid its full destructive force (cf.
Hippolytus  –). As such, it deserves to be treated with full cult
honors, and the chorus of the Hippolytus (vv. – ) anticipates
the Platonic Aristophanes’ surprise at the absence of major cults of
Eros (Symposium c– ). This doubleness in the power of erôs
brings it close to Dionysus, whose principal manifestation among
men—wine—is similarly double-edged and whose destructive po-
tential was celebrated in many myths. “It is a bad thing to drink a
lot of wine, but if one drinks it with understanding, it is not bad but
good” (Theognis  – ).19 The problem, of course, as the Greeks
knew only too well, was how difficult such understanding was: as
wine is drunk, it takes over the drinker’s judgment, so that the “de-
cision” to drink more (or less), just like sexual arousal, is no real
“decision” at all. The “middle way” in both drinking (cf., e.g.,
Theognis –) and desire (cf., e.g., Euripides, Hippolytus –)
is not an easy path to tread. Dionysus’s wine, like erôs, enters from
the outside and works its changes upon both mind and body; that,
moreover, alcohol stimulates sexual desire was as familiar to the an-
cients as it is to us, and the two are constantly found together in po-
etry and narrative. In the second century ad the novelist Achilles
Tatius put it thus:
Once Eros and Dionysus, two forceful gods, have gripped
the soul, they drive it to ecstatic shamelessness, the one burn-
ing it with his usual flame, the other providing the fuel in
the form of wine (for wine is the food of desire). (Achilles
Tatius ..; trans. T. Whitmarsh)
The Symposium emphasizes Socrates’ imperviousness to the effects of
wine (a–), as well as his indifference to its pleasures (c–).
After drinking all night, he is found conducting a very typical “So-

19 For the explicit comparison of drunkenness to desire, cf. Plutarch, Moralia

d – e.

 | Plato’s Symposium
cratic” dialectic about knowledge and craft (d; cf. below, p. )
and then has a perfectly normal day (d). It is, moreover, not
just alcohol which appears to have no effect upon him: having the
beautiful Alcibiades in his bed has no obvious effect upon either his
mind or his body. Under the influence of desire and/or Dionysus,
Socrates remains as changeless and unaffected as we will learn the
Form of Beauty itself to be (a – b). Viewed from another per-
spective, however, Diotima’s speech will suggest that erôs, properly
understood, governs Socrates’ whole life and his pursuit of philo-
sophical understanding.
All of the speeches of the Symposium are predominantly con-
cerned with the erôs felt by an adult man, the erastês (lover), for a
younger man, the erômenos (he who is loved, the beloved); the erô-
menos in such relationships was usually adolescent or somewhat older.
The Greek term for these social practices is “boy-love” (paiderastia),
but it is important that, in Greek, this term does not carry the
strongly negative associations of modern “pederasty”; in this book,
“pederasty,” “pederastic,” and related words refer to Greek practice
and are (as far as I can make them) value-free. These practices have,
of course, always been at the center of debates about the value and
values of Greek society (cf. below, pp. –). Greek sexuality, in
all its complexity, has been much studied in recent years, and the
bibliography contains reading suggestions for those wishing to pur-
sue histories and explanations of Greek sexual practices.
The Symposium is one of a series of fourth-century prose works
devoted to the pleasures and pains and nature of erôs; the Symposium
is in fact referred to as Plato’s erôtikoi logoi (erotic speeches) as early
as Aristotle (Politics .b). Other surviving examples of the
genre include parts of Plato’s Phaedrus, a treatise on erôs ascribed to
Demosthenes, and the “love story” of Panthea which opens the fifth
book of Xenophon’s Cyropaideia. The theme, which was to become
a dominant one in the New Comedy of Menander, occurs already
in fourth-century comedy in forms which perhaps suggest the in-
fluence of the prose discussions of Plato and others. The comic poet
Alexis explicitly associates the idea that not Eros but lovers fly with

Setting the Scene | 

“wise men” (sophistai; fr.  Kassel-Austin), and in another passage
from a comedy, perhaps significantly entitled “Phaedrus,” a lover
reflects on the nature of his experience in ways which bring us close
to the Symposium:
As I was coming from the Peiraeus my troubles and lack of
resource led me to philosophical reflection. To put it very
briefly, I think that all the painters who make images of Eros
are unfamiliar with this daimôn. He is neither female nor
male, neither god nor man, neither brainless nor again wise,
but he is a mixture of all different things and carries many
forms with him in one shape. He has the daring of a man,
the cowardice of a woman, the foolishness of madness, the
arguments (logos) of a wise man, the vehemence of a beast, is
unremittingly hard-working, and being a god (daimôn) loves
to be honoured. (Alexis fr.  Kassel-Austin)

 | Telling the Story

T he opening conversation establishes a complex history for the

account of Agathon’s symposium:
APOLLODORUS: I think I’m quite an expert (lit. not un-
practiced) in what you’re asking about. I mean, just the other
day I was on my way up to town from my home in Phalerum
and an acquaintance of mine spotted me from behind and
called out to me—he was some way off. He used his raised
voice as an opportunity to have a bit of fun: “Hey you!” he
shouted. “You Phalerian there! Apollodorus! Wait for me,
won’t you?”
I stopped and waited for him to catch up. “You know,
Apollodorus,” he said, “I was looking for you only the other
day. I wanted to ask you what happened at that party which
Agathon, Socrates, Alcibiades, and all the other guests were at,
and to find out how their speeches on love went. I’ve already

 | Plato’s Symposium
had a report from someone else (who’d been told about it
by Phoenix the son of Philip), but his account wasn’t very
clear. He did mention, though, that you knew about it as
well. So please will you tell me? I mean, Socrates is your
friend, so it’s perfectly appropriate for you to report what he
says. But tell me first,” he added, “whether or not you were
actually there when they met.”
“It certainly looks as though you’ve heard a garbled ver-
sion of the story,” I said, “if you’re under the impression that
the party you’re asking about took place a short while ago,
and so that I could have been there.”
“Yes, I did think that,” he said.
“But how could I have been, Glaucon?” I asked. “Agathon
hasn’t lived here in Athens for many years, you know, and it’s
less than three years since I’ve been among Socrates’ com-
panions and have been making it my business to know, day
by day, what he says and does. It’s only been that long since
I stopped my pointless running around. I used to think I was
getting somewhere, when I was worse off than anyone —
well, just as badly off as you are now, since you’d rather do
anything than do philosophy.”
“Don’t tease,” he said. “Just tell me, please, when it was
that they did all meet.”
“When you and I were still boys,” I replied. “Agathon
had won with his first tragedy, and they met on the day after
he and the cast had performed the victory rites.”
“It really was a long time ago, then,” he said. “But who
told you the story? Was it Socrates himself ?”
“Oh, good heavens, no!” I exclaimed. “It was the same
person who told Phoenix about it. He’s called Aristodemus—
from the deme of Cydathenaeum, a little fellow, never wears
shoes. He’d been there at the party, since he was one of the
greatest lovers Socrates had at the time, I think. All the same,
I did also ask Socrates about some of what Aristodemus told
me, and the two accounts coincided.” (a– b)

Setting the Scene | 

The information which Apollodorus provides may be displayed in
the same genealogical manner in which relationships of descent be-
tween manuscripts are often set out (all versions of Agathon’s sym-
posium, except, of course, Apollodorus’s, are “lost”). See figure .
The alleged existence of a rival account of Agathon’s party,
though one traceable ultimately to the same source, is both the kind
of realistic detail which we recognize as one of the hallmarks of
fiction—news of the closed world of a symposium may indeed
often have reached the outside only through gossip and rumor: “I
hate a drinking companion (sympotas) with a memory,” says a Greek
proverb20 —and a warning which should put us on our guard.
Apollodorus’s paraded concern with historical accuracy, and the
procedures for procuring it, advertise the fictionality of the account
in a pleasing paradox. Historical accuracy may not, in any event, be
the right criterion to judge the narrative we are about to read; the
vagueness of the dramatic date of the conversation between Apol-
lodorus and his friend (above p. ) is one of many signs of this.
The question of whether or not Plato does in fact have his eyes on
one or more earlier “Socratic symposia” by authors whose names
are now lost to us must not obscure the literary purpose of his cho-
sen narrative mode. Plato’s various experiments with narrative
frames21 show his persistent concern to advertise and problematize
the fictional status of his dialogues. Thus, the Parmenides reaches us
through a series of four “sources,” beginning with an eyewitness
(Zeno himself ); in the Theaetetus, Eukleides claims to have received
the account directly from Socrates and, through repeated question-
ings of the philosopher, has “practically the whole story written
out” (a); the Phaedo is related by Phaedo, an eyewitness of
events (autos [yourself ] is the first word of the dialogue; contrast

20 Plutarch, Sympotic Questions b–d, earnestly notes with pleasure that

philosophers’ symposia are an exception to the usual rule, because one can remem-
ber (and read) what was said the night before. The same proverbial idea is also given
prominence at the start of Lucian’s Symposium (chap. ), as that work also begins
with an imitation of the elaborate “sourcing” of Apollodorus’s account of Aga-
thon’s party.
21 Cf., e.g., Clay (); Johnson ().

 | Plato’s Symposium
 Aristodemus

Phoenix Socrates

Unnamed source

Apollodorus

Glaucon unnamed friends/

readers of Symposium

figure 1

Symposium b), to his host in Phlius who seeks a clear (saphês)

and detailed (akribês) account of what happened, just as Glaucon
does from Apollodorus.
The body of the Symposium, like that of the Parmenides, is con-
sistently in indirect speech or, rather, the narrative is indirect, that
is, “and then [Aristodemus said that] Socrates said,” whereas the
speeches themselves are reported in direct speech; this is a mode of
presentation which never lets us forget that we are not being offered
unmediated access to a “true account” of “what happened” in Aga-
thon’s house. Moreover, Aristodemus and Apollodorus have both
imperfect memories and a practice of selectivity over which we have

Setting the Scene | 

no control (a – , c, c); from what we have learned of
Apollodorus we would not necessarily rely on his judgment as to
what was “worthy of record” (a), and Aristodemus falls asleep
just when things are getting interesting (b– ). Plato’s explicit
interest in problems of narrative mode is clear from a famous dis-
cussion in the third book of the Republic (c ff.) in which Socrates
divides narrative into “simple diêgêsis” (where the poet tells every-
thing in the third person), “mimetic diêgêsis” (where, as in drama,
everything happens through the words of “characters”), and “mixed
diêgêsis” (which, like epic poetry, partakes of both forms); so too, in
the Theaetetus, Eukleides explains how he has turned what he has
learned into “direct speech” (or, perhaps, into a drama) by omitting
all the “he told me that he replied’s” and so forth (Theaetetus b–
c). It is possible, in fact, that something of the sort also occurs in
the Symposium. Socrates’ report of his conversation with Diotima
takes place within the overarching frame of indirect and direct
speech described above, but is itself almost (cf. e– ) entirely in
direct speech; Socrates’ initial stress, however, upon the fidelity of
his reproduction of the discussion (d– e; cf. below, p. )
perhaps includes the dramatic form of what is to follow, in the man-
ner of the introduction to the Theaetetus. Nevertheless, despite these
clear analogies elsewhere in the Platonic corpus, we may still feel
that the nested narrative of the Symposium requires more explana-
tion than simply Platonic interest in narrative experimentation.
The narrator, Apollodorus, “spends his time with Socrates and
makes it his business to know all that he says or does every day”
(e –; cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia ..). In other words, for
him Socrates is not merely a respected guide, but is a kind of guru
on whose every word he hangs. Moreover, Apollodorus tells us that
before his conversion to Socrates and philosophy he “ran around
in any old direction,” thinking that anything was more important
than philosophy.22 Stories of conversion to philosophy are common

22 Later stories of the “conversion” of Plato himself to philosophy most com-

monly make him a poet in his youth; cf. Riginos () – .

 | Plato’s Symposium
from the later Hellenistic world, with its institutionalization of com-
peting philosophical schools, and such stories often represent con-
version as a change from movement and hurry to stability and fixed-
ness (of which the Socrates of the Symposium is, of course, a prime
model). Polemon, head of Plato’s Academy in the late fourth cen-
tury, provides an excellent example:
Polemon’s father, Philostratus, was one of the leading men
of Athens and used to race chariots. It is said that when
Polemon was a young man he was a loose-liver (akolastos)
and once when drunk went on a revel through the Kera-
meikos in the middle of the day. He was scandalously in-
dicted by his wife for abusive treatment, for he was fond of
boys and young men. He used to carry coins around with
him so that he would be able to have instant sex with any-
one he met. When however he had been captivated by
Xenocrates [the head of the Academy] and spent time with
him, he so changed his life that he never again altered his
countenance or his bearing or the tone of his voice, but kept
them the same even when he was in a very bad mood.23
Here is a vision of what Alcibiades, the very embodiment of horse
racing, drunken escapades, and erotic adventures, could have be-
come had he stayed still beside Socrates; instead he bursts in and out
of the lives of others, and neither he nor his emotions ever have
time to rest quietly (b – c).
Neither Aristodemus nor Apollodorus were, as far as we know,
a great gain for the progress of philosophy, though both knew how
to go through the motions. Apollodorus’s mixture of contempt and

23
Philodemus on the authority of Antigonus of Carystus; cf. K. Gaiser,
Philodems Academica (Stuttgart: ) –. In another version of the same mate-
rial (Diogenes Laertius .), Polemon, “drunk and wearing a garland,” bursts into
a lecture of Xenocrates on sôphrosynê (in imitation of the Platonic Alcibiades?). It
is worth noting that, according to Antigonus, Polemon “imitated Xenocrates in
everything” (Gaiser op. cit. ; cf. Diogenes Laertius .)—another narrative ele-
ment of importance for Aristodemus and Apollodorus.

Setting the Scene | 

pity for what he once was and for “nonphilosophers,” particularly
those involved in the real world of power and money (c), may
however remind us of Lucretius’s Epicurean self-satisfaction:
Nothing is more sweet than to dwell in the calm regions,
firmly embattled on the heights by the teaching of the wise,
whence you can look down on others, and see them wan-
dering hither and thither, going astray as they seek the way
of life, in strife matching their wits or rival claims of birth,
struggling night and day by surpassing effort to rise up to the
height of power and gain possession of the world. Ah! Mis-
erable minds of men, blind hearts! (Lucretius, De rerum natura
.–; trans. Bailey, adapted)
or of Seneca’s regret at wasted opportunities:
So long as we wander aimlessly, having no guide, and fol-
lowing only the noise and discordant cries of those who call
us in different directions, life will be consumed in making
mistakes—life that is brief even if we should strive day and
night for sound wisdom. Let us, therefore, decide both upon
the goal and upon the way, and not fail to find some expe-
rienced guide who has explored the region towards which we
are advancing. . . . (Seneca, De vita beata .; trans. Basore)
Apollodorus has certainly found his guide, though whether he under-
stands what that guide has to say is (at least) a moot point. More-
over, as we shall see, the practice of Socratic philosophy is inimical
to the idea of the master whose teaching imparts wisdom: this is the
message of what Socrates jokingly tells Agathon when he first ar-
rives (d), and it is what Alcibiades too failed to understand. Al-
cibiades thought that, by offering himself to Socrates, he could
“hear everything that Socrates knew” (a), but the getting of
wisdom is not a matter of facile exchange, as Socrates points out to
him (e– a; cf. below, p. ).
Plato’s various experiments with narrative form are all, at dif-
ferent levels, concerned with patterns of tradition and authority,
and (with hindsight) may be seen to reflect upon the formation of

 | Plato’s Symposium
philosophical “schools”; such experiments are also, of course, ways
of dealing with Plato’s own paradoxical position as a recorder, after
Socrates’ death, of Socrates’ unwritten words. Apollodorus, who is
described at the opening of the Phaedo as particularly affected by the
coming death of Socrates (a – b; cf. Xenophon, Apology ), is
in the Symposium a comically ironized picture of “the author” (Plato)
himself, just as the short,24 barefooted Aristodemus is a slightly ab-
surd imitation of Socrates. Although “Socrates” may sometimes func-
tion as a kind of shorthand for philosophy to be a “lover of
Socrates” (b) is not, as the case of Alcibiades will show most
painfully, to be a “lover of wisdom,” that is, a philosopher. So too,
the chain of information from Aristodemus to Apollodorus to his
unnamed acquaintances is an oblique and ironical representation of
the constructed chain from Socrates to Plato to Plato’s readers (an-
cient and modern), who are interested in Socrates but need not be
serious philosophers. The implied question which we must imagine
to have preceded the opening of the work, “What happened at that
symposium at Agathon’s house?” evokes the curiosity and expecta-
tion which make us start reading the text.
Plato, moreover, likes to signal his presence in the text behind
the characters. Thus, for example, at the start of the dialogue named
after him, Phaedo welcomes the opportunity to tell the story of
Socrates’ last hours: “Remembering Socrates is for me the greatest
of pleasures, both when I am speaking and when I am listening to
another” (Phaedo d–; cf. Symp. d–). In the Symposium, the
sources for our narrative, our “remembering Socrates,” are drawn
with particular sharpness. Just as Aristodemus copies Socrates, as
though appearance alone could make a philosopher, so Apollodorus,
whose opening anecdote might even be construed as a (poor) imi-
tation of the opening of the Platonic Republic,25 has nothing of his
own to contribute to philosophy, except the (allegedly) verbatim
repetition of the logoi of others. Both of these imitations fall well

24
Xenophon, Memorabilia .. makes “Shorty” a nickname for Aristodemus.
25
Cf., e.g., Rosen () – ; Rowe () . The relative chronology
implied by this speculation is, of course, disputed.

Setting the Scene | 

short of “doing philosophy,” as in particular Diotima’s speech (itself
an allegedly verbatim repetition by Socrates in teasing, carnival-
esque mood) will demonstrate. Apollodorus, like all those who
wrote positively about Socrates after his death, is open to the charge
of being entirely uncritical (in both senses) in his attitude toward
Socrates (d –). Is Plato liable to this charge? Perhaps, but
Plato calls attention to his own crucial difference both from Apol-
lodorus (Plato has his own philosophical contributions to make) and
from Socrates (Plato writes). Plato’s biographical concern with
Socrates’ every move may seem no less than Apollodorus’s, but the
Platonic Socrates, unlike the Apollodoran, is an idea, a figure of fic-
tion and myth “with which to think,” not an attempt at historically
accurate biography (cf. below, pp.  – ).26
Philosophical schools need ways of keeping in touch with the
revered figures of the past, but Socrates left nothing in writing; he
is, therefore, in a special sense the creation of those who write about
him. When we are told that he confirmed some of the details of
Aristodemus’s account (b –), we may be tempted not just to
see him (and Plato) having a joke at Apollodorus’s passion for accu-
racy (without understanding), but also to see an acknowledgment
by Plato, who could no longer check the reliability of his “sources”
with Socrates, of the fictionality of his Symposium.27 It is for Plato
not a question of one account being more historically accurate than
another, but of the very nature of the fictional construct which is
“Socrates” and his life. Moreover, Apollodorus’s own epideixis is “not

26
Cf. Nussbaum () : “Socrates’ pupils, inspired by personal love, tend
not to follow his advice. Instead of ascending to an equal regard for all instances of
value, they, like Alcibiades, remain lovers of the particulars of personal history.” For
a helpful discussion of Platonic and other representations of Socrates, cf. Blondell
()  –.
27
Rowe () – sees the point of Apollodorus’s claim to have checked details
with Socrates in the idea that “[the historical] Socrates would not have demurred
from what he is supposed to have believed on the authority of ‘Diotima.’ . . . the
ideas in question are to be taken seriously.” For another important approach to this
passage, see Halperin () .

 | Plato’s Symposium
unrehearsed” (ameletêtos, the opening line of the work) — it is in fact
a repetition, perhaps indeed a verbatim repetition, of what was in
any case originally a repetition of Aristodemus’s report; we may be
reminded of how Phaedrus hoped to give an oral performance of
Lysias’s speech as the result of much secret practice (meletê) from a
written script (Phaedrus a – b).28 As Socrates famously points out
in the Phaedrus, a written text can never answer questions, it can only
repeat itself over and over again. Thus, the framing fiction of the
Symposium highlights its problematic status as a written, unchang-
ing account of a quintessentially oral occasion, the elite symposium.
It is a provocation to reflection, not — so we are to understand — a
“master text” to be learned by heart and endlessly repeated.

 | Displaying Wisdom

Aristodemus said that he happened to meet Socrates under

unusual circumstances—bathed and wearing shoes! He asked
him where he was going, all smartened up like that.
“I’m going to dinner at Agathon’s,” Socrates replied.
“You see, I didn’t like the look of the crowd yesterday at the
victory celebration, so I kept away from him there; but I
promised to be there today. That’s why I’ve tricked myself
out: he’s good-looking (kalos), and I must look good when I
visit him. What about you?” he asked. “How do you feel
about coming to a dinner uninvited? Would you be prepared
to do that?”
“Whatever you say,” Aristodemus replied.
“Come with me, then,” Socrates said, “and we’ll distort
and alter the proverb, to show that in fact ‘Good men go of
their own accord to good men’s feasts.’ I mean, Homer’s not
far off actually brutalizing the proverb, let alone distorting

28 Cf. Parmenides c–, where we are told that the immediate source of the

account we are to hear, Antiphon, learned it by heart with considerable effort when
he was a young man.

Setting the Scene | 

 it: in his poem Agamemnon is an exceptionally good man —
good at warfare— and Menelaus is a ‘feeble fighter’ [Iliad
.], yet when Agamemnon is performing a ritual sacri-
fice and hosting a celebration, Homer has Menelaus coming
uninvited to the feast [Iliad .]— a worse man to a bet-
ter man’s feast.”
In response to this Aristodemus said, “Actually, I too
may fit the Homeric situation rather than the one you’re
imagining, Socrates, since I’m of no consequence and I’m
going uninvited to a clever (sophos) man’s feast. So you’d bet-
ter think up an excuse for bringing me, because I won’t
admit to coming uninvited; I’ll tell them you invited me!”
“‘The two of us travelling together up the road’ [Iliad
.] will plan our lines,” Socrates replied. “Let’s go.”
(a–d)
So begins Apollodorus’s account of Agathon’s party. Most unusu-
ally, Socrates is all dressed up, no longer the barefoot, scruffy nui-
sance of the comic stage,29 nor the ascetic figure already familiar
to Plato’s readers from earlier dialogues,30 but rather a character
cleaned up and made to look (from one angle) like a member of po-
lite society, if still a bit comic in his best shoes. This is, so we are to
understand, Socrates’ paradoxical, but appropriately carnivalesque,
response to the Dionysiac moment represented by the symposium.
In wearing his “party clothes,” Socrates physically embodies the lit-
erary form of this most festive dialogue, in which philosophy puts
on its party face. Alcibiades will repeatedly warn us that we have to
look for the beauty which lies concealed within Socrates’ ugly outer
appearance and his ridiculously common vocabulary (lit. the lan-
guage in which his logoi are clothed; e –; see p. ); when the

29 Cf. Aristophanes, Clouds ,  (shoelessness); Clouds ,  – , Birds

 (dirt).
30 For the relative chronology of the Symposium, cf. above, p. . The Symposium

constantly exploits our familiarity with other Socratic writings, both that of Plato
and of others; it is this simple fact, not the details of chronology, which it is im-
portant to grasp.

 | Plato’s Symposium
man himself is spruced up (lit. having made himself kalos), we must
really be on our guard.
If we can detect some good-natured teasing in Aristodemus’s
opening question, we might also come to recognize both the shadow
of a genuinely Socratic problem (“What is the nature of beauty?”;
cf. Xenophon, Symposium .–), which will prove central to Dio-
tima’s disquisition (cf. esp. e –a),31 and a role confusion which
is to be important later in the dialogue. Kalos (beautiful) is the stan-
dard term for an erômenos, a young man who is the object of an
older male’s affections, and Alcibiades will tell us how he, paradox-
ically, had to play the “lover” (erastês) to Socrates’ erômenos in his ef-
forts to acquire Socrates’ wisdom. This, then, is not the last time in
the Symposium in which Socrates will play the dandy. Socrates has,
moreover, already entered into the spirit of the elite symposium —
he shuns the crowd (a), but is prepared to attend a select gath-
ering, and his conversation is laced with puns,32 jokingly twisted
proverbs, and Homeric quotations and interpretations. The deliber-
ately tendentious Homeric interpretation, which may be intended as
a joking example of the contemporary critical practices of the elite
symposium,33 exposes the reality that truth is the object neither of

31 Lowenstam () argues that the question of whether it is the “beautiful” or

the “nonbeautiful” who approach the beautiful and good (agathon) is what prompts
Socrates’ immediately following bout of silent introspection, during which he
works out what he subsequently shares with the other guests as Diotima’s speech;
cf. also Kahn () . The idea has its attractions, but the absence of any refer-
ence to erôs at this early stage makes it ultimately unconvincing. A key thing about
Socrates is that no one ever knows what he is thinking about.
32 It is at least worth remarking that the notice of Agathon’s departure from

Athens at Aristophanes, Frogs – shares with Plato the pun upon agathos and a
reference to a “feast of the blessed”; how much traditional material about this poet
does Plato draw upon?
33 Athenaeus’s guests discuss this same passage of Homer and Plato’s discussion

of it (.c–e); it is instructive about ancient criticism that, whereas Athenaeus

defends Menelaus on the perfectly proper ground that the insult is spoken by Apollo
to Hector, not in the voice of the poet, he (or his anti-Platonic sources) take no ac-
count of the fact that in Plato the speaker is the jesting Socrates. For “literary crit-
icism” and the symposium, cf. Slater ().

Setting the Scene | 

epic poetry nor of its interpretation, and the cultural claims of po-
etry are indeed to be the object of sustained irony in the Symposium.
Before Agathon’s door has been reached, however, the old So-
crates has reasserted himself; a change of clothes does not change the
man. Socrates seems preoccupied and tells Aristodemus to go ahead,
with the result that the latter comes alone into the company of Aga-
thon and his guests, where he is greeted with exemplary courtesy
(d–a). Aristodemus recognizes this pattern—Socrates some-
times just withdraws and stands still (b– )— and urges Aga-
thon to leave him alone, as he will eventually turn up, which in-
deed (without a word of explanation) he does. Later, Alcibiades is
to tell of another occasion when Socrates stood, self-absorbed, for
more than twenty-four hours while an audience of his fellow soldiers
gathered to watch him (c–d). Alcibiades interprets this behavior
as a sign that Socrates was searching for the answer to a problem
which took him a very long time; so too, he reports that the soldiers
spread the word that Socrates was “thinking something over.” So-
crates himself, however, offers no account of his behavior, and though
we might be tempted to interpret it as “the philosopher . . . think-
ing things through by himself ” (Rowe on d) or the “concen-
trated intellectual scrutiny of a problem” (Dover on c), So-
crates’ lack of explanation itself is important. At a banal level, the
timing of the first “withdrawal” makes the point that Agathon’s
dinner party is not, for Socrates, an all-consuming object of inter-
est (contrast the passion with which subsequent reports of it are
pursued by Apollodorus, Glaucon, and others); indeed it brings no
real change in his routine at all, as the end of the dialogue makes
clear. It is easy to see how such behavior could be marked down as
another example of Socrates’ nonconformist refusal to behave like
ordinary people (cf. the soldiers at b– ), but it is not, as the
first instance at least makes clear, directed at an audience; there are
no grounds for thinking that Socrates wants to put Agathon and his
guests in their place or to make a public demonstration of “what a
philosopher looks like.” When the soldiers gather to watch Socrates,
he (apparently) takes no notice, and they are of no significance to the
outcome.

 | Plato’s Symposium
 Such periods of silent self-absorption are the closest Socrates
comes to public display, or epideixis,34 or rather they constitute one,
peculiarly Socratic and self-directed, form of what may seem to an
observer to be a “performance.” Agathon’s art, by contrast, is pre-
cisely built upon success with a (mass) audience. When Agathon jok-
ingly asks Socrates to sit beside him, so that, through contact, he can
benefit from whatever “piece of wisdom” Socrates has acquired
while standing in the neighbors’ porch (d–), Socrates counters
with an exaggerated eulogy of Agathon’s wisdom which “shone
brilliantly the other day before more than , Greek witnesses”
(e –). Their very different “wisdoms” are acknowledged by
Alcibiades, who will crown them both, as he plays the role of
Dionysus predicted by Agathon at e. Agathon’s “displays” (epi-
deixeis; cf. b) are both very public and, unlike Socrates’ inner-
directed reflections, directed precisely to the public. His performance
at his own symposium, which he himself likens to a theater (a),
will be no less aimed at a particular audience. Nor, of course, is
drama the only kind of epideixis which may be contrasted in this
way with Socrates’ behavior.
Doctors too were in the habit of giving public “displays” of
their talents, in part to attract clients, and Eryximachus’s “perform-
ance” should be seen in that light (cf. below, p. ). Great intel-
lectuals and sophists, such as Prodicus (cf. the famous “Choice of
Heracles,” b–), Gorgias (cf. Plato, Hippias Maior b–c), and,
from an earlier generation, Protagoras, gave public displays of their
learning, whether through set speeches, such as Protagoras’s great
epideixis at Plato, Protagoras c–d, or by taking questions from
the audience, or by a mixture of the two modes (cf. Plato, Gorgias
c – ). Paradoxical argument, such as, for example, that of the
nonlover in the Phaedrus who argues that a young man should show
sexual gratitude to a man who does not love him rather than to one
who does, is another way in which the ingenuity of the speaker may
be advertised. Among the things which unite these forms are their

34 On epideixis as characteristic of the late fifth–early fourth century, cf., e.g.,

Thomas () – ; Thomas (), with further bibliography.

Setting the Scene | 

potential to reach a wide audience and their hierarchical structure:
power, often in the form of knowledge, is here very clearly in
the hands of the performer. It may often seem to modern readers
that the Socrates of many Platonic dialogues exercises a similar per-
formative power and plays to the audience no less than do the
sophists, as he protests his ignorance and reduces his interlocutors
to helpless confusion. There is, however, a fundamental difference
between, on the one hand, both his periods of “abstraction” and his
practice of dialectic and, on the other, “displays” of brilliance and
superficial knowledge; in the Symposium, the contrast is clear in
Socrates’ questioning of Agathon which immediately follows the
latter’s performance and in Diotima’s reported questioning of the
young Socrates.
The form of epideixis which lies at the heart of the Symposium
is, of course, that of encomium or praise (epainos), a form fully de-
veloped in poetry before prose (cf. a – d), a fact perhaps reflected
in the poet Agathon’s triumphant jeu d’esprit.35 The symposium was
certainly a traditional site for encomia, both poetic and not, of
beautiful young men, and Phaedrus’s shift from praise of individual
erômenoi to that of erôs itself foreshadows the move of Diotima/
Socrates from the particular to the universal (cf. below, p. ).
Moreover, Diotima’s description of the “far from beautiful” Eros
(c – ) and Alcibiades’ praise (epainos, a) of the old and ugly
Socrates are to be seen as striking adaptations of a traditional form.
Plato himself elsewhere refers to encomiastic works (in both poetry
and prose) praising the family and wealth of an erômenos (Lysis d–
d) or a powerful aristocrat (Theaetetus e – b), and such compo-
sitions were no doubt very common.
Epideictic encomium was, moreover, an important manifesta-
tion of the increased professionalization and education in rhetorical
techniques which characterized classical Athens. What is probably
the earliest surviving treatise on rhetorical techniques, the so-called

35 On the history of the encomium and its relation to such forms as the hymn,

cf. Nightingale () –; Hunter () – with further bibliography.

 | Plato’s Symposium
Rhetoric to Alexander (mid – fourth century?), sets out a clear formula
for writing encomia:
After the introduction one should make a distinction be-
tween the goods external to virtue and those actually inher-
ent in virtue, putting it thus: goods external to virtue fall
under high birth, strength, beauty and wealth; virtue is di-
vided into wisdom, justice, courage and creditable habits.
Those belonging to virtue are justly eulogised, but those ex-
ternal to it are kept in the background since it is appropriate
for the strong and handsome and well-born and rich to re-
ceive not praise but congratulation. Having then made this
distinction, we shall place first after the introduction the ge-
nealogy of the person we are speaking of, as that is the fun-
damental ground of reputation or discredit for human be-
ings, and also for animals; so in eulogising a human being
or a domestic animal we shall state their pedigree, although
when praising an emotion or action or speech or possession
we shall base our approval directly on the creditable quali-
ties that actually belong to it. (Rhetoric to Alexander b –
; trans. H. Rackham)
After describing the method of praising the family of the subject of
the speech, the author then advises a roughly chronological pro-
gression through the subject’s life which highlights and magnifies
the accomplishments of each stage of development. The accom-
plishments of adult life are to be divided according to the parts of
virtue: justice, wisdom, courage, and so on (b–). To a greater
or lesser extent, all the speeches in the Symposium show elements of
these formal patterns, though none simply reproduces a scholastic
formula. Thus, for example, Alcibiades’ idiosyncratic encomium of
Socrates focuses upon the “cardinal virtues” of wisdom, modera-
tion (sôphrosynê), and bravery.
The author of the Rhetoric envisages encomia not just of humans
but also of “other living creatures” (prize-winning horses? b–
), and Phaedrus (as quoted by Eryximachus) complains that he

Setting the Scene | 

has come across a written encomium of salt and that there are many
other such things available (b – ). The reason for composing
such “half-joking, half-serious” works is clear: what is important in
such works is the verbal and intellectual facility of the composer,
not the substance or importance of the thing praised; such composi-
tions are, in fact, a means of praising the speaker, not the subject. For
Plato this is all part of the mendacity of a contemporary rhetorical
practice which is consistently portrayed throughout his works as
having no interest in truth or moral value. If this mendacity is
treated with appropriate lightheartedness in the festive Symposium,
the issue remains deadly serious; in the attack upon the spoudaio-
geloion, it is the spoudaiogeloion itself which is the principal weapon.
Eryximachus proposes that each guest should offer “the most
beautiful (kalliston) speech in praise of Eros which he can manage”
(d –), thus (unwittingly) placing the emphasis, as with enco-
mia of salt, upon the skill of the speaker, not upon the value of what
is said. Socrates picks this up with his insistent reference to the beauty
of Agathon’s speech (b, ), but immediately makes the point,
again with typical irony, that he now realizes that encomium has
nothing to do with truth, but with ascribing every possible beauty
and virtue to the thing being praised, and as such it is a form with
which he can have nothing to do (c– a).36 A commitment
to truth introduces Socrates’ contribution to the symposium (a),
and at its conclusion he jokingly suggests that Phaedrus may not
wish to call his performance an encomium to Love, presumably be-
cause its focus has been on truth, not upon laudation without re-
gard to truth (c – ). The rejection of encomium, as having
nothing to do with truth, is of a piece with the Platonic Socrates’
rejection of “rhetoric” elsewhere, most notably in the Gorgias, as
aiming not at true understanding, but merely at the persuasion and
gratification of an otherwise ignorant audience; in the real world,

36 Cf.
Socrates’ ironic formula for a funeral speech at Menexenus a – . The
“beautiful words” with which, according to Socrates, such speeches are tricked out
contrast with the allegedly random vocabulary and arrangement of Socrates’ con-
tribution to the Symposium (b –).

 | Plato’s Symposium
political and forensic oratory may have far more damaging conse-
quences than undeserved praise, but at the heart of both lies the
same corrosive unconcern with truth and value. Alongside the light-
hearted banter of the Symposium, we may place the rather more se-
rious tone of the opening of the Apology in which Socrates contrasts
the persuasive but entirely untruthful speeches of his prosecutors
with the simple truth, delivered in ordinary words and ordinary So-
cratic mode, which they shall hear from him (Apology a – c; cf.
Symposium b – ).

Setting the Scene | 

 •2•
Erôs before Socrates

 | Phaedrus

P haedrus, who begins the series of encomia, came from a

wealthy Athenian family and is characterized in Plato by an in-
terest in clever argument: in the Protagoras we find him, together
with his friend Eryximachus, putting questions on natural science
to the sophist Hippias (Protagoras c –), and in the dialogue
named after him he has been captivated by an epideictic speech of
Lysias, in which a man seeks to persuade an erômenos that he should
give his sexual favors to someone who does not love him rather than
to someone who does. So too in the Symposium, Phaedrus has
clearly given much thought to the subject of erôs (a– c) and is
also well versed in the poets (a – b); we are perhaps to under-
stand that he has ransacked them looking for encomia of erôs in
order to prepare his own. Certainly, his speech, with its opening
quotations of Hesiod and nearly half of it given over to the stories
of Alcestis, who was willing to die in her husband’s stead, Orpheus,
and Achilles, looks exactly like his speech of complaint which


Eryximachus had paraphrased immediately before; this, then, like
Apollodorus’s whole account, is no “unrehearsed” performance.1
We may compare his rehearsal in the Phaedrus of the speech by
Lysias; Phaedrus likes performing (epideiknusthai) and does not like
to leave anything to chance. Citations of the great poetry and
mythology of the past may be clearly appropriate in the sympotic
setting, but they also establish at the outset the fact that it is indeed
the poets who fashion and transmit society’s common notions,
which— as Socrates is there to remind us — it is the duty of “lovers
of wisdom” to interrogate. Phaedrus’s speech may in fact be seen as
an extended version in prose of a common poetic structure: an as-
sertion of some general truth (as the speaker sees it), followed by
exempla drawn from myth to illustrate that truth.
Exempla, of course, like larger-scale mythic narratives, can be
made to show anything and can be manipulated as the speaker wishes;
there is no such thing as an unalterable, “canonical” account. Thus,
in the spirit of literary problem solving which was to become a
standard feature of the symposia of the learned, Phaedrus (not un-
like the pedantic scholars of later antiquity) adduces reasons to be-
lieve that Aeschylus was “talking nonsense” in making Achilles the
lover (erastês) rather than the beloved (erômenos) of Patroclus. So too,
his very idiosyncratic version of the story of Orpheus, whose trip
to the Underworld was unsuccessful because the gods deemed him
soft “because he was a lyre-player” (d– ), reflects the kind of
jesting approach to inherited stories which could be amply illus-
trated from ancient sympotic literature of all periods.
All three of Phaedrus’s exempla illustrate the flexibility of in-
herited stories. That Alcestis’s willingness to die in her husband’s stead
is a paradigm of the power of erôs to induce self-sacrifice is at least
not the most obvious interpretation, given the usual presentation of
that emotion (above, pp.  –); that she surpassed her parents-in-
law “in philia because of her erôs” (c – ) merely calls attention

1 Note Pausanias’s pointed conclusion to his speech: “This, Phaedrus, is my

contribution on Eros. It’s the best I can do on the spur of the moment” (c– ).

Erôs before Socrates | 

to the manipulation.2 Philia and erôs may, of course, coexist, even
in a marriage, and Pausanias will introduce us (in a pederastic con-
text) to “strong friendships (philiai) and partnerships, which . . . erôs
most of all tends to implant in us” (c– ), but Phaedrus’s lack
of explanation or theorizing, a feature in which he differs markedly
from Pausanias, who follows him, induces skepticism. Moreover, why
an action which would have led to Alcestis’s permanent separation
from her husband, Admetus (contrast Achilles’ deliberate death),
should be an act of erôs is left quite unclear. That Achilles had the
courage “not only to die for his lover Patroclus but also in addition
to him” (a) is at best a loose reading of the Iliad, and one seem-
ingly more concerned with verbal wit than with truth; that the gods
transported Achilles to the Islands of the Blessed because it was his
lover he had avenged is a simple rhetorical fiction invented for the
purposes of the argument.
It is indeed the very profusion of mythic voices, which ingenu-
ity can multiply without limit, which hinders the advancement of
understanding. Story A can be used to trump story B, but where
does this actually get us? A very similar thing is true of poetic cita-
tion. Phaedrus’s citational practice is hardly unparalleled in omitting
two “nonessential” verses from his opening quotation of Hesiod’s
Theogony, but we ought at least to ask whether Plato wants us to re-
call that the quotation continues “ . . . Eros, most beautiful among
immortal gods, limb-looser, who subdues the mind (noos) in the
breast and the sensible planning (epiphrôn boulê) of all gods and all
mortal men” (Theogony –). No doubt these verses too could
be turned to encomiastic use, but they are perhaps less appropri-
ate to a philosophical gathering of men allegedly devoted precisely
to noos; the omission of these verses advertises the simple, rather
unsophisticated manipulations of Phaedrus’s speech. The Platonic
Socrates himself, of course, is not slow elsewhere to find confirma-
tion of his views in the great poets of the past, but poetic citation

2 So
too at Xenophon, Symposium ., adduced as a parallel by Dover ()
, we are clearly dealing with some kind of in-joke: Socrates speaks: “Nikeratos,
as I hear it, loves (erôn) his wife and is loved back (anteratai).”

 | Plato’s Symposium
alone is no substitute for argument; Phaedrus counts authorities
rather than asking about their authority. “Lacking, it would seem,
in native force of intellect, Phaedrus relies upon authority and tradi-
tion” is Bury’s rather stern judgment;3 later examples of self-parody
from the other guests may, however, incline us to give Phaedrus
some benefit of the doubt (cf. above, p. ).
Philosophical gatherings, including symposia, no doubt regu-
larly subjected the apparently high-minded words of poets to criti-
cal examination (cf., e.g., Republic .e – b on Simonides), but
there can be a very Socratic objection to the practice as a whole. In
the Protagoras, after a lengthy discussion of another poem of Si-
monides, Socrates observes: “Gatherings such as ours . . . have no
need of other voices or of poets, whom one cannot question con-
cerning their meaning; when they are brought into discussions,
some say that the poet means one thing, others say another, and
people discuss a matter which they have no way of determining”
(e). Socrates’ point (whether ironically intended or not) is that
the poet is not present, and one cannot interrogate a recited quota-
tion, any more than a written text (cf. Phaedrus d – e); in fact, the
Symposium is to offer us major contributions from two practicing
poets who are indeed present to defend themselves, if necessary.
Nevertheless, Phaedrus’s witty contribution allows us to see that the
citation of poetic and mythical exempla of a traditional kind cannot
take us beyond mere assertion. We may be tempted to extrapolate
from his two principal examples (Alcestis and Achilles), both of
whom had been dramatized on the tragic stage, to the nonphilo-
sophical status of mythic drama as a whole.
At the heart of Phaedrus’s speech lies a claim that erôs induces a
proper sense of shame in regard to shameful acts and an ambitious
striving (philotimia) to perform honorable deeds. An erastês would
do anything rather than be seen doing something disgraceful by his
erômenos, and vice versa. If this principle were applied to the com-
position of an army, it would sweep all before it. Erôs can, therefore,
make up for “natural” deficiencies of, say, courage (a – b) in

3 Bury
() xxv.

Erôs before Socrates | 

those who fall into its power. It is important that, at the beginning
of the series of speeches, it is the positive social and moral effects of
erôs which are foregrounded, for this is to be a principal focus in the
dialogue as a whole.
Phaedrus, of course, is operating entirely with very traditional
(even archaising) notions of “shameful,” “honorable,” and “virtue”
(aretê), as is clear from his appeal to Homer and soldiery, though
the bravery of its citizen-soldiers was indeed crucial to the survival
of any ancient city; the tradition of laudatory speeches at funerals,
such as that which Thucydides places in Pericles’ mouth in book 
of the History, shows the continuing potency of these inherited
concepts. Nevertheless, within the context of a Socratic dialogue,
we may regard it as important that Phaedrus makes no effort to
argue that erôs would help a lover to distinguish the shameful from
the honorable—what these are is silently assumed to be part of the
unexamined conglomerate of knowledge which every member of
society possesses, whether or not he is to fall under the spell of erôs.
As such, Phaedrus foreshadows a central element (and deficiency) of
Pausanias’s erotic program; Pausanias’s observation that actions (drink-
ing, singing, having a discussion, loving) are not of themselves hon-
orable or shameful, as everything depends on how they are done,
may be likewise intended to cap Phaedrus’s simplistic assertiveness
(e–a). Moreover, Alcibiades, who otherwise feels no shame
at all, will offer an example of a beloved who does indeed feel
shame in front of his lover; this proves to be a counterexample,
however, as it is a species of “striving after [political] honor” (philo-
timia) which pulls him away from that lover (a – b).4 Where
Phaedrus claims that the beloved is the last person whom a lover
would wish to see him break ranks or desert (a – ), Alcibiades
must confess to “running away” from where he knows he should
be—with Socrates (b). Erôs, as commonly understood, is not
apparently enough.

4 Cf. Xenophon, Memorabilia ..– for a parallel account of Alcibiades’

philotimia, which shares several features with Alcibiades’ account in the Symposium.

 | Plato’s Symposium
  | Pausanias

A bout Pausanias we know very little; Plato presents him and Aga-
thon as an erastês-erômenos couple in the Protagoras (d– e),
set at least a decade and a half before the Symposium, and this long-
standing relationship (cf. b) is clearly central to the speech
which we will hear from him. In the Protagoras he is presented as lis-
tening avidly to the famous sophist Prodicus of Ceos, and there is per-
haps some amused reflection of this influence in Pausanias’s opening
insistence on distinguishing forms of erôs, for linguistic differentiation,
the “proper use of words,” was a prominent interest of Prodicus.
Although Pausanias did not, in the fictional symposium, follow
immediately after Phaedrus (c – ), he does so in the Symposium
which Plato provides for his guests/readers. We should, therefore,
ask how Pausanias caps Phaedrus’s encomium. The beginning would
seem to be auspicious, for whereas Phaedrus had (apparently) taken
it for granted that we all know what erôs is, Pausanias begins by
making a distinction between two kinds of erôs. This “clever” move
introduces Pausanias’s role as the group’s nomothetês, “layer down of
laws.” We may compare how Socrates, speaking in the guise of a
lover pretending not to be in love with a boy he hopes to win over,
caps Lysias’s speech on the same subject:

In everything, my boy, there is one starting-point for anyone

who is going to deliberate successfully: he must know what
it is he is deliberating about, or he will inevitably miss every-
thing. Most people are unaware that they do not know what
each thing really is. So they fail to reach agreement about it
at the beginning of their enquiry, assuming that they know
what it is, and having proceeded on this basis they pay the
penalty one would expect: they agree neither with them-
selves nor with each other. . . . [L]et us establish an agreed
definition of love, about what sort of thing it is and what
power it possesses, and look at this as our point of reference
while we make our enquiry whether it brings advantage or

Erôs before Socrates | 

 harm. Well then, that love is some sort of desire is clear to
everyone. . . . (Phaedrus b – d; trans. Rowe)
In fact, however, Pausanias’s initial concern is not with what erôs is
(a subject which he never reaches), but with what kind of erôs de-
serves encomium. That there is “good” and “bad” erôs is an idea cru-
cial to both Pausanias and Eryximachus, whereas for the second
group of speakers (Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates/Diotima) erôs
is tout court a good thing.
Pausanias establishes two kinds of erôs: the older, Eros Oura-
nios, is the companion of Aphrodite Ourania, who was born—as her
name indicates—“from the foam (aphros)” in the sea where Oura-
nos’s genitals, severed by his son Kronos, fell (cf. Hesiod, Theogony
–), whereas the younger, Eros Pandemos (of all the people),
works together with Aphrodite Pandemos, the child of Zeus and
Dione (cf., e.g., Iliad . –). For the purposes of his epideixis
Pausanias has systematized, or sharpened, an opposition between
two epithets of Aphrodite with cult associations. “Ourania” may be
applied to any god, with the meaning “heavenly,” though the Greeks
knew the Great Mother of various Eastern religions as “Aphrodite
Ourania,” and Ourania was certainly a known cult title of Aphro-
dite at Athens (cf. Pausanias ..).5 The Athenians too had a long-
standing cult of Aphrodite Pandemos6 and, just as the epithet
Ourania offered scope for interpretation, so did Pandemos, which
Pausanias, with sympotic ingenuity, turns from a political epithet
probably celebrating the goddess’s link to “the whole people” to one
suggesting the promiscuity of a love “available to all.” Having hy-
pothesized a divine structure, Pausanias, like an archaic poet describ-
ing the divine order of the world, moves to the spheres of activity
and control of each god: different gods must operate in different
spheres. Here, however, he perhaps loses the clarity of Hesiod, whose

5 Cf. Hdt. ., ; Pausanias ... On Aphrodite Ourania, see also Ferrari

() – . Pausanias .. describes three “ancient” wooden statues of
Aphrodite at Thebes—“Ourania,” “Pandemos,” and “Apostrophia” (Rejector, i.e.,
“of unlawful desire and impious actions”).
6 Cf. Pirenne-Delforge (); Stafford () – .

 | Plato’s Symposium
Theogony was the principal Greek text on the divine structure, for
he shifts from the idea of different spheres of activity to the moral
evaluation of individual activities. No activity (praxis), he argues
(a), is honorable or shameful of itself, but everything depends on
how it is done. We ought, therefore, to not praise just Eros, but only
the Eros “which encourages us to love honorably” (a).7
Pausanias’s simple dualistic model, matched by an equally sim-
plistic moral model of “good” and “bad,” raises a number of ques-
tions, though the rhetorical agenda which informs them will soon
become clear enough. The fact that, as an activity, erôs is per se
morally neutral but can have good and bad manifestations ought not
to mean that it is a different erôs which makes us act in different
ways, any more than different Dionysuses make us drink “honor-
ably” and “shamefully.” Moreover, we have already seen that the
evidence of cult names on which Pausanias bases the plurality of
Aphrodite and Eros is not to be pushed too hard. In Xenophon’s
Symposium, Socrates, presumably responding to this argument, ac-
cepts that there are different cult practices, but keeps an open mind
as to the conclusions to be drawn from that: “Whether Aphrodite
is single or double, ‘Ourania’ and ‘Pandemos,’ I don’t know; Zeus,
who always seems to remain the same, has many titles” (Xenophon,
Symposium .). The Xenophontic Socrates thus already calls atten-
tion to a potential weakness in Pausanias’s argument, one which is
still fought over by modern historians and philosophers of religion.
For Pausanias, the erôs which works with Aphrodite Pandemos
(herself the product of an adulterous union) is promiscuous in the
sense that it operates without social and educational distinctions —
Pausanias is nothing if not a self-proclaimed elitist—and it aims
merely at sexual gratification, being erôs for the body rather than the
soul (b–). All erôs for women is of this kind. We may be tempted
to put this observation down to Pausanias’s long-standing relation-
ship with Agathon—the primary audience for the whole speech —
but in fact this rejection of heterosexuality (and, at least implicitly,
of female homosexuality) is of a piece with the main body of the

7 The
Greek may also be translated as “which honorably encourages us to love.”

Erôs before Socrates | 

speech, which is to be concerned with erôs as a force for the trans-
mission of civic aretê; as women are “by definition” excluded from
such aretê, they must also be excluded from “good” erôs. More broadly,
of course, the intimate link which Plato is constructing between
erôs and philosophy means that homosexual relations must be privi-
leged in any paradigm, even a mistaken one, of the getting of
wisdom, and this Platonic tradition was to have a long history in an-
tiquity. A Platonizing pederast in Plutarch makes similar use of a
distinction between true erôs, which is pederastic and has higher pur-
poses, and “desire” (epithumia), which aims at pleasure and enjoy-
ment (Amatorius c– e); on this view, so it is alleged, men no more
feel true erôs for women than flies do for milk or bees for honey. The
same character also recounts that when someone complained to
Aristippus of Cyrene (late fourth – early third century) that the
courtesan Lais, whose sexual services he was presumably purchas-
ing, did not love (philein) him, Aristippus replied that he did not
imagine that wine and fish loved him either, yet he derived pleasure
from both.
Aphrodite Ourania, on the other hand, has no mother and
therefore she and the corresponding erôs have nothing to do with
heterosexuality.8 As the goddess is older than Aphrodite Pandemos
(as Kronos is older than Zeus), so she and those inspired by her have
the characteristics of the old — they have put youthful outrages (hy-
bris) behind them (c) and are interested in the mind rather than
the body. The “sophistical” equivocation — X is “younger” than Y
and therefore “young,” whereas Y is “mature” — is as much at home
in the play of the symposium as will be Pausanias’s joke that in
societies such as Elis and Boeotia, where people are no good at
speaking, it is always honorable for boys to grant their favors to
lovers, as this spares the lovers having to make speeches of persua-
sion (b –). The disavowal of hybris, however—a term which,
in sexual contexts, is regularly used in connection with rape or

8 The
playfulness of Pausanias’s distinction may be seen from the fact that Pin-
dar describes how the temple prostitutes of Corinth “frequently soar in their minds
towards Aphrodite, the heavenly (ourania) mother of loves” (fr. . –  Maehler).

 | Plato’s Symposium
other forms of sexual attention which bring dishonor— and the
praise for relationships which begin when the younger man’s beard
is starting to grow and which then last, as shared partnerships,
throughout life clearly take Pausanias’s relationship with the listen-
ing Agathon as an ideal model (d –; cf. Aristophanes’ words
about Pausanias and Agathon at b – ).9 Finally, in the section
devoted to the two types of erôs Pausanias introduces the subject
which, apparently, is closest to his heart: the conditions under which
erômenoi should indulge (charizesthai, show charis to) their lovers
(a –). His “heavenly erôs” thus also involves physical relief for
the lover, but only under specific circumstances.
The second part of Pausanias’s speech, for which the first has
prepared, is a normative description of the practice of pederasty in
Athens, which he acknowledges to be complex (poikilos), “not easy
to grasp” (b), and which would seem to an outside observer to
be riddled with inconsistencies; pederasty is indeed another activity
which is neither honorable nor shameful of itself, but the evaluation
of it is entirely dependent on how it is done (d –). Many mod-
ern scholars would grant Pausanias at least this: same-sex relations
of all kinds in Athens were indeed a problematic area of social anx-
iety, where custom and convention (nomos) dictated a much more
mixed set of attitudes than the law (also, in Greek, nomos) defined.10
Put baldly, Pausanias argues that pederastic practice in Athens is
broadly divisible into two kinds (another of his rhetorical dualities):
good practice and bad. In both kinds, both erastês and erômenos may
be characterized by different attitudes and purposes, but it is again
the conditions under which sexual favors may honorably be granted
to which the argument leads.
9 So too e–  (Pausanias), “the lover of a good character lasts throughout

life, as he is fused together with something long-lasting,” looks forward to Aristo-

phanes’ speech and clearly suggests Pausanias and Agathon again. At Xenophon,
Symposium . Socrates explicitly refers to young men who are simultaneously erô-
menoi and ( just developing) erastai.
10 Cf. Cohen () chapter , citing much earlier bibliography. The subject

cannot be pursued in detail here. For different views on the historical origins of
Greek “didactic” pederasty (a subject only of marginal interest for the Symposium),
cf. Dover () –.

Erôs before Socrates | 

 Good Athenian pederasty for Pausanias is of the following kind.
The older erastês expresses his love and pursues his object openly,
rather than secretly; he loves the younger man’s soul rather than
his body, and wishes to make the younger man better, by making
him “wise and good,” by “contributing to understanding (phronêsis)
and the rest of aretê” (d – e); beyond this education and the
friendship which attends it he offers the young man nothing (such
as money, power, and so on). The erômenos similarly acts out of a
wish to be made “wise and good” and does not sell himself for money,
power, or other advantage; he will not grant sexual favors easily or
quickly, for there must be time to see that the lover really is of the
right sort and not merely interested in physical gratification. Bad
pederasty is everything else, or any relationship in which one of these
conditions is not fulfilled. According to Pausanias, social custom in
terms of encouragement for the erastês in his pursuit and the physi-
cal and moral checks which are placed upon the behavior of younger
men support this complex situation of approval and disapprobation.
As an encomium, this is at least strange, for the speech as a
whole certainly suggests that the “good erôs,” which activates the
“good pederasty,” is much rarer than its opposite. Moreover, and
this is something which will become important in Socrates’ speech,
erôs is here felt by the older erastês, whereas the younger erômenos (lit.
he who is loved) will feel at most “affection” (philia; cf. c);11
despite this, the results of the erôs are entirely centered upon the
younger man’s improvement. If we were to ask what the (honorable)
erastês derives from his erôs, then there seem to be two possible an-
swers: a not explicitly expressed emotional satisfaction that he is
doing good by helping a young citizen toward virtue and, second,
physical satisfaction (“favors”; note especially d–).
Pausanias might have been a witness on the side of those who
believe that Plato was familiar with the idea of an erôs which is gen-
erous and directed to the good of the beloved, as well as with the

11
There is a nice illustration at Xenophon, Hiero ., “A private citizen has
immediate evidence that, whenever his beloved (erômenos) yields, he is offering the
favor (charizesthai) out of affection (philôn). . . .”

 | Plato’s Symposium
selfish, appetitive erôs of mainstream Greek opinion,12 were it not
for the obvious gravitational center of Pausanias’s concerns, namely,
the sexual satisfaction of the erastês. A cynic might be forgiven for
thinking that the good erastês derives little more from his erôs than
does the bad one. What, moreover, we might be tempted to ask,
can erastai do for young men that a good father cannot do, for the
paternal model is clearly analogous to, though of course also cru-
cially different from, the pederastic one. Thus, in the pederastic verse
of Theognis, the poet gives advice about conduct “as a father to his
son” (v. ), and the Socrates of the Republic outlaws the “mania”
of sexual pleasure for erastai who love properly: “although a lover
can (if he can persuade his boyfriend to let him) kiss and spend time
with and touch his boyfriend, as he would his son — which is to say,
for honorable reasons—still his relationship with anyone he cares for
will basically be such that he never gives the impression that there
is more to it than that” (Rep. .b – c; trans. Waterfield). The
fraught ambiguities of this passage of the Republic ( just what kind
of physical contact is envisaged?) are a powerful indication of the
anxieties that surround sexual behavior in an educational context.
Crucial for Pausanias’s program, then, is an implicit acknowl-
edgment of the universal and awkward reality (awkward for every-
one except Socrates, at least) of physical desire requiring physical
release, and this program must be seen as at least a rhetorical strat-
egy for channeling and controlling that brute fact. Whether such a
program, particularly as regards sexual relations, was realizable in
practice was something which need not have concerned Pausanias
or his fellow guests. To an outside observer (or a modern reader),
indeed, it may seem that such a program might be merely a fine
mask for the indulgence of sexual drives, and a fragment of fourth-
century comedy seems already to reflect such attitudes:
What are you saying? Do you expect me to believe that a
lover (erastês) who loves a boy in his prime is a lover of his
character and is truly sober-minded (sôphrôn), with no inter-
est in what he sees? I believe this no more than I believe that
12 The
debate may be pursued through Rist () and Osborne ().

Erôs before Socrates | 

 a poor man who constantly pesters the rich doesn’t want
something. (Amphis fr.  Kassel-Austin)
The fact that an outside observer may see things differently does not,
of course, mean that the practitioners themselves do not sincerely be-
lieve in the reality of the fine ideals they espouse or that these ideals
are not realized in practice. On the other hand, it is at least worth ask-
ing how many members of Pausanias’s immediate audience we are to
imagine as “believing” his account of Athenian practice: Agathon’s
guests and Plato’s readers, of course, knew that all sympotic discourse
was a mixture of the “serious” and the “playful.” The speech by the
nonlover in the Phaedrus (above, p. ) shows how easily Pausanias’s
arguments can be flipped over in the service of a different rhetoric.
Despite this, much modern interest in Pausanias’s speech has
been, unsurprisingly, focused upon the question of how accurate a
picture of Athenian social customs it affords. Some of the detail of
his speech does indeed seem to be confirmed from other sources,13
and Plato creates internal consistency through Alcibiades’ similar
account of the rules of the game in which he thought he was en-
gaged; we must be careful, moreover, to distinguish Pausanias’s de-
scription of alleged Athenian practice from his proposed ideal and
idealistic pattern of philosophic pederasty (c – c).What are,
however, perhaps more important than the historicity of the social
practice which Pausanias depicts are the awkward questions of real
social relations which his presentation elides. It will, for example,
be left to Alcibiades to fill in for us one of the many areas which
Pausanias leaves unexplored: the almost inevitable fact that erômenoi
will exploit the universal need of all lovers for sexual release, and
the dependence which that need brings, as a weapon in the game of
education. Unfortunately for Alcibiades, Socrates was the exception
that proved the rule, but the rule is a fatal flaw in Pausanias’s rosy
picture. The lover (unless he be Socrates) will thus inevitably say what
the beloved wishes to hear because of the “favors” upon which the
former is so dependent. As an orator or politician also claims to
make an audience better, but must play to (charizesthai) and flatter
13 The
classic study here is Dover ().

 | Plato’s Symposium
(kolakeuein) the crowd if he is to be successful (cf. Gorgias d – a),
so the lover’s desire for a successful conclusion to his pursuit will
determine the character of any exchange with the beloved.14 Sex-
ual favors, then, are not something given out of gratitude for better-
ment or wisdom gained, but are determinative of the nature of that
wisdom.
As for the erômenos, how will he become better with respect to
virtue? No answer is given, but the obvious inference — and one
which corresponds to ancient notions of teaching and of the rela-
tionship between master and pupil or father and son — is that he will
become like the erastês, who is “a decent person” (chrêstos, d).
This last word had also been used by Phaedrus — “I cannot myself
say that there is a greater good for a young man than a chrêstos lover
and for a lover than a (chrêstos) boyfriend” (c – )— and though
Pausanias has been more explicit than Phaedrus as to what consti-
tutes such “decency,” his speech represents in fact little advance-
ment of clarity in this regard; it is at least reasonable to infer that
Phaedrus too was only praising erôs of an honorable, nonmercenary
kind. The principal difference between the accounts of Phaedrus
and Pausanias lies in the explicitly didactic role of the erastês in the
latter. Whereas in Phaedrus’s speech, erôs will make someone be-
have “rightly,” for Pausanias erôs is a force which makes not its ob-
ject, but its object’s beloved wiser and better.
The possible objections to Pausanias’s model are easy enough to
see. If the erastês is to make a young man “better and wiser,” then —
on a conventional model of teaching — he himself must be a wise
man, as Alcibiades realized that Socrates manifestly was; but in what
this wisdom might consist is never examined. Phaedrus had laid
stress upon traditional military virtues such as courage, whereas the
most flattering inference to be drawn from Pausanias’s speech is that,
broadly speaking, it is “citizenship” in which the older man will
mold the younger, who himself will one day become a “good erastês.”
A less flattering interpretation would see Pausanias entirely preoc-
cupied with an ever-recurring round of sexual practice, so that it is

14 An
excellent discussion is in Nightingale () – .

Erôs before Socrates | 

simply the didactic circle of how erômenoi are taught to be erastai
which is of concern to him; in this latter case, “wisdom” and “virtue”
will simply be part of the self-serving vocabulary with which a
particular subgroup of society justifies its practices. On the more
favorable interpretation, however, Pausanias is describing a particular
form of the nonprofessional transmission of cultural knowledge
common to all societies, but one which was a source of special anx-
iety (for some) in the latter part of the fifth century and the early
part of the fourth because of the rise of professional educators, par-
ticularly those whom we, somewhat inaccurately, group together as
“the sophists.” This new kind of professional educator could be
represented, as happens for example in Aristophanes’ Clouds, as dis-
mantling the traditional, largely family-based, structures by which
one generation instructed another and society was preserved and
protected. Thus, in the Protagoras, Plato makes Protagoras undertake
to make men “good citizens” (a), as Hippias too offers to make
men “better with respect to aretê” (Hippias Maior c), and it is this
“citizenship” which lies at the heart of Protagoras’s great speech in
his dialogue; Socrates then questions Protagoras about how he will
make his students better and in what the aretê which he professes to
teach consists. Pausanias’s model is traditional, not innovative, but
Socrates’ cross-examination of Protagoras’s claims shows us what
kind of an examination might lie in wait for Pausanias’s unreflective
notions.
That Pausanias is indeed thinking of (an ill-defined) civic virtue
is also suggested by the political frame of his pederastic program.
Whereas Phaedrus drew solely on poetic myth, Pausanias’s princi-
pal exhibits are the greatest heroes of Athenian democratic myth, the
tyrant-slayers Harmodius and Aristogeiton (celebrated also in drink-
ing songs performed at elite Athenian symposia),15 and his pattern
of pederasty is allegedly rejected in tyrannies and nondemocratic
states. This political rhetoric is particularly important, as it is likely
15 For the love of Harmodius and Aristogeiton adduced as beneficial to Athens,
cf. esp. Aeschines ., where they are immediately followed by Achilles and Pa-
troclus; Wohl () – . That this love “put an end to the rule” of the Athen-
ian tyrants (c– ) is certainly an exaggeration; cf. Thucydides .–.

 | Plato’s Symposium
that the almost ritualized type of homosexual practice which Pau-
sanias describes was perceived or could be represented as an elite,
upper-class activity carried on by those with too much time on their
hands and an attachment to democracy which was always at least
open to question (cf. above, p. ). In his apologetic picture of Soc-
rates, Xenophon shows him reproving the oligarch Critias for his
designs on the pretty Euthydemus, and the language precisely ap-
peals to a sense of social class:
When [Socrates] realized that Critias was in love with Eu-
thydemus and was trying to seduce him like those devoted
to physical sexual pleasure, he tried to stop him by saying
that it was not worthy of a free man (aneleutheron) and not
fitting for a gentleman (kaloskagathos) to plead with his be-
loved, whose good opinion he wished to have, and implore
him like a beggar, asking him to grant something which was,
moreover, no good thing. (Xenophon, Memorabilia ..)
Plato’s defense of Socrates’ role in the love life of Alcibiades, an-
other high-profile associate of Socrates of dubious democratic cre-
dentials, will be rather more artful. Nevertheless, it seems unlikely
that the “willing slavery” of the erastês, as described by Pausanias
(a–b), would be thought to be “something very excellent” (b)
by anyone outside a reasonably restricted, and self-absorbed, circle
in which the coded language of such behavior was fully understood.
That such behavior was “of great value to the city” (b) would
probably have come as news to many ordinary Athenians; what the
Platonic Socrates, whose real-life model the democratic city had
executed in part for “corrupting young men,” thought of it, Alcib-
iades’ speech will clearly demonstrate.

 | Eryximachus

T he speeches of Eryximachus and Aristophanes offer universally

applicable models of how erôs functions in the world, drawn, re-
spectively, from science and mythical storytelling. If both the humor

Erôs before Socrates | 

and irritating suggestiveness of Aristophanes’ double-people theory
has long been recognized, criticism has, on the whole, been less kind
to Eryximachus, a doctor and close friend of Phaedrus (a – d; cf.
Protagoras c –). The doctor’s much less generally accessible
speech has been taken to be just a parody of the jargon-ridden
“grand unifying theories” of fifth-century science and medicine.16
In other words, the critical assumption has been that Eryximachus
takes himself perfectly seriously (and is therefore more than a little
ridiculous), whereas Aristophanes and Agathon, at least, and per-
haps also Pausanias, are conscious of the sympotic atmosphere to
which their discourses must be adapted. Such a way of reading seems,
however, overly harsh.
Eryximachus’s epideixis is a kind of sampler of medical theory
and discourse, and we know that doctors did indeed make public
(and absolutely serious) displays of their wares and their skills, medi-
cal and rhetorical, in this way.17 Eryximachus’s performance, how-
ever, is festive and self-knowing in its very overfullness (cf. e–);
in this it resembles the deliberate over-the-topness of Agathon’s
verbal and rhythmical style, which wittily exaggerates and distorts
what seem to have been genuine features of the real Agathon’s po-
etic style (below, pp. –). Of course, there is also both humor at
Eryximachus’s precise pedantry (note the way he gives the full
source for his tragic quotation at a) and parody of the medical
profession and its theorizing. Plato seems to have had no time for
the exaggerated claims of medicine, which had little in common
with what he saw as the true pursuit of understanding (philoso-
phy),18 and we are clearly meant to sympathize with Aristophanes’
obvious amusement at Eryximachus’s performance. Nevertheless,
pleasure and amusement are precisely the ends at which such sym-
potic logoi should aim, and Eryximachus not only gives us both but
also enters into the spirit of things with his mock-solemn prescrip-
16 Criticism of such theories was itself a standard rhetorical move of some doc-

tors; cf., e.g., Hippocrates, On the Nature of Man , On Nature .

17 Cf., e.g., Jouanna (); Lloyd () – ; Thomas () chapter ;

Thomas ().
18 The best place to start is Republic .d–b.

 | Plato’s Symposium
tion for curing hiccups (d – e); although doctors were indeed
interested in such things,19 we are perhaps to understand that the
cures which this learned doctor prescribes were as universally fa-
miliar then as they are now. His apparently labored interpretation of
a dark utterance of Heraclitus (a – b) is, moreover, of a piece
with the familiar half-serious problem solving and critical discussion
of the symposium.
The sixth and fifth centuries bc were an extraordinarily pro-
ductive period of scientific observation and speculation all over the
Greek world (the inquiry into nature). As part of this revolution,
medical theory and practice flourished in the second half of the fifth
century and later, and some at least of our large collection of clas-
sical medical texts (the Hippocratic corpus) will date from this pe-
riod. Much in Eryximachus’s speech finds close parallels and analo-
gies in these texts. It is perhaps not very surprising that he adopts
the “scientific” analysis of the fundamental qualities of cold and
hot, dry and wet (d, a– ),20 but there are passages where
the Hippocratic resonance of the argument is strongly marked.
Thus, for example, his definition of the art of medicine — “Medi-
cine, to put it in a nutshell, is the science (epistêmê) of the erotics of
the body with regard to repletion (plêsmonê) and emptying (kenôsis),
and the man who can distinguish the fair and the shameful love in
these matters is the most doctorly person” (c – d)— like much
else in his speech, finds close echoes in two parallel passages from
what are all but certainly early Hippocratic treatises:

Emptying cures repletion and repletion emptying, as rest

cures weariness. To put it briefly, opposites are the cures of
opposites, and medicine is subtraction and addition, subtrac-
tion of what is in excess, addition of what is in deficiency.
The man who best does this is the best doctor, and the one
who falls shortest of this falls shortest of the art also. (Hip-
pocrates, On Breaths )

19 Cf.,
e.g., Hippocrates, Aphorisms ..
20 Cf. Lloyd ().

Erôs before Socrates | 

 Emptying cures all diseases produced by repletion, and
repletion cures all which arise from emptying; those which
arise from exercise are cured by rest, as those which arise
from idleness are cured by exercise. . . . [T]he doctor must
relax what is tense and make tense the relaxed. (Hippocrates,
On the Nature of Man )
So too, Eryximachus shares with the author of the Hippocratic On
Regimen an interest both in Heraclitus (Regimen .; a) and in the
musical harmony of highs and lows as an analogy to the creation of
harmony in the body (Regimen .; b – d). In this Hippocratic
treatise the musical material is part of a theory of how all the arts
(technai) are like the nature of man, starting from seercraft, mantikê,
to which Eryximachus too addresses himself at b– d (Regimen
. –). The arguments of the two doctors are quite different, but
Eryximachus’s all-encompassing claims, which explicitly embrace
medicine (in all of its areas, including dietetics, the effects of cli-
mate, the seasons, and so on), music, and seercraft and which reflect
a similar kind of (what we would see as) polymathy, do share the
structuring strategy of On Regimen. The Hippocratic flavor of the
speech is indeed important to its proper appreciation. More broadly,
some of the basic ideas of the speech — mixture, the harmonization
of opposites, the alternation of excess and deficiency — are among
the most staple tropes of medicine and science of many different in-
tellectual traditions.
Eryximachus takes up Pausanias’s duality of erôs, but extends it
to the whole natural and divine world, an insight which he has
gained from his medical art.21 The encomium therefore becomes
(unsurprisingly) in part an encomium of medicine, which is the art
which knows how to use and implant erôs (c, d), and of its
practitioners (of whom Eryximachus himself is the prime ex-

21 Modern
readers have been divided over the form and merits of Eryxi-
machus’s argument. I have found Rowe () of most help, although the account
that follows differs from his in certain respects; further bibliography may be traced
through Rowe () and, for earlier treatments, Martin () – .

 | Plato’s Symposium
ample), just as Pausanias’s speech is in part an encomium of one par-
ticular kind of erôs, of which Pausanias and Agathon are the chief
example. “Good love” is the desires of the healthy part of any body,
“bad love” those of the unhealthy. The healthy and the sick will, for
example, both want and require different diets (cf. On Ancient Medi-
cine ), and the doctor must know how to “promote the interests”
(again, charizesthai) of the healthy part and show no favor (acharis-
tein) to the unhealthy (c – ); the result of his ministrations will
be the reign of “good erôs” and thus good health. More broadly, an
unhealthy body will want unhealthy things: thus, for example, a
body which is too cold (i.e., in which “cold” has encroached on the
space of “warm” and thus caused unhealthy imbalance) will want
more cold and reject the warmth which it needs for health. A good
doctor can reconcile the two opposed qualities (d–), can make
them “love each other.”
Eryximachus’s speech, therefore, does not merely use the famil-
iar pre-Socratic idea of the necessity to harmonize opposites, but
also foreshadows Diotima’s crucial idea that erôs must be for some-
thing which you do not have already: the cold cannot “love” cold,
only warm. So too, the skilled musician reconciles opposites (high
and low notes) which were formerly at variance with each other,
in order to produce a harmonious concord by implanting “erôs and
agreement” in them; by a definition parallel to that for medicine,
music is “the science of erotics concerned with harmony and rhythm”
(c– ).22 Behind the parallelism of the two arts lies Apollo, both
father of the founder of medicine, Asclepius (e; cf. e, a–
), and divine musician: Apollo promotes harmony both in the body
and in music (cf. Cratylus c– a). Although — so Eryximachus
seems to say—anyone would be able to recognize (diagignôskein)
“the erotic element” in harmony and rhythm per se, i.e., realize that
all harmony and rhythm depend upon an erôs of contrasting tones
and speeds, nevertheless a “good practitioner” is needed for the ac-

22 The nature of the “bad erôs” in the case of music remains rather unclear: many

commentators see Eryximachus tangled up in the rigid scheme he has proposed.

Erôs before Socrates | 

tual composition and teaching of music (c– d); in the same
way, it is obvious that the health of the body has to do with erôs, but
it requires a “good practitioner” to know how to diagnose (diagig-
nôskein) the fair and the shameful erôs and produce good health
through erotics.
Eryximachus parts company with Pausanias in not rejecting en-
tirely from his musical theory “the common love,” here associated
with the Muse Polymnia, whose name might be half-seriously in-
terpreted as “music for the many.” The expert must know how to
apply it (as a doctor applies remedies), so that its undeniable physi-
cal pleasures may be enjoyed while any risk of “wantonness” (ako-
lasia), presumably arising from addictive overindulgence, is avoided
(e– ).23 Plato here seems to put in his doctor’s mouth a version
of his frequently expressed fear of the moral effects of music which
plays to the crowd, which lacks the “good order” (kosmos) which
should be the necessary aim of all psychological and medical ther-
apy (cf. Gorgias a–c). Musical developments of the late fifth and
fourth centuries did indeed, as Plato stresses in the Laws, break
down traditional modes and harmonies and — or so conservatives
complained—aimed merely at the baser pleasure and arousal of the
audience; it is such music (and contemporary criticism of it) which
is mocked by Aristophanes in the Women at the Thesmophoria, where
Agathon is a principal practitioner of the new art. With the musi-
cian’s double knowledge, Eryximachus compares the doctor’s need
to know about “desires concerned with the art of cooking,” an art
which Plato elsewhere (cf. Gorgias d –c) treats as a kind of
sham medicine and which here functions as the popular counterpart
of medicine, one aiming, like popular music, at pleasure (rather
than health). Doctors must know about cooking so that their pa-
tients can enjoy food but remain healthy (e –); the deleterious
effects of elaborate “arty” cooking, no less than those of elaborate
“arty” music, are a recurrent theme of Plato’s writing.24
23 Foucault
()  is pithy but a bit misleading: “it . . . rests with [doctors]
to prescribe . . . how to have an orgasm without any resulting ill effects.”
24 Cf., e.g., Republic .d–e, where music and cooking are again explicitly

linked.

 | Plato’s Symposium
 With the role of erôs in seercraft, Eryximachus might be thought
to have overreached the usefulness of his model, though mantikê,
like medicine, is also concerned with the interpretation of signs and
the move from the visible to the invisible (cf., again, On Regimen
.).25 More problematic, within Eryximachus’s repetitive model,
is astronomy, “the science of erotics concerned with the movements
of the stars and the seasons of the years” (b – ), for it is hard in
this case to see how any human practitioner could do anything to
correct imbalances, and here indeed Eryximachus stays purely at the
level of theoretical knowledge rather than practical intervention. In
one of those turns, however, which occur throughout the work, a
new and apparently rather inconsequential idea is now introduced
which is to assume great significance later.
According to Eryximachus, erôs regulates the relations between
gods and men, and it is the seer’s role to keep this relationship
healthy by the proper use of sacrifices and prayers; at base, presum-
ably, the idea is that all prayers and sacrifices are about human de-
sires, or erôtes, just as divine attitudes toward humans could also be
seen as a matter of desire. The specialist is again an erotic expert:
“seercraft is a practitioner of friendship between gods and men
through its knowledge of human erotics, insofar as they aim at right
and piety” (d– ). When things go wrong, in other words,
when the disorderly Love governs relations, impiety occurs, and it
is necessary for the seer to restore the proper balance, as a doctor re-
stores the body. We may be reminded of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in
which Oedipus has plainly “gratified the disorderly Love . . . with
respect to parents”; the state is diseased as a result and, as in the first
book of the Iliad, a seer must be summoned in an attempt to restore
the normal balance between man and god. That erôs mediates be-
tween man and god is something that we will next hear from Dio-
tima (e –a), and in a context which will encourage us to take
it very seriously.

25 Medicine
and seercraft as analogous, but also opposed, crafts are powerfully
dramatized through the medical imagery of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; Oedipus and
Teiresias embody the two very different kinds of knowledge.

Erôs before Socrates | 

  | Aristophanes

A ristophanes’ speech is in some ways the most surprising of all

the encomia of the god.26 Plutarch regarded the speech as a
“comedy thrust into the symposium” (Moralia c), but at first glance
we seem a world away from the Aristophanes of the surviving come-
dies. Plato’s character indeed calls Eros “the most human-friendly
(philanthrôpotatos) of gods” (d), a term which the chorus of
Aristophanes’ Peace uses in an appeal to Hermes for his help (Peace
), but that does not seem very much to go on. Remarkably ab-
sent, for example, is any sign of (even mild) personal satire; the
mockery of named Athenian citizens (onomasti kômôdein) was per-
haps the single feature of the comedy of Aristophanes’ day most
often remarked upon, by both opponents and supporters, and al-
though we would not expect any harsh mockery within the well-
ordered context of the symposium (cf. above, p. ), the absence of
even much worth the name of jesting is noteworthy. Certain mo-
tifs do indeed find analogies in Aristophanic comedy (cf. below),
but most of the humor on show is of a rather different kind.
Aristophanes’ first words after Eryximachus’s speech — the “de-
sire of the orderly part of the body” (a– )— teasingly parody
the doctor’s language and thought, and Eryximachus then tells him
not to play the fool (like, we might think, the clown Philip in
Xenophon’s Symposium), which leads to an Aristophanic equivoca-
tion (b –) between geloion (humorous) and katagelaston (ridicu-
lous);27 here perhaps is a glimpse of the Aristophanes we know. The

26
For a full-length study of Aristophanes’ contribution to the Symposium, cf.
Ludwig (). Reckford () is a sympathetic reading of Aristophanes’ speech as
“Aristophanic.”
27
At b, Eryximachus warns Aristophanes not to say anything geloion, by
which he means “mocking (with the sole intention of raising a laugh),” as Eryxi-
machus has (probably rightly) taken a– and as was a standard elite interpre-
tation of the whole nature of comedy (Republic .c is important here). Aristo-
phanes replies that to say something geloion, which he uses in the sense of “amusing,”
would be entirely appropriate both to the situation and to himself—his fear rather
is that his speech itself will deserve nothing but mockery.

 | Plato’s Symposium
speech which follows, however, is comedy of a kind not normally
associated with the Old Attic Comedy of Aristophanes. Toward its
end, Aristophanes himself protests (too much?) that his words are
not to be misinterpreted: “Eryximachus must not protest and make
a mockery (kômôdôn) of my speech by saying that I’m talking about
Pausanias and Agathon. . . . what I’m saying applies to everyone, men
and women . . .” (b– c). Certainly, some gentle teasing con-
tinues: the opening of the speech picks up, almost indeed para-
phrases, the conclusion of Eryximachus’s; the god himself becomes
a doctor (d –; cf. d) whose skills hold out hopes of the
greatest happiness (in contrast to what mortal doctors can do for
us?), and Aristophanes undertakes to teach his audience the nature
(phusis) of man and what has happened to it, lessons which (again)
we would expect to hear from a doctor. So too, when Aristophanes
talks of men finding sexual “satisfaction” (lit. filling; plêsmonê, c),
we are presumably to remember Eryximachus’s definition of medi-
cine (above, p. ) and draw the amused conclusion that Aristophanes
is learned in medical lore; for males, of course, sexual satisfaction is
more like an emptying (kenôsis) than a filling. The description of
Apollo’s healing (e –a), which likens the god to a cobbler or
leatherworker, would presumably be found unflattering by any con-
temporary surgeon; surgery is, however, likened to the art of the
cobbler in the Hippocratic treatise On Regimen (.), which we
have already seen to throw light upon Eryximachus’s speech. It may,
therefore, be that Aristophanes is again finding comic material in
the scientific ideas and texts which Eryximachus reveres. Neverthe-
less, such teasing is of the gentlest sort, and nothing in the body of
the speech remotely resembles comic invective.
There is, of course, much more to Aristophanic comedy than
invective, and we may even wish to see the speech of the Platonic
Aristophanes as a reflection of what seems to have been the inno-
vative style of Aristophanes’ comedy with respect to some of his
contemporaries; we know that not all Old Comedy, and certainly
not all of Aristophanes, was harshly invective in the mold of, say,
Aristophanes’ own Knights. Nevertheless, any reading of Aristo-
phanes’ speech must ask why Plato has given a speech of this form

Erôs before Socrates | 

to the comic poet to whom in the Apology (c – ) and elsewhere
he ascribes part of the responsibility for popular prejudice against
and misunderstanding of Socrates. Aristophanes is not, however,
necessarily out of place at Agathon’s gathering, either socially or po-
litically. It can be plausibly argued that the political stance of Aristo-
phanes, and of Old Comedy generally, was not just conservative but
in fact openly hostile to the more radical democrats and their lead-
ers; the association between Aristophanes and “Socrates’ set” is, de-
spite the satire of Socrates in the Clouds, by no means implausible.
Aristophanes’ myth may be seen as a radical revision of the
“battles of Titans, Giants, and centaurs, the fictions of men of old,”
which Xenophanes had banned from the well-conducted sym-
posium (fr.. – , above pp.  –); certainly Aristophanes’ moral
(d– ) shows the exemplary piety which Xenophanes had de-
manded. Previously, begins Aristophanes, we were not as we are
now, but we were double creatures, resembling perhaps two mod-
ern humans standing back-to-back with their limbs stretched out in
parallel: everyone had two faces (on either side of a single head),
two sets of genitals, four legs and four arms, and moved quickly by
tumbling along. There were three kinds of “doubles”: male, female,
and mixed. These powerful ancestors of ours got out of hand, like
Ephialtes and Otus in Homer (Odyssey .– ), and tried to
storm heaven to attack the gods. Zeus eventually decided to split all
these creatures down the middle into two, at right angles to the di-
rection of their faces. The result was two-legged, two-armed crea-
tures (male and female); each being’s face was then turned through
 degrees so it now faced that plane of itself which had been cut,
and this plane was healed and molded by Apollo into a chest and
stomach, though he left the navel “as a reminder of the ancient suf-
fering” (a – ). These “halves” went around looking for “their
other halves,” and when they found them they locked together in an
embrace as they tried to reunite; in their desperation they ate noth-
ing and so died. Out of pity, Zeus now completed the surgery by
turning the genitals also through  degrees (i.e., to where they
are now), so that when a man and a woman embraced, their geni-
tals would meet and through procreation the race would continue;

 | Plato’s Symposium
so too, when man embraced man there would be physical satisfac-
tion (plêsmonê) which would enable the men to get back to work
(Zeus’s plan being largely motivated by a desire for men to be use-
ful to the gods).28
Although this narrative of the double-people is set far in the past,
it also explains both our present situation and the varieties of human
desire and practice. We all spend our lives searching for our lost half,
whether that be of the same or a different gender, and the kind of
sex we enjoy is determined by the gender of that missing half; sex
is, in fact, part of our pursuit, or as Aristophanes puts it, “erôs is the
name for the desire and pursuit of the whole” (e). If an original
couple is lucky enough to find each other again, the result is amazing:
It’s impossible to describe the affection, warmth, and love they
feel for each other; it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that
they don’t want to spend even a moment apart. These are the
people who form unbroken lifelong relationships together,
for all that they couldn’t say what they wanted from each
other. I mean, it’s impossible to believe that it’s their sex-life
which does this—that sex is the reason they’re each so eager
and happy to be in the other’s company. They obviously have
some other objective, which their minds can’t formulate;
they only glimpse what it is and articulate it in vague terms.
Imagine that Hephaestus came with his tools and stood
over them as they were lying together, and asked, “What is
it that you humans want from each other?” And when they
were unable to reply, suppose he asked instead, “Do you
want to be so thoroughly together that you’re never at any
time apart? If that’s want you want, I’d be glad to weld you
together, to fuse you into a single person, instead of being
two separate people, so that during your lifetime as a single
person the two of you share a single life, and then, when you

28 Aristophanes
is apparently thinking only of the possibility of front-to-front
(intercrural) sex between two men; as his model is entirely nonhierarchical (cf.
below); penetrative anal sex, in which one partner was seen as “active” and the other
“passive,” would be out of place.

Erôs before Socrates | 

 die, you die as a single person, not as two separate people,
and you share a single death there in Hades. Think about it:
is this your hearts’ desire? If this happened to you, would it
bring you happiness?” It’s obvious that none of them would
refuse this offer; we’d find them all accepting it. There
wouldn’t be the slightest doubt in any of their minds that
what Hephaestus had said was what they’d been wanting all
along, to be joined and fused with the one they love, to be
one instead of two. (b – e)
We must, however, behave properly toward the gods, or Zeus will
split us again, as he had threatened at the time of the original par-
tition (d – ). It is Eros, however, who is able to grant males the
best possible conclusion to their search in the present circumstances,
namely, a congenial erômenos (c –); the final part of Aristo-
phanes’ speech concentrates almost entirely upon male homosexual
relations. Eros also offers us the hope for the future that, by restor-
ing us to our original wholeness, he will make us “blessed and
happy” (makarios and eudaimôn, d). If we only understood the
blessings which Eros can bestow, we would never cease praising
him and establishing cults of him.
We may well smile as we recognize something of ourselves and
our own sexual pursuits in the comedy of Aristophanes’ half-people,
and certain features do remind us of comic scenes and motifs. Both
Aristophanes’ Peace and Birds concern threats to the Olympian
order and—more specifically — the uncertainty of the gods when
confronted by the threat of the double-creatures, and their fear at
losing honors and sacrifices (c – ) is reminiscent of their plight
in the Birds, cut off from earth by the new foundation of Cloud-
cuckooland and hence starved of the sacrifices they previously en-
joyed (Birds – ; cf. Wealth –). So too, the difficulty
which Zeus has in coming up with a scheme to confront the dan-
ger is clearly a comic contrast to the traditional ease and speed of
divine thought. That successful politicians, to a man, “showed af-
fection for (philousi) men and enjoyed lying locked in embrace with
them” when they were young (e –a) is a polite version of

 | Plato’s Symposium
the frequent comic jest that all politicians were “rent boys” in their
youth (e.g., Knights –), just as adulterers (moichoi; cf. d–e)
also litter the extant plays. The allusion to the fate of the Arcadians
(a), the homely images of hopping on one leg in a popular game
(askôliazontes, here in Zeus’s mouth), of cutting apples and eggs, of
flatfish,29 and of a drawstring purse, all suggest not merely the topi-
cal reference and exuberant everyday imagery of Aristophanes’ extant
plays, but also that mixture of the mythical and the contemporary
which must have been a hallmark of the mythological burlesque
which flourished on the Attic comic stage in Plato’s day, if not in
Aristophanes’. More broadly, it is easy enough to see how Apollo’s
banausic skill in cobbling humans might be thought to come from
the same kind of comic imagination in which, for example, War
makes a salad out of the Greek states (Peace – ). Although evi-
dence for speaking of one’s beloved as “my other half ” is largely
later than Plato, it is also tempting to believe that Aristophanes’ nar-
rative is to be understood as an example of a very familiar aspect of
the technique of Aristophanic comedy, namely, the literalization of
metaphorical language (as, for example, when “weighing up” po-
etry becomes a matter of real weighing in the Frogs).
The logic of this narrative is not to be pushed any harder than
the logic of real Aristophanic narratives (Dicaeopolis’s private peace
in Acharnians, the sex strike in Lysistrata, and so on), although its
closest extant analogues are rather in the world of Aesopic fable and
popular storytelling than in Old Comedy.30 The logic is that of the
etiological “just-so” story: a one-time event in the past (such as a
young elephant’s encounter with a crocodile) has universal conse-
quences in the present (all elephants have long trunks). Thus, for
example, in Hesiod the gods once created the beautiful but de-
structive woman Pandora and gave her to Epimetheus, but all
women are now like her. Slightly different, because it deals in ab-

29 Wilson () –  argues for an explicit allusion here to Aristophanes,

Lysistrata – .

30 Cf. Dover () which should be consulted for other analogues to this

narrative.

Erôs before Socrates | 

stracts, but clearly related to such narratives is Socrates’ remark at
Phaedo b–c on how pleasure and pain always go together “as
though they shared one head”: “I think that, if Aesop had noted
this, he would have composed a story (mythos) about how god wished
to reconcile them and stop them warring, and when he found that
he couldn’t, he joined their heads together.” Very close to such an
Aesopic etiology will be Diotima’s story that explains the mixed na-
ture of Eros, the son of Resource and Poverty; in this too Socrates
will be made to cap all the speeches which have gone before.
Whereas Eryximachus’s speech had covered the workings of the
whole cosmos, Aristophanes stays firmly in the world of human de-
sire; nevertheless, we are clearly to read these speeches together as
opposed (cf. d), or perhaps complementary, ways of seeking to
understand the world, ways which, without investing too much in
the actual labels, we might call the scientific and the mythic. Whereas
the former depends on privileged knowledge only available to an
expert, and to some extent upon explanations of a subtlety which
reinforces the very need for such expertise, the latter appeals to
“facts” allegedly observable by anyone who wishes to construct an
explanation for those facts. That the Athens of the late fifth and early
fourth centuries was a ferment of such competing explanations, a
society as multivocal as the Symposium itself, is a familiar fact of in-
tellectual history. In the Clouds, Aristophanes himself had drama-
tized part of this ferment. Of particular interest is Clouds – ,
in which the comic Socrates explains, with the help of analogies
drawn from the behavior of the stupid Strepsiades’ stomach, that the
clouds and “Whirl,” not Zeus, are responsible for natural phenom-
ena such as rain, thunder, and lightning; this is a low comic version
of the same kind of “scientific” explanation which Eryximachus
gives for disturbed weather patterns in a – b. Although Eryxi-
machus’s speech certainly did not eliminate the role of gods, other
than Eros, in human affairs (c– d), it certainly tended — as sci-
entific and medical explanations must31 — to diminish their impor-

31 A classic text here is the opening chapters of the Hippocratic On the Sacred

Disease.

 | Plato’s Symposium
tance (as does, with comic ridiculousness, the Socrates of the Clouds),
whereas the Platonic Aristophanes (like Diotima in myth-telling
mode) makes his Olympians very real indeed.
The faultlines of Aristophanes’ story are not limited to its just-
so logic. Thus, for example, birth and childhood are not easily ac-
commodated to the idea of our original doubleness (where is a
baby’s “other half ”?), but this problem is elided in the consideration
of pederasty (e – b): men whose other half was male are, ap-
parently, erômenoi when young and erastai when they have grown
up. If they are lucky enough to find their other half, the relation-
ship, as that of Pausanias and Agathon, will persist into the adult-
hood of the younger partner. Nevertheless, Aristophanes’ speech does
offer something which no speaker before him has done, namely, a
definition of erôs—the pursuit of wholeness (e)— and a de-
scription of what it feels like to be “in love.” Many modern readers
of Plato have felt that this definition and description correspond to
a real aspect of “being in love,” namely, the sense that the loved one
somehow fills an absence in the lover, makes him or her “whole”;
moreover, the mythic fantasy of original union is as good a way,
probably better, of accounting for the mystery of why any individ-
ual loves another than any attempt to list the reasons to a higher
standard of proof. Very few Platonic texts have become the basis for
successful rock-operas, but Aristophanes’ speech can claim this dis-
tinction. Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a stage show () and sub-
sequently a film () by John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen
Trask, tells the story of a transsexual rock singer from East Berlin
in search of her other half after a botched sex-change operation.
The key song of the show, “The Origin of Love,” sets Aristophanes’
speech, sometimes almost verbatim, to music, and the splitting of
the double-people is made analogous, inter alia, to Eve’s separation
from Adam and to the partition of Berlin. There can be few more
unexpected testimonies to the continuing popular power of the
Platonic-Aristophanic myth.32
32 For
the influence of this myth, cf. also below, pp. –. One potential
“other half ” who confronts Hedwig is called “Tommy Gnosis” (i.e., Knowledge);
knowledge was certainly the object of Socrates’ search.

Erôs before Socrates | 

 It is not just the description of our universal search which
has proved influential and productive. Aristophanes’ claim that the
souls of a reunited couple want something from each other, some-
thing which is not just sex, that “the emotional storm of physical
passion . . . contains within itself a metaphysical element . . . an as-
piration that transcends the limit of the human condition and that
cannot possibly be satisfied in the way that hunger and thirst can be
satisfied,”33 is clearly important for the later stages of the Symposium
and has struck a powerful chord in more than one modern reader;
the relief which sex (even sex with one’s other half ) offers is, as we
know only too well, a temporary one, and our persistent need for,
and persistent dissatisfaction with, this second-best solution is an
uncomfortable fact about the human condition. Aristophanes’ lovers
find it difficult to know or articulate what exactly it is that they
want (c –d), but readily assent to Hephaestus’s suggestion that
it is complete fusion. Socrates’ speech will suggest a rather different
answer.
As for the importance of this speech for our view of antiquity,
Aristophanes’ extraordinary fable has become a classic text in the
tracing of a shift from the hierarchical structures of pederasty as de-
scribed by Pausanias to a more symmetrical and reciprocal pattern
of erotic relations, both homo- and heterosexual, observable both
in real social patterns and in the literature of later antiquity.34 Cer-
tainly, the travails and travels of the separated couples of the ancient
novel, two young people equally beautiful and equally virtuous,
might well fit Aristophanes’ definition and narrative of erôs (cf. below,
pp. –). Socrates will make Diotima reject, or at least radically
revise, the central proposition of Aristophanes’ myth (d –a),
but the attractiveness of that proposition is apparent in the ancient
and modern reception it has received. It may be the case that lovers
would not in fact answer Hephaestus as Aristophanes (rather dis-
33 Kahn
() .
34 Cf.,
e.g., Konstan (); further discussion and a bibliography are in Hunter
(); and cf. further below, pp. –. Much modern discussion starts from Fou-
cault (), e.g., –.

 | Plato’s Symposium
ingenuously) claims they would,35 except in the first afterglow of
passion, but love precisely promotes such fancies and unrealizable
wishes, and no one is going to demand that lovers in bed together
give reasoned and thought-out answers to important questions; just
how hard then ought we to push the Aristophanic model?
The glorification of narcissism and self-regard might seem to be
the most potent dangers of the Aristophanic model, though the
comic poet shows us how “love of self ” and “love of other” are in-
timately connected. The preceding speeches have also conditioned
us to ask other questions of this fable. The story has a simple and
virtuous moral—we should be pious toward the gods— but what
will each of us derive if we are lucky enough to find our other half ?
According to Aristophanes, Eros is responsible for “the greatest be-
nefits by leading us toward what is our own (oikeion)” (d–), and
if he consents to “heal” us by making us whole again, we will be
“blessed and fortunate.” The inculcation of piety may be a conven-
tionally praiseworthy aim, though it seems unlikely that Aristo-
phanes’ story would pass the censorship which Socrates elsewhere
seeks to impose upon stories which do not rightly portray the gods
(Republic .a– .c). Be that as it may, we must ask in what this
happiness consists, and the answer can only be some kind of blissful
trance in which there is no obvious role for the intellect or im-
provement of the individual (who will of course no longer exist)36
or the body politic at large, except insofar as the practice of piety is
helpful to the state. Socrates and Diotima will show us (again) that
an encomium of erôs must explain the positive nature of what erôs
does for us, and this Aristophanes has singularly failed to do. A Pla-
tonic answer to Hephaestus would stress that what every lover
should want is help in the ascent toward knowledge. We cannot fail
35 Cf. Rowe’s () note on e –. Rowe suggests that the whole idea of

“doubleness” derives from sexual intercourse, in which two human beings, with
four arms and four legs, get as close to each other as possible. Thus, the Spice Girls’
song of  entitled “Two Become One” was, unlike the similar motifs in Hedwig
and the Angry Inch, probably not indebted (consciously) to Plato.
36 Cf. Aristotle, Politics .b–.

Erôs before Socrates | 

to recall here the stress in the Symposium upon the “loneliness” of
Socrates: as he stands absorbed in thought or refuses to play Alcibi-
ades’ game, there is no sign that he is desperately searching for an-
other human being. His search, as Diotima will suggest, is of a
rather different kind.
Aristophanic plays regularly conclude with the celebration of the
heroes, now “blessed and happy,” in a world apparently improved;
makarios and eudaimôn are words often applied to successful comic
heroes as the play draws to a close.37 We might think of the end of
Acharnians, of Lysistrata, or of Women in Assembly, in which the
whole state is treated to a banquet after relinquishing power to the
women. Particularly in the so-called parabases of his plays, in which
the chorus addresses the audience directly, Aristophanes claimed to
address seriously the serious issues of the day; for Plato, however,
comedies may be “feel-good” performances in which awkward
questions both about the plot of the play and its general civic sub-
ject are simply swept aside in a tide of communal jollity. Aris-
tophanes’ last two extant plays, the Women in Assembly of  and
the Wealth of , are both excellent examples of this.38 So too is the
Platonic Aristophanes’ performance in the Symposium: inventive,
witty, appealing, naggingly suggestive, but at heart utterly empty.
We finish “blessed and happy” but none the wiser, not unlike, in
fact, old Demos (the people) in Aristophanes’ Knights, “blessedly
restored to his ancient state” (v. ; cf. d), but in fact no fur-
ther forward. Restoration of previous happiness is indeed a prime
motif of Aristophanic plots (cf. Acharnians, Peace, Lysistrata), and
with this hope for the future Aristophanes leaves us smiling. Like all
of the encomiasts, therefore, the Platonic Aristophanes has put erôs
to the service of his own project (though we — and he? — would
still like to know the identity of Aristophanes’ own other half ).
Unlike, however, the Silenus Socrates and the dialogues which de-
scribe him (cf. below, p. ), and unlike Diotima’s model of birth
37 Cf.Macleod ().
38 According
to the conventional chronology, Plato would not have been a res-
ident in Athens in these years, but such plays may well have been influential on his
ideas of what comedy was.

 | Plato’s Symposium
and pregnancy (cf. below, pp.  – ), opening up Aristophanes’
double-people brings diminution and loss, not revelation. Happi-
ness, eudaimonia, is crucial (e – a), but we should be searching
not for the lost half of ourselves, but inside what we already have.

 | Agathon

T he speech which forces out Socrates’ ironic formula for en-

comium (above p. ) is the coruscating performance of the tragic
poet (and host of the party) Agathon. In the Protagoras Socrates de-
scribes the adolescent Agathon as “of a fine (kaloskagathos) nature and
of very fine (kalos) looks” (d – e) and, though probably around
thirty in  bc, he still plays the role of beautiful object of desire
at his own symposium. His speech, moreover, depicts Eros as an
idealized version of the “model erômenos,” namely, Agathon himself
in his prime —young, beautiful, soft, and creative — and in part the
embodiment of all the cardinal virtues (as prescribed in the Rhetoric
to Alexander, above p. ).39 Even by the highly rhetorical standards
of the Symposium, however, Agathon’s speech is marked by an ex-
plicit self-consciousness with its own technique and structure
(“There is one correct method of praise in all situations . . . ,”
a) and by many forms of word- and sound-play (puns, equivo-
cations, antithesis, assonance, rhyme, and so on), which often take
the place of, while simultaneously advertising the absence of, any-
thing that could be described as “convincing argument.”
In the Gorgias, Socrates asserts, and Callicles agrees, that tragedy
is just a kind of “flattery,” which aims at the pleasurable gratification
of the audience (b), and the Agathon of the Symposium is precisely
designed as an illustration of that view. Agathon’s frequent references
to the “evidence” or “proof ” (often, “powerful evidence”) for his
assertions (b, d, e; a, e) again show a self-conscious revel-
ing in the ingenuity (and emptiness) of argumentation. The demon-
stration that erôs, a force which normally makes one lose all sense
39 Stokes () – offers the fullest available attempt to take Agathon’s

speech seriously.

Erôs before Socrates | 

of self-control, is perfectly sôphrôn (sensible, controlled, moderate,
chaste) may serve as a nice example of Agathon’s pleasure in para-
dox: “It is agreed that sôphrosunê is ruling over (kratein) pleasures and
desires, and that no pleasure is stronger (kreittôn) than Eros. If the plea-
sures are weaker, they would be ruled (kratein) by Eros, and he will
rule (kratein), and if Eros rules over pleasures and desires he will be
extraordinarily sôphrôn” (c–). The argument for Eros’s wisdom
(sophia) is also worth following, both for itself and also because “wis-
dom” is a matter very close to the hearts of Plato and his Socrates.
Traditionally in Greek culture sophia is “skill” and may be ap-
plied as readily to a purely manual facility (e.g., ship making) as to
an intellectual talent. It is a standard word in earlier poetry (notably
Pindar) for “[skilled] poetry,” and it was with this sense that Socra-
tes had already teased Agathon (e –; cf. Aristodemus at c);
this is where Agathon unsurprisingly starts his account, even though
this is not the expected sophia of an encomium. The “argument”
runs as follows (d – e): Eros is so sophos a poiêtês (lit. maker, but
a standard term for “poet”) that he can make (poiei) other people
into poets; the evidence adduced for this is a famous quotation from
a lost play of Euripides: “Eros instructs a poet, even if he was with-
out the Muses beforehand” (fr.  Nauck). As one cannot teach
what one does not know, this demonstrates that Eros is a skilled
poiêtês in every branch of poiêsis (lit. making, of which poetry is a
particular instance) concerned with music. As for the poiêsis (mak-
ing) of all living creatures, this too is obviously the work of “Love’s
wisdom”; the thought will be that () erôs is responsible for all sex-
ual activity and procreation (a–; cf., e.g., Euripides, Hippolytus
–; Lucretius, DRN . – ), and () this will be “wise,” be-
cause through this, nature continues and prospers (cf. Aristophanes’
narrative at c– ). It will be left to Diotima to offer an explana-
tion for the slippages which such language allows (a–c on the
broad and narrow senses of poiêsis). Next, any “practitioner of an art”
who has been taught by Love will be “glorious and conspicuous,”40

40 “Conspicuous” (phanos; lit. bright, shining) is chosen to recall Socrates’ de-

scription of Agathon’s “shining” sophia at e.

 | Plato’s Symposium
but any who is not touched by Love will remain obscure. This might
look like a rather weak extension from the case of poetry and of
Agathon himself to all craftsmen, but it picks up Eryximachus’s the-
sis about erôs and the arts, as the language of “practitioners” (dêmi-
ourgoi) and the pointed “do we not know?” (a), that is, now
that Eryximachus has told us, demonstrate.
For Eryximachus, a skilled practitioner, such as a doctor, had to
know about the erôtika relevant to his subject; Agathon merely ex-
trapolates from this the view that a good practitioner, i.e., one who
succeeds in restoring the proper erôs, must in doing so be guided by
Eros. It will, therefore, follow that the gods who invented the var-
ious arts (which are all concerned with erôs) were also guided by
Eros, though this then slides into a different, though related, claim
that this guiding erôs was a “love of beauty” (b– ), because the
arts are beautiful/fine (kala) for both gods and men. Just before his
brilliant peroration and at the conclusion of a remarkably slippery
argument, then, Agathon incidentally introduces what will become
a crucial idea: erôs must be erôs for something. In his claim that it is
“very obviously erôs for beauty — for there is no erôs for ugliness”
(b– ), he will prove both right and wrong, in ways which we
cannot yet suspect.
In the closing section of the speech, an almost untranslatable in-
cantation of rhythmical phrases, a beautiful sound signifying noth-
ing, brings Greek prose as close to metrical poetry as it ever got:41
Eros draws insularity out of us and pours familiarity into us,
by causing the formation of all shared gatherings like ours,
by taking the lead in festal, choral, sacrificial rites. He dis-
penses mildness and dismisses wildness; he is unsparing of
goodwill and unsharing of ill-will. He is gracious and gentle;
adored by the wise, admired by the gods; craved when ab-
sent, prized when present. Hedonism, luxury, and sensual-
ism, delight, desire, and eroticism—these are his children.
He looks after the good and overlooks the bad. In adversity
and uncertainty, for passion and discussion, there is no bet-
41 To
the commentators add Dover () – .

Erôs before Socrates | 

 ter captain or shipmate or guardian deity; for the whole of
heaven and the whole of earth, he is matchless and peerless
as governor and guide. (d – e)
Socrates says that the speech reminded him of the famous Sicilian
rhetorician Gorgias, and though Gorgias’s prose style does not really
share the rhythmical character of Agathon’s peroration, we can see
what Socrates means. It may in fact be that Agathon’s conclusion,
“Let this speech of mine be dedicated to the god, one which partakes
both of play (paidia) and of moderate earnestness” (e – ), is an
explicit allusion to (and rewriting of ) the conclusion of Gorgias’s
famous Encomium of Helen, “ . . . this speech which is an encomium
of Helen and a plaything (paignion) of mine.” The Encomium of Helen
is a prominent example of epideictic rhetoric on paradoxical sub-
jects in which what is on display is the cleverness of the speaker
(above, pp.  –); such works notoriously have nothing to do with
truth, and as such this closing allusion to Gorgias, if such it is, is one
more way in which Plato guides our interpretation of Agathon’s
speech. Even without this allusion, however, the association be-
tween Agathon and Gorgias is clear. Gorgias’s Encomium is charac-
terized by many of the verbal features which we have noted in
Agathon’s speech—rhyme, assonance, wordplay, and so on — and a
central section on the incantatory, magical power of words, which
are “carriers on of pleasure, carriers off of pain” (Encomium ),
would find no better illustration than the Platonic Agathon’s per-
oration. A famous fragment of Gorgias’s Funeral Oration gives some
idea of what lies behind Socrates’ comparison:
What did these men lack that men should have? And what
did they have that men should lack? May what I say be what
I sought to say, and what I sought to say what I ought to
say—free from the wrath of gods, far from the envy of men.
They had the virtue that is instilled by gods, and the mor-
tality that is inborn in men . . . schooling themselves into
what was most needed: might of hand and rightness of plan,
thinking through the one and acting out the other; succour-

 | Plato’s Symposium
 ers of the unfairly unfortunate, punishers of the unfairly for-
tunate; assertive when advantage called, yielding when pro-
priety forbade; restraining hastiness of hand with prudence
of plan; confronting outrage with outrage, orderliness with
order; fearless in the face of the fearless, feared themselves
in the midst of things to be feared; in testimony to which
they raised trophies over their enemies: for themselves, ded-
ications; for Zeus, consecrations; strangers neither to the fire
of battle in the blood, nor chaste loves, nor armour-clad
strife, nor beauty-loving peace. . . . Dead though they be,
our longing for them dies not; but deathless in bodies not
deathless, it lives, though they live not. (Gorgias fr.  Diels-
Kranz; trans. T. Cole)
In view, however, of Plato’s persistent association of Gorgias with a
persuasive rhetoric which pays no regard to truth, Socrates’ charged
comparison of Agathon to Gorgias looks to the (lack of ) substance
of what was said, as well as to the style in which it was expressed.
Of the real Agathon’s tragedies only the scantiest fragments sur-
vive; a high proportion of these is indeed marked by verbal wit (in-
cluding rhyme and assonance) and smartness, but the body of evi-
dence is extremely small.42 Of greater interest for present purposes
is the fact that Agathon appears as a character already in the Women
at the Thesmophoria of Aristophanes ( bc). In this play Euripides
asks his fellow tragedian to infiltrate an all-female gathering to
speak on his behalf; Agathon would be able to do this because he is
“fair-faced, white, shaven, of feminine voice, soft, and lovely to be-
hold” (Thesm. –). We recognize here a comic version of the
same characteristics which are highlighted in the Symposium. So
too, in the Women at the Thesmophoria both the comic Agathon and
his servant are characterized by a self-consciousness about tragic art,
which is revealed in a series of craft metaphors applied to poetic
composition (Thesm.  –,  – ; cf. Plato, Phaedrus e) and in
42 The standard edition is volume  of B. Snell and R. Kannicht (eds.), Tragico-

rum Graecorum Fragmenta, d ed. (Göttingen: )  –.

Erôs before Socrates | 

a rather confused set of principles about the relationship between a
poet and his productions which the comic Agathon enunciates:
I wear my clothes along with my mentality. A man who is a
poet must adopt habits that match the plays he’s committed
to composing. For example, if one is writing plays about
women, one’s body must participate in their habits. . . . If
you’re writing about men, your body has what it takes
already; but when it’s a question of something we don’t pos-
sess, then it must be captured by imitation. (Aristophanes,
Women at the Thesmophoria  –; trans. Sommerstein)
After this concept of mimetic adaptation, the comic Agathon seems
to argue for an intrinsic relationship between a poet’s appearance
(and his clothes) and the poetry he writes:
Phrynichus . . . was an attractive (kalos) man and he also
wore attractive clothes, and that’s why his plays were attrac-
tive too. One just can’t help creating work that reflects one’s
own nature. (Aristophanes, Women at the Thesmophoria –
; trans. Sommerstein)
The Platonic Agathon’s speech and his picture of Eros are clear pro-
jections of himself (as Plato portrays him), and there is thus a shared
substrate (“you write as you are” or vice versa) to the portrayals of
the tragedian in both Plato and Aristophanes. Unfortunately, only
more information than we currently possess about the real Agathon
and his works would allow us to understand what really lies behind
these representations. On the verbal level, the Agathon of Aris-
tophanes’ play, “Agathon of the beautiful language (kalliepês)” (v. ),
and his servant are characterized by redundancy, rhyme, assonance,
and antithesis (note especially vv.  –),43 and again we see how
the Aristophanic and Platonic representations share important char-
acteristics. The Aristophanic portrayal can, moreover, help to ex-
plain the extravagance of the Platonic character’s speech. Agathon

43 Aristophanes also drew attention to Agathon’s fondness for antithesis in an-

other play (the Second Thesmophoriazousai); cf. fr.  Kassel-Austin.

 | Plato’s Symposium
is playing not just to an elite and highly literate audience, but to one
containing a poet who has already parodied him in fairly strong
terms; he disarms such criticism by going “beyond parody” in a de-
liberately over-the-top challenge to conventional criticism. The
winning self-knowledge thus revealed is perfectly at home in the
looking glass of the symposium.

Erôs before Socrates | 

 •3•
The Love of Socrates

 | Socrates

S ocrates undertakes to speak “as suits me / on my own terms”

(b), and his contribution does indeed fall into two modes
familiar from other Platonic dialogues: question-and-answer, which
reveals the answerer’s ignorance, clears away misconceptions, and pre-
pares for what is to follow, and, second, longer “didactic” speeches,
first by Socrates and then by Diotima. In the progression from
speech (Socrates) to dialectic (Socrates examining Agathon) to fur-
ther dialectic (Diotima examining Socrates) and finally to Diotima’s
great speech of myth and metaphysics, Socrates’ personal role be-
comes progressively less important. Although each successive speaker
to some extent caps those who have preceded, only Socrates (and
Diotima) address specific questions to the immediately preceding
speaker: it is apparently truth, not rhetorical and performative ef-
fectiveness, which is now to be the central concern.
Socrates begins by praising Agathon’s encomiastic strategy of
first describing (epideixai) “what sort of thing erôs is” and only then
“what it is responsible for” (c –; cf. a – ). “I very much
admire that beginning,” says Socrates, and we can see why: it is a


strategy which can be easily accommodated to one of the most fa-
miliar aspects of Socratic ethical discussions, namely, the quest for
definitions of ethical terms. One cannot discuss what, say, “brav-
ery” (as in the Laches) or even “beauty” (to kalon, as in the Hippias
Maior), let alone “justice” (as in the Republic) can do for us, before
having decided what these actually are. The Socratic dialogue in
pursuit of definition is thus what a “true encomium” should look
like. Plato himself shows this later in the Symposium. After Alcibi-
ades’ speech we are led to expect an encomium of Agathon by
Socrates (a– ) and though our hopes are cut short by the rev-
elers who burst in,1 when Aristodemus restores our vision the fol-
lowing morning Agathon and Aristophanes are, with some diffi-
culty, being driven by Socrates to accept that someone who is “by
art” (technê) a tragic poet is also a comic poet, so that the same per-
son knows how to (epistasthai) compose both forms of drama. Here
we recognize an argument of typical Socratic form and apparent
paradox (tragic and comic compositions were utterly separate arts
in classical Athens), and it seems likely that we are indeed witness-
ing the promised encomium; it too will have started from a defini-
tion of terms and, like the dialectic between Agathon and Socrates
which we do actually witness, may well have led Agathon to con-
clude that he knew nothing about a subject upon which he must
have held views (b – ).
Socrates first gets Agathon to agree that erôs always involves erôs
of something, whether this is stated explicitly or not: one can no
more “be in love” without “being in love with something/someone”
than one can be a “father” without being a “father of someone.” The
fact that erôs is relational is crucial for what follows, but Socrates’
explanatory examples of “father” and “brother” also allow him to
slip into talking about erôs in ways that we would more naturally
associate with an erastês, that is, a person who embodies erôs, as a
father embodies “fatherhood.” Thus, for example, at a “erôs
[rather than the erastês] desires,” and the importance of the idea that
1 We
may be reminded of the revelry with which Attic comedy regularly ends
and/or the “drunken young men” who form the chorus of many plays of New
Comedy.

The Love of Socrates | 

loving is always for the purpose of “permanent possession” is estab-
lished through a series of personal examples (c– e); we move
seamlessly from “everyone who desires” (e) to “erôs is of cer-
tain things and indeed of those things which it lacks” (e– ).
The payoff for this slide will come in the similarity, so close as to
suggest an identification, of Socrates to erôs, as Diotima will depict
the god. Second, Socrates’ insistence upon the relational nature of
erôs carries a criticism of the encomium which Agathon has just de-
livered: praise of erôs must inevitably consider also what is being
loved, what the “erôs is of,” whereas much of Agathon’s speech, as
indeed much of Phaedrus’s, simply praised erôs and ascribed quali-
ties to it, as though one could treat erôs in isolation from its work-
ing in the world. Even when poets describe what erôs is like, such
descriptions normally have their starting points in particular erotic
experiences and particular manifestations of erôs at work. It is worth
adding that although Agathon had, almost in passing, noted that erôs
must be “of beauty” rather than “for ugliness” (b), a view
which Socrates describes as “reasonable enough” (a), ordinary
Greek usage would have felt nothing odd about using erôs and its
cognates with what would today be considered a morally disgraceful
object. Just as the Greek for “beautiful” (kalon) is also the ordinary
word for “honorable/morally right,” so the word for “ugly” (aischron)
also means “shameful/morally wrong”; for this reason, praise of erôs
cannot shirk the question “erôs of what?”
Agathon is made to agree that erôs (we would find it easier to say
“the lover”) always “loves” and “desires [to have]” what this erôs is
of, and this will necessarily involve the fact that this is something
which erôs/the lover currently does not have. The modern reader
may consider that Agathon should have held out against this propo-
sition for rather longer than he does, but it is important to bear in
mind (again) that erôs can be a much more powerful emotion than
our “love”; it is a desire to possess, whether sexually or otherwise
(cf. above, p. ), and Agathon had used erôs and epithumia (desire)
as virtual synonyms (a). When satisfied, as for example through
sexual intercourse, erôs recurs, demanding to be satisfied again; we
can therefore understand why it (as opposed to, say, philia) may be

 | Plato’s Symposium
thought to carry an inevitable sense of lack and absence. An erastês,
even a successful one, always “wants something.”2 The upshot is that
Love cannot be at all as Agathon described it: if we (and the gods)
love/desire beautiful and good (c–) things, it follows that Love
itself cannot be beautiful, as Agathon had claimed (a–b). A rather
labored Socratic pun—Agathon has made a big mistake about beauty,
but spoke “beautifully” (c)— seals the criticism of a speech in
which style had triumphed over content.
Socrates, we now discover to our great surprise, had a teacher
in erotics, and a female one at that, Diotima (“honored of Zeus”)
from Mantinea in the Peloponnese, a place name which inevitably
suggests mantikê (seercraft); certainly, Socrates’ story of how she
helped the Athenians in time of plague (d –) recalls Eryxi-
machus’s account of seers as experts in a particular field of erotics
who can restore a proper relationship between man and god
(b –d; cf. e – a). There has been much discussion of the
historicity of Diotima, though her role in the Symposium is obvi-
ously a fictitious one (she has even had an advance inkling of Aristo-
phanes’ speech, d – e), and we should no more wonder when
she and Socrates used to meet than we should inquire when Er of
Pamphylia told Socrates the story which concludes the Republic. It
was common enough at symposia for the male guests to imperson-
ate characters, including women, through the recitation of poetry,
whether one’s own or another’s (the recitation of Sappho would be
an interesting case),3 and Socrates’ gambit must be seen, in part, as
appropriate to the setting in which he finds himself. As a female in-
structor of Socrates in matters of erôs, Diotima also has analogues
in other Socratic literature, notably the famous hetaira and mistress
of Pericles, Aspasia; another follower of Socrates contemporary
with Plato, Aischines of Sphettos, wrote an influential work called
Aspasia in which Socrates seems to have quoted this woman’s views
on erôs and aretê, and the Platonic Socrates himself claims Aspasia as
2 It
is possibly relevant that “to have” may have, in Greek as in English, a sex-
ual sense.
3 For verse imagined to be delivered by a woman, cf. also Theognis  – ,

 – ; Alcaeus fr.  LP-Voigt.

The Love of Socrates | 

his “schoolteacher in rhetoric” in the Menexenus, in which he re-
cites by heart a funeral speech she allegedly composed for the Athen-
ian war dead. More fundamentally, however, the procreative and
reproductive model of philosophy which Diotima will espouse is
appropriate to and reinforced by her femaleness.4
Socrates’ performance very much enters into the inverted, Dio-
nysiac world of the symposium. In apparently repeating all but
verbatim the words of his instructor, we see him behaving like
an Aristodemus or Apollodorus,5 whose skill lies merely in the re-
production of remembered conversations; this is not the Socratic
manner as we have come to know it from our acquaintance with
Plato. So too, Socrates now places himself on the receiving end of
a “Socratic” examination, or elenchus, followed by a long “Socra-
tic” speech; the Platonic Socrates thus shows himself to be as self-
aware about his normal procedures as had Agathon through his ex-
travagant self-parody. The childlike naïveté of his alleged responses
to Diotima may be seen as a reductio ad absurdum of the position
of Socrates’ interlocutors in some of Plato’s most famous dialogues,
who often contribute nothing themselves or find themselves agree-
ing, as modern readers often complain, to propositions and argu-
ments to which they should never have unthinkingly assented.6
At the heart of Diotima’s instruction will be the idea that erôs
functions in allowing an individual to “give birth” to ideas and logoi
with which (s)he is already pregnant; along the way, the individual
requires a guide, who— as it were — turns Pausanias’s ideal couple
into a triangle. The crucial point, however, is that this is a model of
philosophical advancement fundamentally different from Pausanias’s,
and one of which there will be no sign that Alcibiades, who is not
present to hear Diotima, has any notion. For these characters, teach-
ing, “becoming better,” is a matter of “information transfer” from
teacher/older man/lover (erastês) to pupil/younger man/beloved
4 Halperin
() – is an important study of Diotima’s female identity.
5 The
two introductions, e and d– , are very close.
6 Plato elsewhere can joke about this “artificiality” of the dialogue form; cf. Re-

public .d.

 | Plato’s Symposium
(erômenos), whereas Diotima’s concern is with the guided advance-
ment by careful stages of an individual erastês (here radically rede-
fined). As a woman, Diotima shows that the idea of an exchange of
such intellectual information for sexual favors (charizesthai) is ab-
surd, but the fact that she is a seer in touch with “mystic” knowl-
edge allows Plato to have her instruct Socrates (cf. esp. b– ,
c– ) as Socrates cannot and will not instruct Alcibiades or any
other of his followers. The origin of Socrates’ knowledge of the
process of discovering about Beauty and the philosophic ascent is
an unrepeatable “revelation”; the model of Socratic and Diotimic
teaching is thus preserved.
Diotima herself is not “pregnant,” though it might be thought
that her mystic language is appropriate to the sex for whom preg-
nancy is a real physical possibility, and Socrates— in this sense at
least— is not beautiful. Moreover, it is crucial that the central part
of Diotima’s revelation, which Socrates now passes on to his fellow
guests, is precisely about the process by which men may climb the
ladder of understanding toward the Form of Beauty (cf. below); at
least in the speech which Socrates allows us to hear, Diotima does
not herself take Socrates very far up that ladder. That Socrates (in-
credibly, if with the admirable politeness of a guest) presents him-
self as once upon a time as ignorant about erôs as Agathon is now,
as emotionally but unreasoningly attached to “boyfriends” as any
Athenian (d– ), and as entirely “unironic” and un-Socratic (as
we are familiar with that mode from Plato’s dialogues) reinforces
the distancing effect of Diotima’s intervention; it is not just the sub-
stance, but also the mode, of that intervention which will explain
to us (but not to Alcibiades) Socrates’ treatment of the politician.
Diotima begins by telling Socrates that although, as Agathon
and he have agreed, Eros is not beautiful and good, neither is he
ugly and bad; more than that, he cannot be a god, as all gods are
“beautiful and blessed,” and blessedness consists in the possession of
good and beautiful things, whereas Eros precisely desires such
things, because he lacks them (c – d, picking up Agathon’s
words at a–). Eros is between beauty and ugliness, good and

The Love of Socrates | 

bad, god and human: he is a “great spirit” (daimôn), a member of a
class which is neither mortal nor immortal. Though Diotima skill-
fully avoids naming the states which fall between beauty and ugli-
ness and between good and bad, her (very Socratic) example of
“correct opinion” as a halfway state between wisdom and ignorance
(a –) prepares the ground for the idea of the philosopher’s
quest and the philosophic erôs, which itself is “in the middle be-
tween wisdom and ignorance” (e); the halfway position can
be viewed not as a permanent state, but as a stage in a progression
toward a further and better state. For Diotima, the idea of “in-
betweenness” is an elastic one: Eros exemplifies an intermediate state
between immortal and mortal, but also literally shuttles “between”
gods and men as a kind of messenger or intermediary, “filling the
middle space so that the whole is bound together” (e–). For the
moment this account leaves unclear the element of “mortality” in
Eros, though this absence is soon to be rectified (cf. e, e–a,
b–): Eros/erôs cannot be immortal, because love is love of im-
mortality, which of necessity is something which is lacking to love.
Diotima’s threefold division into god, daimôn, and man is a sys-
tematization and simplification (but one which was to prove very
influential) of the much more diffuse and often apparently incon-
sistent set of ideas about divine beings and forces which character-
ized Greek society (as many others);7 it is the kind of classificatory
distinction we might have expected from a religious expert, but of
itself it is not intended to sound radically innovative (that there are
“many daimones of all different kinds” [a – ] is a view to which
most ordinary Greeks would readily have assented). On the other
hand, we will not find it difficult to suspect that Socrates himself is
the prime example of a “daimonios man” who is wise (sophos) about
daimones and the relation between gods and men (a– ; for the
adjective applied to Socrates, cf. c); Eryximachus, Aristophanes,
and Agathon (at least) will, however, not have been pleased to learn
that those who are “wise” in the arts are merely “vulgar” (banausos).

7 Cf.
Burkert ()  –, –; Osborne () –.

 | Plato’s Symposium
 The wonderstruck Socrates now asks a very childlike (cf. b)8
question about Eros’s parents, a notorious problem inviting specu-
lation and invention (cf. b–). Diotima’s answer treats the ques-
tion at the level it deserves with her simple, childlike fable of Eros’s
birth from “Poverty” and “Resource, son of Cunning (Metis).”9
Genealogy and personification as devices for explaining the world
are familiar to us from Hesiod onward; in the Republic Socrates fig-
ures philosophy itself as a helpless female who is deserted by those
who should support her and left as prey for unworthy men to have
their wicked way with her and bring her into disrepute (Republic
.b –c). Not many years before the writing of the Symposium,
Aristophanes himself had dramatized a confrontation between per-
sonified Wealth and Poverty in the Wealth. Diotima’s simple narra-
tive, which may remind us of Socrates’ Aesopic fable of pleasure
and pain in the Phaedo (cf. above, p. ), is to be understood as the
lowest level of Socrates’ instruction; in this, as in everything, Dio-
tima will proceed by orderly stages toward the highest and most dif-
ficult mysteries.
The Eros of Diotima’s fable inherits his mother’s poverty/lack/
want, but from his father he has the “resource” to do something
about it (he is again neither one thing nor the other):10
In the first place, he never has any money, and the usual no-
tion that he’s sensitive and attractive (kalos) is quite wrong:
he’s a vagrant, with tough, dry skin and no shoes on his feet.
He never has a bed to sleep on, but stretches out on the

8 See Diotima’s words to Socrates, “this is obvious even to a child” (b); cf.,

e.g., Socrates’ “this is obvious even to a blind man,” when he is doing the teaching
(Republic .d).
9 If we are to think of Eros as conceived in the normal way, then there is the

implication, which is not unimportant for Diotima, that sexual intercourse per se
need have nothing to do with erôs. Nightingale ()  n. comments, “God
knows how Poros managed it while collapsed in a drunken sleep.”
10 For Eros as a resourceful contriver, cf., e.g., Callimachus fr.  Pfeiffer

(Acontius and Cydippe); Sappho’s “guile-weaving daughter of Zeus [i.e., Aphro-

dite]” (fr. .) is not far away.

The Love of Socrates | 

 ground and sleeps in the open in doorways and by the road-
side. He takes after his mother in having need as a constant
companion. From his father, however, he gets his ingenuity
in going after things of beauty (kala) and value (agatha), his
courage, impetuosity, and energy, his skill at hunting (he’s
constantly thinking up captivating stratagems), his desire for
knowledge, his resourcefulness, his lifelong pursuit of wis-
dom (philosophôn), and his skills with magic, herbs, and words.
He isn’t essentially either immortal or mortal. Some-
times within a single day he starts by being full of life in
abundance, when things are going his way, but then he dies
away . . . only to take after his father and come back to life
again. He has an income, but it is constantly trickling away,
and consequently Love isn’t ever destitute, but isn’t ever well
off either. He also falls between knowledge and ignorance,
and the reason for this is as follows. No god loves knowledge
(philosophei) or desires wisdom, because gods are already wise;
by the same token, no one else who is wise loves knowledge
(philosophei). On the other hand, ignorant people don’t love
knowledge or desire wisdom either, because the trouble
with ignorance is precisely that if a person lacks virtue and
knowledge, he’s perfectly satisfied with the way he is. If a
person isn’t aware of a lack, he can’t desire the thing which
he isn’t aware of lacking. (c – a)

This mixed being, who bears a striking resemblance to the nor-

mally unshod Socrates, ever “scheming after the beautiful and the
good” (masculine or neuter?) while exercising a kind of witchcraft
upon others (as Alcibiades is soon to confirm; cf. already Agathon
at a), “philosophizes throughout life.” The philosopher (“lover
of wisdom”) is not wise, but he restlessly and relentlessly seeks to
rid himself of intellectual aporia (resourcelessness) and pursues wis-
dom, which is one of the most beautiful things (b– ), posses-
sion of which would be true happiness (eudaimonia; cf. e– a);
although the possibility of there being “wise” people is left open
(a), there is a suggestion here that only gods are truly wise.

 | Plato’s Symposium
Those who are not searching after wisdom, and have no desire to
do so, are simply ignorant/stupid (amatheis); we cannot fail here to
recall Socrates’ claim in the Apology that, if he is wise, his “wisdom”
consists in acknowledging his lack of wisdom (a – b). That same
passage of the Apology also offers a splendid illustration of Socrates
engaged in the relentless (and to others very annoying) pursuit of
understanding.
Diotima moves her argument forward by getting Socrates to
agree to the substitution of “good” (agathon) for “beautiful” (kalon).
This potentially problematic substitution is perhaps easier in Greek
than in English, given the large semantic overlap of the two Greek
words in ordinary usage; moreover, we must never forget that Aga-
thon himself (“Mr. Good”) is also the most beautiful (kallistos) per-
son at his own party (e.g., c).11 Nevertheless, these words and
ideas are not (for Diotima) simply synonymous or interchangeable;
the relationship between them in fact remains somewhat unclear
in the Symposium, though there will be no doubt that the ultimate
object of erôs, as of all human activity according to the Republic
(cf. .a–e), is “[possession of ] the good.” Be that as it may, this
verbal substitution allows Diotima to proceed to consider the ends
of action: it is easier for the young Socrates to consider why one
wants to possess “good” things rather than “beautiful” things.12 All
human action, the pursuit of “good things and eudaimonia,” is
driven by erôs, but whereas language conceals this in the case of, say,
money making and even philosophy (we don’t say “erotosophy”),
it is patent in the case of “lovers” (erastai), who are in fact only one
instance of a general truth (d). Having observed that the Aristo-
phanic model as stated must be wrong because it has nothing to say
about the “goodness” of the other half which is pursued, Diotima
concludes that erôs is “of permanent possession of what is good”
11 Both the meaning of Agathon’s name and his beauty are also important in

Agathon’s other Platonic appearance at Protagoras d –e; cf. also below, p.  on
Alcibiades’ entrance.
12 Notice how the conversation in d–e “mimics” the subject: an answer

“desires” a question (erô-têsis), and Socrates finds one question easier (euporô-teron)
than another.

The Love of Socrates | 

(a) and then turns to the central question of what erôs does
for us.
This second stage of Diotima’s exposition, marked as such by
Socrates’ renewed reference to “seercraft” (b), moves away from
the Aesopic mode of her earlier fable toward a mystic world of meta-
phor: erôs is “of birth in the beautiful,” and it is erôs which allows us
to bring to birth the “pregnancies” which we carry in our bodies
and souls, and this “giving birth” is both something immortal for us
and drives us by a desire for immortality, for erôs is for immortality
as well as for the good.13 Pregnancy (cf. below, pp.  – ) here pre-
cedes a giving birth, to which the beautiful acts as stimulus and which
is described in terms that inevitably suggest (male) ejaculation:
When what is pregnant draws near to beauty, it becomes
obliging and melts with joy, and gives birth and procreates;
when, however, it approaches ugliness, it contracts, glum
with pain, turns away, curls up, and does not procreate,14 but
retains its unborn children and suffers badly. So the reason
why, when pregnant and swollen, ready to burst, it gets so
excited in the presence of beauty is that the bearer of beauty
releases it from great pain. (d – e)
The metaphorical biology of this and related passages is perhaps
(slightly) less strange in Greek than in English, because of an an-
cient notion (by no means universally held) that male seed contains
within itself “embryonic humans” which are placed inside the fe-
male womb which then functions merely as a receptacle and hot-
house;15 intercourse and ejaculation may then indeed be seen as a

13
The bibliography on Diotima’s mysteries is very large; I am particularly con-
scious of the influence of Patterson (); Ferrari (); and Sheffield (a),
which should be consulted in detail.
14
The description of the pregnant being turning away from ugliness obviously
suggests the detumescence of the penis, and it is hard not to recall Petronius’s parody
of Virgil, Satyrica  (of the impotent penis), illa solo fixos oculos auersa tenebat . . .
15 Cf. Aeschylus, Eumenides –; Plato, Timaeus c–d; Morrison ()

 – ; Pender (); Ferrari () –. Halperin ()  –  is an impor-
tant commentary on this passage.

 | Plato’s Symposium
kind of “giving birth” (c –).16 The desire for immortality
through procreation is an idea that has exercised a powerful hold
over the imagination, and over psychological speculation, for many
centuries: in the face of the inevitably transient nature of our bod-
ies, our emotions, and our knowledge, we seek to renew ourselves
from within, whether by physical procreation or by the “rehearsal”
(meletê) of what we knew but are in danger of forgetting (c –
b). The universal desire to overcome the limits of our mortality
may be seen also in the erôs (c –) of the great figures of myth
and history (such as Phaedrus’s paradigms of Alcestis and Achilles)
to leave a glorious reputation behind them. We all strive to live after
death. Despite this universal desire, however, we will suspect that
an account which uses “love of honor” (philotimia) and “irrational”
behavior as evidence (c –) will not (yet) be an adequate or full
account of Socrates’ own philosophical behavior.
To this point Diotima’s account has applied to all human beings,
all of whom are pregnant in both body and soul. There are, however,
major differences of degree between individuals, so that one can
broadly speak of those pregnant in the body and those (more) preg-
nant in their souls (e–a). The former seek immortality through
children and hence— Diotima speaks from a male perspective —
“turn their attention more toward women and are erôtikoi in this
way.” The clear inference is that pregnancy of the soul, which is
here privileged over that of the body and to which the remainder
of Diotima’s discourse will be directed, seeks its outlet in homo-
sexual beauty. Here, then, Pausanias’s distinction between the two
kinds of erôs is recuperated to the service of a challenging thesis.
With what are men pregnant in the soul?: “the things which it is fit-
ting for the soul to conceive and give birth to, [namely,] wisdom
(phronêsis) and the rest of virtue” (a – ), particularly modera-
tion and justice. Neither here nor later does Diotima suggest where
these “embryos” in the soul might have come from: “intercourse”
is entirely devoted to bringing them to birth. In Plato’s Phaedo and
16 That
intercourse/giving birth is “a divine thing” (c) inevitably calls to
mind Archilochus fr. A West (a seduction scene): “the goddess [Aphrodite] of-
fers many pleasures to young people beyond the divine thing” (vv.  –).

The Love of Socrates | 

Meno knowledge is “recollection” of what our soul has previously
learned, but Diotima’s entire focus is not on origins, but on the edu-
cative process by which such wisdom and virtue is brought to birth;
at best, we may perhaps be here encouraged to think of innate po-
tentialities in the soul.
In the Theaetetus Socrates presents himself as a midwife who,
though barren himself, helps others to bring their ideas to birth and
to test their genuineness.17 In that dialogue also, then, we find a
model of “pregnancy,” but there Socrates is apparently fashioned as
playing a very different role. In the Symposium Socrates himself, so
we are here to understand, is “pregnant,” and it is Socrates who is
the prime example of the philosopher en route to that vision of
Beauty which makes life worth living (cf. below); as Alcibiades’
narrative will make clear, Socrates, who in the Gorgias is made to
jest that his two erômenoi are Alcibiades and philosophy (a), has
long since moved beyond the attractions of individual beauty.
Socrates, moreover, is far enough advanced to be able also to act as
guide and helper to others (notably Alcibiades), if only they will
cooperate, an idea which is at least not completely irreconcilable
with the “midwife” model of the Theaetetus (cf. below, p. ). Here
Socrates’ resemblance to the Eros of Diotima’s myth becomes cru-
cial: as Eros is, according to Socrates (now speaking in his own per-
son), the “best coworker” with an individual in the pursuit of truth
and immortality (b), so Alcibiades, speaking the truth in igno-
rance, will declare Socrates to be “the best collaborator for becom-
ing as good as possible” (d). Alcibiades’ understanding of Soc-
rates will, of course, prove limited.
What then is this educative process?:
When someone’s mind has been pregnant with virtue from
an early age . . . once he reaches the prime of life he longs

17 Cf. Burnyeat (). Attempts to reconcile Diotima’s ideas with those of the

Theaetetus and other dialogues began early; thus a second-century ad commentary

on the Theaetetus observes that it is “reasonable” that Diotima’s “pregnancy of the
soul” is the same as the “recollection” idea (Corpus dei Papiri Filosofici Greci e Latini
III [Florence: ] – , col. LVII –).

 | Plato’s Symposium
 to procreate and give birth, so he . . . goes around searching
for beauty, so that he can give birth there, since he will never
do it in ugliness. Since he’s pregnant, he prefers physical
beauty to ugliness, and he is particularly pleased if he comes
across a mind which is attractive (kalos), upright, and gifted
at the same time. This is a person he immediately finds he
can talk fluently to about virtue (lit. has a good resource of
logoi about virtue) and about what qualities and practices it
takes for a man to be good. In short, he takes on this per-
son’s education. . . . In other words, once he has come into
contact with (lit. touching) beauty and become intimate18
with it, he produces and gives birth to the offspring he’s
been pregnant with for so long. (a – c)

Here again Pausanias’s prescription is rewritten, but this time to the

service of both partners, particularly the “lover.” The role of beauty
in Plato’s thought as productive of creative activity of all kinds—pro-
creation, artistic creation, philosophy — cannot be underestimated;
Socrates’ habitual association with “beautiful” young men is to be
understood both as a stimulus to philosophy, his pursuit of knowl-
edge, and as a metaphor for the unending search for “the beautiful.”
Whereas Pausanias’s erastês receives only sexual access from a grate-
ful and “beautiful” partner, here the pregnant lover is offered a beauty
(both physical and psychic) in which to give birth (described again in
a language suggestive of ejaculation), and what he bears are “words
(logoi) concerning virtue, the concerns and practices of a good man”
(b–c). The partner is certainly offered education of a sort
(c), and here again we are quite close to Pausanias, but it is the
pregnant partner to whom erôs is most of service. These logoi are
“more immortal” than human children, and the couple who was
present at their birth (such as Pausanias and Agathon?) share a much
stronger “partnership and affection (philia),” two words often used
in the context of the ideal of marriage, than do a (heterosexual)
couple bound together by their children. As proof of this, Diotima

18 The
Greek may bear the same double sense as the English.

The Love of Socrates | 

adduces the “offspring” of Homer, Hesiod, and the other good
poets,19 that is, the poetry which was at the basis of Greek educa-
tion, and of the great lawgivers such as Lycurgus of Sparta and Solon
of Athens; she does not elaborate on what beautiful partners these
great names from the past found to facilitate such poetic or legal
“births.” We ought at this point at least to wonder where Plato’s
own writings fit into his longing for immortality.
To this point Diotima’s discourse might be seen as an ingenious
elaboration upon more or less familiar metaphors for intellectual ac-
tivity, such as “giving birth.” In Aristophanes’ Frogs, for example,
Dionysus goes down to Hades in search of a “fertile” ( gonimos) poet
(v. , a description which puzzles the stolid Heracles), and in the
Clouds the arrival at the Think Shop of the boorish Strepsiades
causes the abortion of a thought. Erôs has so far been given a cen-
tral place by Diotima in the creative and educational process, but it
is not one which goes too far beyond areas already sketched out
(particularly by Pausanias and Agathon). We still lack an account of
the function of erôs in Socrates’ wisdom, and this would not be the
Socrates we know if the climactic position in his (and Diotima’s)
encomium were to be reserved for the activities of poets and politi-
cians (a–e), the first two classes whose “wisdom” is popularly
celebrated but is found by Socrates in the Apology to be worthless,
as he seeks to understand the Delphic oracle about himself (Apology
b– c).
Diotima now makes a fresh start and promises, in the language
of the Eleusinian Mysteries, a glimpse of the ultimate and true mys-
tery;20 “initiation” into erôs (cf., e.g., Xenophon, Symposium .)
was a familiar metaphor, but here it is given quite new life. Meta-
phor was at the heart of the Mysteries, whose “meaning” was not
susceptible to rational demonstration, and so it is to be here also. Just
19 That a poet’s poetry confers a kind of immortality upon him is an idea which

becomes very common later; cf. Horace, Odes ..– ; Ovid, Am. .., Met.
., but, for the immortality of poems, we may note already such passages as
Homeric Hymn to Apollo –; Theognis –; and Thucydides’ hope that his
history will be a “possession for all time” (..).
20 On Diotima’s use of the language of the Mysteries, cf. Riedweg () –.

 | Plato’s Symposium
as the conduct of the Mysteries depended on absolute observance
of prescribed ritual in due order, so initiation into the final Mys-
teries of erôs similarly requires “correct” (orthos) sequencing; it will
also prove to be a long process.
The starting point is similar but not identical to Diotima’s ear-
lier account: a young man will, through the agency of a guide and
erôs, fall in love with “a single body” and there generate “beautiful
words.” He will, however, then come to realize for himself that the
beauty in any body is “brother” to the beauty in any other body, so
that he might as well consider all bodily beauty one and the same
thing and thus become an erastês of all beautiful bodies (a– b).
The idea that the lover “realizes” this “for himself ” is important for
understanding the whole of Diotima’s account of the philosophical
ascent. The account is very thin on details of what the move from
one stage to the next actually entails, but the language here strongly
suggests that the lover’s realization is the result of a “Socratic” pro-
cess of question-and-answer about whether different manifestations
of beauty are or are not in fact manifestations of one and the same
quality. In such a “dialectic” exchange, the lover will come to see
his own ignorance (as Agathon did) and then be brought to “real-
ize for himself ” a higher truth, a realization which will be expressed
in logoi about the nature of the beauty which attracts him. It is the
Socratic/Platonic model of dialectic and cross-examination which
best fits Diotima’s apparent mixture of “self-advancement” and the
important, if somewhat ill defined, role of a “guide” along the
way.21 Here too, then, we find common ground between Diotima’s
model of philosophical pregnancy and the midwife role which
Socrates assigns himself in the Theaetetus. It is reasonable to assume
that this model of how one moves from one stage of the ascent of
knowledge to another holds good for every step along the path
which Diotima constructs, just as, at every step, it is beauty which
is the object of the logoi.

21 The passage at c has been interpreted as showing that “a guide for the
journey is only optional” (Ferrari [] ), but this may put too heavy a weight
on “or.”

The Love of Socrates | 

 Becoming a lover of “all beautiful bodies” is not mere promis-
cuity, as our young man will then come to consider that the beauty
of souls far surpasses that of bodies; how and on what grounds he
will reach this conclusion is again left unstated, though we might
again understand that this advance is made through a dialectic consi-
deration of the nature of the beauty which all beautiful bodies
manifest. In any case, both the inferiority of bodily beauty to that
of the soul and an intimate link between them are familiar Socratic/
Platonic ideas. Here, for example, is an exchange between Chaere-
phon and Socrates about the beautiful and much sought-after erô-
menos Charmides:
Chaerephon called me and said, “How does the young man
strike you, Socrates? Has he not a beautiful face?”
“Very much so,” I replied.
“But if he were willing to take his clothes off,” he said,
“you would think he was faceless, so perfectly beautiful is
his body.”
The others agreed wholeheartedly with Chaerephon.
“Heracles,” I exclaimed, “how irresistible you make him out
to be, if he also has one other little thing.”
“What?” said Critias.
“If the nature of his soul is excellent — and it should be
as, Critias, he comes from your house.”
“Well,” he said, “in that respect too he is truly excellent
(kaloskagathos).”
“Why then,” I said, “do we not undress that part of him
and view it rather than his body?” (Plato, Charmides d–e)
The lover in Diotima’s account of the Mysteries of erôs loves (erân)
those with good souls and gives birth there to educational logoi,
“which make young men better” (c), a formulation which
reuses and gives new meaning to Pausanias’s ideal form of ped-
erasty, in which however the focus was on the circumstances under
which sexual contact is to be permitted (cf. c– c), a subject in
which Socrates has shown no interest. This lack of sexual interest
(as narrowly defined) is paradoxically, but powerfully, advertised by

 | Plato’s Symposium
the sexual language of the whole of Diotima’s discourse, and “mak-
ing young men better” must also be seen as a provocative reversal of
one of the charges on which Socrates was condemned, that of “cor-
rupting young men.” (One wonders indeed what Socrates’ prose-
cutor could have done with Diotima’s speech.) If we now take stock
and ask how this situation differs from that of the production of po-
litical and poetic logoi in b – c, we find that in the former situa-
tion, the pregnant male goes around looking for something beauti-
ful in which to give birth, and if he is lucky enough to find someone
beautiful in both body and soul, he is immediately more than fer-
tile (b–); there is no sign in this first account either of a guide
or of what the pregnant man might have learned along the way. In
the second situation, however, which as we have seen strongly sug-
gests a philosophical method associated with both Socrates and
Plato, the pregnant man has come to see the importance of recog-
nizing the shared category underlying different particular instances.
Next, the philosophical lover will apply this same ability to rec-
ognize family resemblance to the beauty of first, activities and laws,
and, then, kinds of knowledge, so that his gaze is fixed on the ex-
traordinary variety of beauty (“the great sea of beauty,” d); as
he is now in the realm of knowledge he will “give birth to many
beautiful and grand logoi in boundless philosophy.”22 The next step
is almost the final one:
Anyone who has been guided and trained in the ways of love
up to this point, who has viewed things of beauty in the
proper order and manner, will now approach the culmina-
tion of love’s ways and will suddenly catch sight of some-
thing of unbelievable beauty — something, Socrates, which
in fact gives meaning to all his previous efforts. What he’ll
see is, in the first place, eternal; it doesn’t come to be or
cease to be, and it doesn’t increase or diminish. In the sec-
ond place, it isn’t beautiful (kalon) in one respect and ugly in
another, or beautiful at one time but not at another, or beau-
tiful in one setting but ugly in another, or beautiful here and
22 The implications of this last phrase are particularly contested.

The Love of Socrates | 

 ugly elsewhere, depending on how people find it. Then again,
he won’t perceive beauty as a face or hands or any other
physical feature, or as a piece of reasoning or knowledge,
and he won’t perceive it as being anywhere else either — in
something like a creature or the earth or the heavens. No,
he’ll perceive it in itself and by itself, constant and eternal,
and he’ll see that every beautiful object somehow partakes
of it, but in such a way that their coming to be and ceasing
to be don’t increase or diminish it at all, and it remains en-
tirely unaffected.
So the right kind of love for a boy can help you ascend
from the things of this world until you begin to catch sight
of that beauty, and then you’re almost within striking dis-
tance of the goal. The proper way to go about or be guided
through the ways of love is to start with beautiful things in
this world and always make the beauty I’ve been talking
about the reason for your ascent. You should use the things
of this world as rungs in a ladder. You start by loving one
beautiful body and step up to two; from there you move on
to physical beauty in general, from there to the beauty of
people’s activities, from there to the beauty of intellectual
endeavours, and from there you ascend to that final intellec-
tual endeavour, which is no more and no less than the study
of that beauty, so that you finally recognise true beauty.
What else could make life worth living . . . than seeing
true beauty? If you ever do catch sight of it, gold and cloth-
ing and beautiful boys and young men will pale into in-
significance beside it. (e –d)

The ordered training of seeing how an ascending sequence of sets

of things shares the same property allows him first to “catch sight
of ” (“sight” is crucial also in the revelation of the Mysteries) and
then to contemplate beauty “itself by itself . . . pure, clean, un-
mixed” (b–, e; cf. Phaedo b; Republic .b – ,
.b), in which all transient beautiful particulars “share in some

 | Plato’s Symposium
way” (b; cf. Phaedo c – ). Here is one of the finest de-
scriptions of Plato’s most famous metaphysical concept, the Forms
or Ideas, transcendental mental concepts of qualities perfect in their
essence, existing beyond time, circumstance, and particular percep-
tible manifestation. The result of this vision of true Beauty is that
the philosophic lover gives birth to true virtue, which is the closest
to immortality a man can attain. Diotima’s ideas and language about
what philosophy is are here (unsurprisingly) close to those of Soc-
rates in the Republic:
A genuine lover of knowledge innately aspires to reality, and
doesn’t settle on all the various things which are assumed to
be real, but keeps on, with his love remaining keen and
steady, until the nature of each thing as it really is in itself
has been grasped by the appropriate part of his mind —
which is to say, the part which is akin to reality. Once he has
drawn near this authentic reality and united with it, and thus
fathered intellect and truth, then he has knowledge; then he
lives a life which is true to himself; then he is nourished; and
then, not before, he finds release from his love-pangs. (Plato,
Republic .a –b; trans. Waterfield)
Diotima’s account is something of which Socrates is firmly per-
suaded (b); the choice of language acknowledges the account’s
special status as a revelation of that which may be beyond formal
proof (cf. Republic .c, after the myth of Er, “the myth could
save us, if we are persuaded by it”).23 Certainly, it may be beyond
Socrates’ fellow guests, whose praise for the speech (c) is not
glossed in any way that suggests understanding or a wish to engage
with it; only Aristophanes is moved to intervene because he recog-
nizes an allusion to his own speech. Socrates has shown us what erôs,
properly understood, actually is, what function beauty has in lead-
ing us up the ladder of knowledge, and what erôs can do for us in
terms of virtue and understanding; throughout his speech, and that

23 Cf.
also Gorgias a –b, d–; Phaedo e, a.

The Love of Socrates | 

of Diotima, we recognize fragments of the ideas of earlier speeches
put to the service of a new encomiastic vision. It is a vision which
has, of course, a very different effect from that of the other speeches.
Its apparent rejection of the value of lasting love between individ-
uals has often seemed to modern readers to present a harshly intel-
lectual view of erôs which ignores basic, universal facts of human
experience and which offers little comfort to all but a Socrates.24
Like the hero of an epic or a tragedy, however, the Socrates of the
Symposium embodies ideals to which we may aspire, but — though
this is something which neither Aristodemus nor Apollodorus
understood—he is not set before us as a model to be copied (even
if we could). Alcibiades’ speech will suggest both why Socratic erôs
may be beyond most of us and how we should use the “idea” of
Socrates in more productive ways.

 | Alcibiades

lcibiades’ first words, heard from the court outside, work like
A a pun on the speeches of Socrates and Diotima: “he was very
drunk and shouting loudly, asking where Agathon was and demand-
ing that someone lead him to Agathon” (d – ).25 Diotima has
just explained the way in which each of us may be led toward the
truly good (agathon) and beautiful, but it was not a flute-girl and slaves
(d – ) she had in mind for that role; the serious (spoudaion) and
the metaphysical have given way to the humorous (geloion) and the
all too physical with brilliant suddenness. The juxtaposition of Dio-
tima’s “mysteries” and Alcibiades’ riotous entrance inevitably evokes
the charge against him of having profaned the Eleusinian Myster-
ies (above, p. ); on this occasion, however, we will be given an
immediate chance to hear his speech of defense.
24 Cf.,
e.g., Vlastos () chapter ; Nussbaum () chapter .
25 On
ideas of “leading” and “guiding” throughout the Symposium, cf. Osborne
() chapter .

 | Plato’s Symposium
 Alcibiades’ speech will pick up Diotima’s, for he will deliver an
encomium upon Socrates (the object of his own paradoxical erôs)
rather than upon Eros, but Diotima’s speech has shown us how very
alike these two “creatures” in fact are.26 The “mysteries” of Love
which he will reveal will also show him embracing (indeed with his
arms around) “truth” (b), but again not quite as Diotima en-
visaged (a –). The end of Alcibiades’ great speech similarly
picks up the end of Diotima’s speech. Whereas she had spoken of
the way in which true virtue may be brought to birth (in the shape
of logoi) through coming to see the truth (a– ), Alcibiades ac-
knowledges that Socrates’ words carry “images of virtue” within
them (a).27 Alcibiades’ performance for the invited guests is
thematized by Plato as a playful and rather naughty satyr drama;28
tragedians entered three tragedies and a final satyr play in the great
Dionysiac contests, and the satyr play often reflects upon the tragedies
which have preceded from an oblique, and very Dionysiac, angle.
Alcibiades, stories of whose “satyric” fondness for wine and ko-
mastic adventure fill the anecdotal tradition,29 the very antithesis —
one might have thought — of a female seer who can control and
even laugh at Socrates, turns the sober world of Agathon’s sympo-
sium upside down: now it is erômenoi, not their lovers, who get
insanely jealous (c–d); it is they who are enslaved to their teach-
ers (e – , b –, e, and so on); and it is sexual absti-
nence which is characterized as outrage (hybris, c). Alcibiades
will, however, align himself with Socrates in telling only “the
truth” (a – a).
26 The detailed parallels between the two speeches have been noted by many;

cf., e.g., Bury () lx–lxii; Riedweg () – ; Sheffield (b)  – .
27 The parallelism is pointed by the similarity between b (“This, Phaedrus

and you others, is what Diotima said . . . ”) and a (“This, gentlemen, is my en-
comium of Socrates . . . ”).
28 Cf. below, pp. –; Sheffield (b); Usher (). For a full bibliogra-

phy and discussion of the themes of satyr drama, cf. Griffith ().
29
The standard discussion of literary representations of Alcibiades is Gribble
(); see also Wohl (). The speaker of Lysias  turns Alcibiades’ son into a
good replica of his “debauched” father (note esp. .).

The Love of Socrates | 

 Alcibiades likens30 the snub-nosed, pot-bellied Socrates and the
way he talks to the crafted image of a conventionally ugly Silenus
or satyr, carrying musical pipes (auloi). When the statue is opened
up, it reveals smaller images of the gods inside (a– b); the
warning against “assuming homology between visible appearance
and the reality within,”31 a mistake against which much of Platonic
philosophy is directed, seems clear. Literature and iconography
both reveal the continuing power of this image of Socrates as a
Silenus (cf. Xenophon, Symposium ., .), an image which may
have started as abusive mockery but was soon recuperated (perhaps
by Socrates himself ).32 Alcibiades draws upon stories about the
chief of all such figures, old Father Silenus himself, a source of an-
cient and secret wisdom; this Dionysiac creature, like Diotima’s
Eros neither god nor man nor beast, taught Dionysus himself, as
Socrates “taught” Alcibiades, the living Dionysus. It is, however,
also important that the image of Socrates as a Silenus is Alcibiades’;
it is not one which, at least as Alcibiades uses it, we must assume
comes with special (Platonic) authority. It is perhaps less important
that the image would contradict Socrates’ repeated assertion of his
own lack of knowledge than that it presents a completed, un-
changing figure who already has “all he needs” (particularly all the
knowledge), whereas both Diotima and Socrates himself have led
us to believe that the philosopher is engaged in a constant search to
remedy his lack.
If the Silenus image seems to reuse Diotima’s images of preg-
nancy at a lower, more comic level, and Alcibiades offers his body
as a place into which Socrates might “give birth” (though that is
not, presumably, how Alcibiades would have described it), Alcibi-
ades is in fact, like Diotima’s Poverty, seeking to remedy his own
lack by acquiring Socrates’ images, and that is precisely not how
30 For this sympotic game, cf. above, p. . The bibliography on Alcibiades’ eikôn

is very large; I have found particular help in Steiner (); for the implications of
the aulos, cf. Wilson () –. Further discussion and bibliography are in
Blondell () –.
31 Steiner () .
32 Cf. Zanker () –.

 | Plato’s Symposium

Socratic erôs works. The depth of Alcibiades’ misunderstanding is
thus revealed when he explains that he assumed that, in return for
sexual favors, he would “hear everything which Socrates knew”
(a –). This is not the model of Socratic inquiry with which we
are familiar; Socrates’ “failure” to enlighten Alcibiades as to his
misconceptions is as powerful a reminder of that as we could wish.
Alcibiades, who claims to know what lies behind Socrates’ appear-
ance, has once more been misled by appearances: Socrates is indeed
a paradoxical satyr, who does seem not to need anything such as
food, drink, money, warm clothing, or sex. He appears entirely
self-sufficient; even his thirst for conversation with pretty young
men (d– ) is just a game. The absolute opposite of the mass of
contradictions which is Alcibiades himself, Socrates appears as un-
changing as Diotima’s ultimate Beauty (e– b), never having
great enthusiasms and desires, never out of control, lacking nothing
(least of all, public admiration).
Socrates is, moreover, not just any Silenus, but a Marsyas, the
satyr who fatally challenged Apollo in musical skill and whose
music is used in ritual initiations for its qualities of manic posses-
sion; a pity, then, that Alcibiades does not realize how Socrates
could in fact initiate him (cf. a). Listening to Socrates induces
a manic state, not unlike the symptoms of love (“heart leaps, tears
pour forth,” e–), such as no other speaker can weave. Soc-
rates’ philosophical logoi should not, of course, produce an emo-
tional response more associated with tragedy or rhetoric (at least as
a Gorgias saw the power of such verbal performances),33 but Alcib-
iades’ description is a typically extravagant version of a familiar as-
pect of Plato’s picture of Socrates; very close to Alcibiades’ portrait
is that of Meno, who is also forced to fall back on “likenesses”:
Socrates, before I as much as made your acquaintance I had
heard that you are simply perplexed yourself (lit. in aporia)
and that you make others perplexed as well; and now, as it
33 Cf.
above, p. . Bacon ()  sees the likeness as a productive one: “it is
pity and fear not for an actor on the stage, but for himself, when . . . forced . . . to
confront himself, and recognize that his life is no better than a slave’s.”

The Love of Socrates | 

 seems to me, you are bewitching me with magic and alto-
gether putting a spell on me,34 so that I am completely at a
loss (lit. full of aporia). And you seem to me, if I may actu-
ally make a joke, to be altogether most like, both in appear-
ance and in other respects, to that flat sea-fish, the electric
ray. For this causes whoever at any time comes close to it and
comes into contact with it to be numb; and I think you too
have now done something like this to me. For I am truly
numbed both in my mind and in my speech, and I have no
answer to give you. And yet I have on countless occasions
said a great deal about excellence to many people, and very
well too, at least as I thought; but now I can’t even say at all
what it is. I think you make a right decision in not traveling
abroad from here or living abroad; for if you did such things
as a foreigner in another city, you might well be arrested as
a wizard. (Plato, Meno e – b; trans. R. W. Sharples)
The Socratic spell has, however, not just reduced Alcibiades to
philosophical aporia, but to thinking that, in his present condition,
life is not worth living (a), although we, at least, know from
Diotima that Socrates can in fact help one toward a glimpse of the
only thing which does indeed make life worth living (d – ).
Alcibiades does know (at some level) that it is Socrates alone who
can offer the answer, but political ambition and the love of honor
keep driving him elsewhere, his ears blocked like Odysseus’s witless
crew confronted with the Sirens (a);35 these Homeric creatures
lured men, who thirsted after knowledge, through the fact that they
claimed to know “all that happened on the earth” (Odyssey .–
). Alcibiades makes a deliberate choice to avoid hearing the Song
of Socrates, because such an education would get in the way of po-
litical success (a –); at another level, however, he knows that it
is with Socrates that he should be. Such self-knowledge, the real-

34
The language here is very close to Diotima’s description of erôs at d.
35
For a generalization of this type of behavior see Republic .c–b. We may
also be reminded of midwife Socrates’ regret for those who have left him too early
and thus “miscarried through keeping bad company” (Theaetetus e– ).

 | Plato’s Symposium

ization that he is harming himself by yielding to baser desires and
drives, has led to a kind of self-loathing.
There is a clear apologetic aspect to these words which Plato has
placed in Alcibiades’ mouth. Despite what rumor and his accusers
said, Socrates had no control or influence over the turbulent politi-
cal career of his most high-profile young associate; Socrates and
politics tugged in very different directions. Outside Plato, Alcibi-
ades was a prominent subject in much Socratic literature, and this
reflects the special problem which his relationship with Socrates
posed for those who sought to fashion Socrates’ posthumous rep-
utation; Polycrates’ lost Accusation of Socrates certainly exploited the
potential of this relationship to arouse prejudice against Socrates. The
surprise (and risk) of the brilliant literary masterstroke by which
Plato makes Alcibiades himself deliver an encomium of Socrates is
thus not to be underrated.
Xenophon too devotes a lengthy section at the beginning of the
Memorabilia to seeking to dispel prejudice which Socrates may have
incurred from his association with Alcibiades. According to Xeno-
phon, Alcibiades, together with Socrates’ relation Critias, was the
“most politically ambitious” of all the Athenians (..) and thought
that Socrates could teach him “to speak and act”; while with
Socrates he prospered and did no harm, but his ambition took him
away, where he was ruined by the attentions of women and lesser
men and so “neglected himself ” (..; cf. Symp. a – ). Far
from incurring blame, therefore, Socrates is, in Xenophon’s view, to
be praised for the controlling influence he exercised on Alcibiades
while he was young. In his erotic dialogue, the Amatorius, in which
allusions to the Symposium abound, Plutarch too spells out one in-
ference which may be drawn from the speech of the Platonic Al-
cibiades by having a character tell how a drunk Alcibiades burst in
(“on a kômos”) to the house of Anytus, famous later as Socrates’
chief prosecutor, and stole some of his expensive cups; in this an-
ecdote also, Alcibiades is clearly the erômenos and his behavior is ex-
plicitly characterized as “hubristic” by an observer.36 What is most

36 Plutarch,
Amatorius c; cf. Life of Alcibiades ..

The Love of Socrates | 

important, however, in Plutarch’s narrative is Alcibiades’ relations
with the man responsible for Socrates’ death; Alcibiades’ promiscu-
ity of association is, so we are to understand, the clearest possible
indication of Socrates’ lack of responsibility for the actions which
damaged Athens.
If Xenophon has similar apologetic purposes to those of Plato,
there is also a revealing difference. Xenophon presents Socrates as a
teacher, like a teacher of musical instruments (Memorabilia ..),
whose discipline ends when the pupil leaves him. Plato’s Socrates,
on the other hand, is not, as Diotima’s speech and the whole Pla-
tonic corpus makes clear, a “teacher” in that way. Xenophon deals
with Socrates’ accusers on their own terms, whereas Plato con-
structs his own Socrates and his own Socratic myth. The distraction
which Socrates induces (“I have no idea what to do with this
man”), made manifest in a desire to be rid of him which competes
with the knowledge of how terrible such a loss would be (b–
c), suggests (with painful irony) the attitude of the Athenians as a
whole both to Socrates and indeed to Alcibiades himself (cf. Aristo-
phanes, Frogs : “the city longs for him, it hates him, it wants to
have him”); more potently, perhaps, it suggests a condition which
many would recognize as love.37
Whereas Diotima’s instruction had proceeded through question-
and-answer, through myth, and through revelation, Alcibiades moves
from “images” to the confirming autobiographical mode of legal
speeches; Agathon’s guests are to pass judgment upon his story, or
rather upon Socrates’ “contemptuous superiority” (c– ). It is
here hard not to think of another trial, in which Socrates was accused
of “corrupting young men” and in which his habitually “strange”
behavior counted heavily against him; in the Apology (c– ) Plato
makes Socrates refer to his first entrance in the Clouds, hanging in
a basket and proclaiming “to tread the air and get his mind around
the sun,” a claim which Strepsiades understands as confirming that
Socrates “puts his mind above that of the gods” (Clouds – ).
37 ThusCatullus  (odi et amo . . . ) is very close to the Aristophanic verse. The
most thought-provoking account of Alcibiades’ love for Socrates is probably Nuss-
baum () chapter .

 | Plato’s Symposium

In what such “superiority” consists, we are presently to learn. Would
we condemn such a man?
Alcibiades replaces the erastês and erômenos of Pausanias’s ideal
model by autobiographical history: he explains how he realized the
worth of what Socrates had apparently to offer, and assumed that
what Socrates would want in return was sexual access to his young
body. He therefore arranged various opportunities (including naked
wrestling) for Socrates to make sexual approaches, but nothing of
the kind happened,38 to Alcibiades’ considerable puzzlement (he
would presumably have been surprised to learn that, based on Di-
otima’s account, Socrates was actually “giving birth” inside him
during their conversations). Alcibiades here, of course, is by his
own admission acting more like a frustrated erastês than an erômenos,
or (and this comparison is even less flattering) like an erômenos who
shamefully sells himself; when Socrates later charges him with try-
ing to “exchange gold for bronze” (a), we should be conscious
of the monetary resonance. Socrates’ apparent disinterest in Alcib-
iades’ body, a phenomenon which Diotima’s speech has allowed us
(but not Alcibiades) to understand, is itself a provocation to inquiry
(c: “I had to know what was going on”).
Alcibiades’ version of the most secret mystery is, as is proper,
spoken only to those who have been initiated into the “philosophic
madness and Bacchic frenzy” (b –),39 a phrase not only ap-
propriate to the sympotic setting, but also one which takes us back
to the comparison of Socrates to Marsyas with his maddening pip-
ing.40 This is also one of a number of “we’re all alone” passages
which play with the idea of a large audience of eavesdroppers upon
a symposium, or rather with readers of the Symposium (all of whom,

38
In the Republic Socrates assumes that exercising together and persistent prox-
imity will lead “through the compulsions of nature” to sex between male and fe-
male guardians (Republic .d–), but Socrates is made of even sterner stuff.
39 For other aspects of this passage, cf. above, p. . How Platonic this idea is may

be gauged by the contrast with Xenophon, Symposium ., where Callias tells
Socrates and his companions that he would like them as guests because they are
“purified in their souls.”
40 Cf., e.g., Laws .c for these associations.

The Love of Socrates | 

to some extent, will have been touched by the “philosophic mad-
ness”). The mystery which Alcibiades relates is the narrative of the
occasion on which he saw the images inside Socrates and they ap-
peared to him “divine and golden and all beautiful and amazing”
(e– a), an idiosyncratic version, of course, of the philoso-
pher’s vision of the amazing, unchanging, divine Beauty with which
Diotima’s speech concluded. “Philosophic madness” cannot fail to
suggest to us Socrates’ mystical account in the Phaedrus of precisely
the “madness” of the philosopher whose soul ascends to the realm
of the Forms (b–c), an account which shares important fea-
tures with Diotima’s final mystery; clearly, no one at Agathon’s
party except Socrates qualifies as an initiate into philosophic mad-
ness under the account of the Phaedrus, but Alcibiades is here rather
drunkenly repeating and reworking his earlier comparison of the
effect of Socratic arguments to the music which rouses and pos-
sesses members of ecstatic cults (c– e). It is obvious from whom
Alcibiades has heard the “logoi in philosophy” (a).
In order to understand how Alcibiades got his wires crossed, it
is necessary to go back again to Pausanias’s ideal situation:
If in any meeting between a lover and his boyfriend each has
his set of guidelines — the lover appreciating that any ser-
vice he performs for a boyfriend who gratifies him would be
morally acceptable, and the boy appreciating that any favours
he does for a man who is teaching him things and making
him good would be morally acceptable, the lover capable of
increasing wisdom and other aspects of goodness, the boy
eager to learn and generally to increase his knowledge — it
is only then, when these facets of the moral code coincide,
that it becomes all right for a boy to gratify a lover. Under
any other circumstances, it is wrong. (d – e)
On the same principle, suppose someone is led by a lover’s
putative goodness to gratify him in the expectation of gain-
ing, for his part, moral benefit from the lover’s friendship,
but his hopes are dashed: the man turns out to be a scoundrel
and to have no goodness to his name. Even so, being de-

 | Plato’s Symposium

 ceived in this way is all right, because the aspect of himself
which he is seen to have shown is that he’d gladly do any-
thing and everything for the sake of moral improvement,
and there’s nothing more creditable than that. So there’s ab-
solutely nothing wrong with gratifying a lover for the sake
of virtue. (a –b)

Alcibiades does indeed believe that Socrates can make him “wise and
good,” can make him “a better person”; he offers Socrates his body
because it would be “senseless” (c) not to do so (on Pausanias’s
model). One of the things which Alcibiades has not recognized,
however, is that his many conversations with Socrates (b – )
were not only part of Socrates’ restless search, part of his “giving
birth in the beautiful,” but were precisely guiding Alcibiades on a
journey which could have resulted in him becoming “better.” Soc-
rates’ erôs, as Diotima has allowed us to glimpse, is not for any in-
dividual beautiful body, and not indeed for bodies at all. His words
to Alcibiades contain for us echoes of Diotima’s revelation, to make
the point that—from another perspective — Socrates could indeed
help Alcibiades along the way:

It would be an irresistible beauty (amêchanon kallos) that you

would see in me. . . . you are trying to acquire truly beauti-
ful things (lit. the truth of beautiful things) in exchange for
the apparently beautiful (lit. the appearance [of beautiful
things]). (e–)

From Alcibiades’ point of view, there is nothing in Socrates’ speech

to suggest that the latter will now refuse the opportunity for sex;
rather, it is perfectly possible to read the speech as an acceptance of
Alcibiades’ offer, but one expressed in the typically “ironic” (d)
and self-deprecatory Socratic manner. It is Alcibiades’ very famil-
iarity with that manner, with, for example, the typically Socratic
contrast between “truth” and “appearance” (e), which leads to
his misunderstanding of Socrates’ words; the same is true of Soc-
rates’ reply at a–b, in which he corrects Alcibiades’ singular
imperative (“you yourself give thought to what is best for us”) to an

The Love of Socrates | 

invitation to a Socratic joint investigation (“in the time to come we
will take thought”).41 If it is only subsequent reflection and further
experience of Socrates which has brought Alcibiades to the ironic
interpretation of Socrates’ words, that increased understanding has
colored his narrative of recollection.
The night which Alcibiades spends with Socrates continues the
catalog of his misunderstanding. Though he has pursued Socrates
like an erastês, when lying down with him he waits passively42 like
an erômenos for the older man to become sexually aroused and seek
physical relief. Alcibiades only has himself to blame if Socrates too
now plays to perfection the (passive) erômenos role in which he has
been cast by Alcibiades himself. Plato has created a hilarious com-
edy about who is supposed to do what to whom. From another per-
spective, Socrates’ apparent imperviousness to physical desire can
also be understood as one more remarkable epideixis by the philoso-
pher. It is interpreted by Alcibiades (who himself knew all about hy-
bris) as scornful ridicule of his beauty, just as the soldiers on cam-
paign think that Socrates’ apparent imperviousness to the cold is a
way of mocking them (b –); with Socrates, however, appear-
ances are almost always deceptive. From one perspective, Alcibiades
is near a kind of truth: a major step in the philosopher’s progress —
and we at least will now read Socrates in the light of Diotima’s
“program”—is indeed to “scorn and think little of ” (b– ) the
single beautiful body to which he was first attached, though there
is nothing to suggest that Alcibiades played this role in Socrates’ life.
Nevertheless, such remarkable feats of endurance and control
(thaumasia, c) are the stuff of which myth is made, and Alcibi-
ades’ encomiastic strategy is indeed to shape Socrates into a figure

41 The
exchange irresistibly calls to mind (once again) the seduction scene of
Archilochus’s “Cologne epode” (fr. A West): “I and you will take thought for
this with the god’s help. . . .” Nehamas () – offers a helpful discussion of
Alcibiades’ “misunderstanding” of Socrates.
42 For the unaroused passivity (at least in the ideology of pederasty) of the erô-

menos, cf. Dover () –; a famously stern view is that of the Xenophontic
Socrates at Symp. .: “Unlike a woman, a boy does not share in the delights of
love-making, but sober looks on at the other drunk with desire.”

 | Plato’s Symposium

around whom anecdote and myth cluster (like Ajax, e). Socra-
tes’ calm normality during the retreat at Delium (a – b) is pre-
cisely the stuff of legend.
Of particular interest is Alcibiades’ comparison — for the latter
part of his speech reverts to the use of likenesses— of Socrates to
Odysseus, through quotation of a verse used by both Helen and
Menelaus in the fourth book of the Odyssey in their accounts of
Odysseus’s exploits of bravery and self-control at Troy (c). The
second of these passages (Menelaus’s) establishes Odysseus as, like
Socrates, a “one-off”:

Before now I have come to know the counsel and the mind
of many heroic men, and I have travelled far over the earth,
but I have never seen with my eyes such a man as was
Odysseus of the much-enduring heart. What a thing was
this too which that strong man did in the carved horse,
where all we Argive chiefs were sitting to bring death and
slaughter to the Trojans. (Homer, Odyssey . – )

In the wooden horse Odysseus had resisted Helen’s deceptive use of

the voices of the Greeks’ wives and had, single-handedly, prevented
others from doing so also; in this way “he saved all the Achaeans”
(Od. .). We have already seen Socrates’ immunity to sexual
temptation, and Alcibiades will proceed to give examples of how
Socrates performed heroic services of communal benefit in war-
time, though conventional civic motives such as “honor” seem very
far away; here is a living embodiment of the bravery (andreia) of erôs
of which Phaedrus and Agathon have spoken.43 Socrates’ solitary
self-absorption is perhaps being compared to Odysseus’s patient,
silent plotting against the suitors on his return home, but Odysseus,
the hero “of many turns,” was to have a very long afterlife as the
model for the restless inner search, the quest for knowledge of the
philosopher, and indeed as a heroic model for Socrates.

43
For a wry look at Socrates’ heroism, cf. Brecht’s short story “Der verwun-
derte Sokrates” (Gesammelte Werke [Frankfurt: ] V –).

The Love of Socrates | 

 Alcibiades will, however, make the point that the most extra-
ordinary thing about Socrates is that, though one might compare
him in particular respects to, say, Odysseus, “he is like no other man,
either of the ancients nor those of the present day” (c– );
Socrates has, in his totality, no model or equal to whom he may be
likened, as the great Spartan general Brasidas may be likened to
Achilles or the great Athenian statesman Pericles to Nestor. Socra-
tes in fact, appealing with rhetorical skill and interpretive inven-
tiveness to the epic poetry beloved of the jurors, had claimed
Achilles as a model for himself in the Apology (c– d): both he
and Achilles placed concerns of dikê ( justice, revenge) above fear of
death. This is exactly the same Achillean motif which Phaedrus
had put to a different use in his speech (e – b), but the ex-
ample of Brasidas suggests that Alcibiades at least is not thinking of
Achilles’ devotion to either justice or Patroclus, but rather of his
military prowess. The choice of one Spartan (Brasidas) and one
Athenian (Pericles) is a wry hint at Alcibiades’ checkered political
history, for he served both of these states, equally well and equally
badly, in their destructive war with each other (cf. above, p. ); never-
theless, there is also a particular point in Alcibiades’ stress upon the
“incomparability” of Socrates. Alcibiades himself incurred hatred
in Athens because of his “out-of-the-ordinariness” (paranomia).44 De-
mocracy entails a leveling of the citizens, and those whose “strange-
ness” (atopia) cannot be leveled out, who cannot be “likened” to
known categories, are likely to pay the penalty; the state no more
knew what to do with either Alcibiades or Socrates than Alcibiades
knew what to do with Socrates. In both their cases, it was Athens
which was the loser (cf. Thucydides ..).
Epic poetry and its descendant, tragedy, Agathon’s genre, tell
the stories of the great men of the past, and the meaning of those
stories resides not in their literal historicity, whether they happened
or not, but in the patterns of behavior which are instantiated in
them. Poetry is a special case of the familiar truth that people tell

44 Cf. Gribble () –; the hostile speaker of [Andocides] . notes that

the like of Alcibiades had never been seen before.

 | Plato’s Symposium

tales about the past (inter alia) to try to explain the present to them-
selves. Alcibiades is telling “true” stories about one of his contem-
poraries, but for Plato’s audience, as for us, Socrates was a great fig-
ure from the past to whom many stories attached:
[Plato] treats historical characters with the fluidity of myth.
He recreates the Athens of his childhood as a “legendary”
past in which he locates “real” people for the exploration of
his own concerns. As such it is populated with the heroes
and villains of his imagination, and provides an ancestry and
aetiology for the problems and concerns, political and ideo-
logical, of his own time.45
No doubt, by the middle of the fourth century, Socrates, like
Alcibiades himself, was the subject of considerable anecdotal mate-
rial, but there is one particular kind of memory of Socrates which
is crucial here, and that of course is the Socratic dialogue, most no-
tably Plato’s Socratic dialogues. They are a literary form with their
own hero,46 and if we are too concerned with narrow questions of
historicity, whether of setting or of characters or of the views which
are ascribed in the dialogues to Socrates, we will be missing the
point. Thus, as the sequence of encomia draws to a close, we return
to the issues which were central to the opening frame, namely, the
Socratic legend (how ought we to remember him?), the growth of
writing about Socrates, and how to read a Socratic dialogue. Socrates
was of course much more than just “good to think with,” but he
was indeed a vehicle through which Plato explored his own vision.
As such, both we and Plato must acknowledge that the Socratic di-
alogue is like, as well as very unlike, the great poetry which claimed
to educate the Athenians.
We return in another way also to the issues of the frame. The
source for Apollodorus’s story is Aristodemus who, as we have al-
ready noted, copied the externals of Socratic behavior (shoeless-
ness and so on), though there is no sign that he got very far on the

45 Blondell () .

46 Cf. Clay () – ; Hobbs ().

The Love of Socrates | 

philosophic journey. Despite Aristodemus, imitation of Socrates is
a charge, or perhaps a badge of pride, which many philosophers
from the fourth century on, of varying intellectual gifts, thoroughly
deserve. How can we imitate Socrates, and should we try? Alcibi-
ades notes that one can look at the poetry of the past and find there
“equivalents” for the great figures of the modern world. It is a small
step from there to the idea of educational mimesis, of treating those
figures as models after whom we should fashion our lives, or at least
recognizing (as Plato certainly did) how hearing and watching those
characters does influence us. No doubt Plato would have wanted
the Symposium to influence its readers, but he has gone out of his
way to cancel the possibility of any simple mimesis of the great fig-
ure at its center: we can no more imitate Socrates’ satyric appear-
ance or his inner virtue than we can “do philosophy” simply by
reading the Symposium. At best, perhaps, we will learn from Alcib-
iades’ experience (b –) and realize that it is with ourselves, not
with our teachers, that we must begin.

 | Plato’s Symposium

 •4•
The Morning After

 | The Imagined Past

T he Symposium has always been one of Plato’s most read, most

influential, and most imitated works. No doubt this has much
to do with the universal appeal of its subject matter — no Greek
text is, for example, cited more often in Roland Barthes’s famous
Lover’s Discourse1 —but it is also the rich variety of the work, to-
gether with its accessibility to readers with little philosophical
training, which have given it a place of honor in the reception of
Platonic ideas. Unsurprisingly, of course, some parts— Pausanias’s
“Two Venuses,” the speeches of Aristophanes (cited as early as Aris-
totle) and Diotima, the entry of Alcibiades (depicted by, inter alios,
Rubens, Testa, and Feuerbach),2 Alcibiades’ night with Socrates—
have proved more memorable and worthy of allusion than others, but
the work as a whole has shaped the way that the “golden age” of
classical Athens has been imagined.
1 Barthes
().
2 Cf.
McGrath (); Henderson (forthcoming). Feuerbach’s three versions
are figures –  in G. Keyssner (ed.), Feuerbach: Eine Auswahl aus dem Lebenswerk
des Meisters in  Abbildungen (Stuttgart/Berlin: ).


 Plato almost seems to have designed the Symposium for those
who like their history presented in clear synoptic snapshots: in one
room we have gathered glittering representatives of art, science,
philosophy, and politics, that heady mixture of intellectual and im-
perial power that is precisely the modern vision of Athens in the
later decades of the fifth century. Moreover, this is a “prelapsarian”
Athens, situated just before the disasters of the last years of the cen-
tury, after which, in the standard model of popular history, there
was to be no return to the golden age. That those disasters are
clearly foreshadowed within the work merely adds to our (manipu-
lable) sense of regret for an irrecoverable and better past; we may
perhaps compare it to all those modern books and films which de-
pict English society before the First World War as a place of glori-
ous innocence about to be shattered forever. A parallel rather closer
to Plato would be the modern popular sense of the Funeral Speech,
which Thucydides places in the mouth of Pericles in the second
book of his Histories: this too is viewed, and may in part have been
viewed by Thucydides himself, as a glorious (last) testament to a re-
markable society which was soon to be brought low by military
failure, overweening personal ambition (of which Alcibiades stands
as the prime example), and the petty squabbling of “smaller” men.
If Thucydides’ Pericles speaks to us directly, the characters of the
Symposium are recreated for us through a veil of hearsay and second-
hand reports, which seems to dramatize both our own frantic efforts
to discover “what actually happened” in the Athenian past and the
impossibility of ever being sure. There is so much we have to take
on trust; to cover up our ignorance and the insecurity which goes
with it, we are forever, just like Apollodorus and Plato, putting
words into the mouths of “historical” characters, making them say
what we would like them to have said. The Symposium feeds both
our sense of insecurity about the past and our indomitable hopeful-
ness that, despite everything, we are in touch with it.
The subject of the Symposium, erotic desire, is central to the his-
torical nostalgia which the work has at various times generated. De-
spite Pausanias’s rhetorical and ethical contortions, despite the hier-
archies of types of desire to which almost all the speakers adhere, and

 | Plato’s Symposium

despite the complexities in Greek attitudes toward sexual relations
which much recent scholarship has so fully explored, the Sympo-
sium has often been represented as a witness to an age which both
recognized and openly celebrated the place of erôs in human lives
and the many forms that such desire may take. For those who wish
to see Greek sexuality as less ridden with guilt, less saddled with
hang-ups than almost any society of modern times—often, of course,
in order to urge their own societies to adopt more liberal, more
“Greek” attitudes—there will always be something to be found in
the Symposium. Allusions to this work run, for example, as some-
thing of a leitmotif through E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice, first
written in – but only published posthumously in .
The novel tells the story of Maurice Hall and Clive Durham com-
ing to terms with their homosexual feelings and their “Platonic”
love for each other while undergraduates at Cambridge; whereas
Clive loses his love and his love affair with an imaginary Greece, be-
comes “normal,” and marries a woman, Maurice finally finds emo-
tional and physical satisfaction with a young male gamekeeper. It is
the older, more scholarly Clive, whose eyes had first been opened
by the Phaedrus,3 who introduces Maurice to Plato’s work:

Towards the end of term they touched upon a yet more deli-
cate subject. They attended the Dean’s translation class, and
when one of the men was forging quietly ahead Mr Corn-
wallis observed in a flat toneless voice: “Omit: a reference
to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks.” Durham observed
afterwards that he ought to lose his fellowship for such
hypocrisy.
Maurice laughed,
“I regard it as a point of pure scholarship. The Greeks,
or most of them, were that way inclined, and to omit it is to
omit the mainstay of Athenian society.”
“Is that so?”
“You’ve read the Symposium?”

3 Pp. –. All subsequent references in the text are to Forster ().

The Morning After | 

 Maurice had not, and did not add that he had explored
Martial.
“It’s all in there — not meat for babes, of course, but you
ought to read it. Read it this vac.” (pp.  –)
Clive subsequently prefaces his first declaration of love to Maurice
with another reference to the Symposium — “I knew you read the
Symposium in the vac. . . . Then you understand —without me say-
ing more “ (p. ; cf. pp. , )— and certain scenes in the book
may be read as versions of motifs from the Symposium: Maurice try-
ing to get Clive alone like Alcibiades’ maneuverings around Socra-
tes (pp.  –), and Clive’s enthusiastic lecture to Maurice on aes-
thetics as a “giving birth to logoi in the beautiful” (pp. – ). For
Forster, as for many intellectuals of the time, Plato offered almost
the only available language in which homosexual feelings could se-
riously be discussed.4
In a “terminal note” to Maurice, written in , Forster says
that the novel was inspired by a visit to his friend Edward Carpen-
ter, the socialist educator and writer who believed “in the Love of
Comrades, whom he sometimes called Uranians” (p. ). This last
term, derived from the high-minded erôs depicted by Plato’s Pausa-
nias (from whom the term “Pausanian” was also created for a simi-
lar “ideal”), was applied to themselves by various aesthetes and poets
in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early ones of
the twentieth. The Uranians pursued, as they saw it, a higher ideal
of pure homosexual (and often pederastic) love descending from
Plato.5 Carpenter himself published an anthology of passages relat-
ing to “friendship” (Iolaus: Anthology of Friendship) in which the
Symposium and the Phaedrus bulk large. In Maurice, the unconsum-
mated, and ultimately doomed, passion of Maurice and Clive, which
Forster described as “precarious, idealistic and peculiarly English”
4 Helpful
discussion is in Jenkyns () – .
5 Cf.
Smith (). For Carpenter’s reflections on this subject, cf. Carpenter
() – ; for “Pausanian” cf., e.g., A. L. Raile (a pseudonym for E. P. War-
ren), A Defence of Uranian Love (London: – ), and the same writer’s novel
A Tale of Pausanian Love (London: ); in both of these the Symposium makes
prominent appearances.

 | Plato’s Symposium

(p. ), is set against the physicality of Maurice and the game-
keeper, Alec, which will be expressed away from England (“an exile
they gladly embrace”). Maurice might indeed be seen as a medita-
tion on Carpenter’s observation, confirmed by generations of inde-
pendent witnesses, that “lust and love — the Aphrodite Pandemos and
the Aphrodite Ouranios— are subtly interchangeable.”6
It is, of course, not just Pausanias whose account found later ad-
mirers. The Uranian novel of F. W. Rolfe (Baron Corvo), The Desire
and Pursuit of the Whole (published in , more than twenty years
after Rolfe’s death), which is (in part) the story of the relationship
in Venice between an Englishman and a teenage girl, “straight-
limbed, and strong, almost as sexless as a boy, white as milk and
honey” (pp.  – ), takes its title and its opening and closing frame
from the Platonic Aristophanes, whose myth, as we have already
noted (above, p. ), has exercised a strong fascination during vari-
ous modern periods. Thus, anyone familiar with the Symposium will
recognize the intellectual background to the following summary of
part of the theory of desire of one of the great figures of twentieth-
century psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan:
To make matters worse, Lacan announces, a fundamental
Freudian insight is suppressed by the theoretical over-promoters
of need. . . . Something else is always going on in dealings be-
tween the need-driven subject and the other who may or
may not provide satisfaction. A demand for love is being
made. The divided subject, haunted by absence and lack, looks
to the other not simply to supply his needs but to pay him
the compliment of an unconditional yes. . . . The paradox
and the perversity to be found in any recourse to persons is
that the other to whom the appeal is addressed is never in a
position to answer it unconditionally. He too is divided and
haunted, and his yes, however loudly it is proclaimed, can
only ever be a maybe, or a to some extent, in disguise.
Desire has its origin in this non-adequation between
need and the demand for love, and in the equally grave dis-
6 Carpenter
() .

The Morning After | 

 crepancy between the demand itself and the addressee’s abil-
ity to deliver.7
Here again our apparent dissatisfaction with sexual “satisfac-
tion,” the fact that erôs is not the same thing as physical need, is what
is central, as it was for the Platonic Aristophanes. Lacan recurred
explicitly on a number of occasions to Aristophanes’ myth as a
possible, though inadequate, model for “desire” (as he understood
it).8 For Lacan, desire, like language, never reaches “the happy end”
that Aristophanes holds out as a possibility: one displacement, one
metonymy, always leads to another: “[Desire] is a dimension in
which the subject is always destined to travel too far or not far
enough . . . and in which each anticipated moment of plenitude
brings with it a new vacancy.”9 Aristophanes’ myth had in fact al-
ready more than once caught the attention of Sigmund Freud, the
great predecessor with whom Lacan is in constant dialogue. In Be-
yond the Pleasure Principle, Freud uses the story of the double-people
as the starting point for some speculation:
Shall we follow the hint given us by the poet-philosopher
[the Platonic Aristophanes], and venture upon the hypothe-
sis that living substance at the time of its coming to life was
torn apart into small particles, which have ever since en-
deavoured to reunite through the sexual instincts? that these
instincts, in which the chemical affinity of inanimate matter
persisted, gradually succeeded, as they developed through
the kingdom of the protista, in overcoming the difficulties
put in the way of that endeavour by an environment charged
with dangerous stimuli— stimuli which compelled them
to form a protective cortical layer? that these splintered
fragments of living substance in this way attained a multi-
cellular condition and finally transferred the instinct for
reuniting, in the most highly concentrated form, to the

7 Bowie () –.

8 Cf.Lacan (b) index, s.v. “Plato.”
9 Bowie () – .

 | Plato’s Symposium

 germ-cells?—But here, I think, the moment has come for
breaking off.10
Plato’s Aristophanes thus becomes an early cell physiologist, but it
is appropriate to that character’s comic powers that Freud’s specu-
lations may also suggest the searching sperm of Woody Allen’s
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Sex.11
Lacan also found cause for reflection in Alcibiades’ narrative,
and here (as always) his reading is very much his own:
Included in the objet a [i.e., the object of erotic fantasy, the
“autre”] is the a[galma (agalma), the inestimable treasure that
Alcibiades declares is contained in the rustic box that for him
Socrates’s face represents. But let us observe that it bears the
sign (-) [i.e., absence of the phallic image]. It is because he
has not seen Socrates’s prick,12 if I may be permitted to fol-
low Plato, who does not spare us the details, that Alcibiades
the seducer exalts in him the a[galma, the marvel that he
would like Socrates to cede to him in avowing his desire: the
division of the subject that he bears within himself being ad-
mitted with great clarity on this occasion. . . .
Thus by showing his object as castrated, Alcibiades pres-
ents himself as he who desires—a fact that does not escape
Socrates’s attention — for someone else who is present, Aga-
thon, whom Socrates, the precursor of psychoanalysis, and
confident of his position in this fashionable gathering, does
not hesitate to name as the object of the transference, plac-
ing in the light of an interpretation a fact that many analysts
are still unaware of: that the love-hate effect in the analytic
situation is to be found elsewhere.
But Alcibiades is certainly not a neurotic. It is even be-
cause he is par excellence he who desires, and he who goes as
10 Freud
() .
11 The
animation sequences in Hedwig and the Angry Inch (above, p. ) also use
both searching sperm and the splitting and recombining of cells to illustrate the
ideas of Aristophanes’ speech from the Symposium.
12 The literal-minded may think this improbable after all that naked wrestling.

The Morning After | 

 far as he can along the path of jouissance, that he can thus
(with the help of a certain amount of drink) produce in the
eyes of all the central articulation of the transference, made
present by the object adorned with his reflexions.
Nevertheless, he projected Socrates into the ideal of the
perfect Master, whom, through the action of (<F) [i.e., the
phallic image], he has completely imaginarized.13
The temptation to see Lacan here entering into the spirit of
sympotic self-parody is perhaps to be resisted. There is in fact no
better witness to the power of Plato’s vivid prose than this extra-
ordinary attempt to get behind his characters and write their hid-
den lives. Many lay readers of Plato’s dialogues would, however,
testify to the fact that psychological insight,14 understood in a far
less technical way, is indeed an important facet of his Socrates, and
the Lacanian gloss is a sophisticated attempt (one among many) to
articulate what is a widespread admiration.
That reading the Symposium, with whatever degree of historical
sophistication, can change one’s life is attested, for example, on the
first page of Sex and Reason, a  study of the history of the re-
lations between law and sexual behavior by R. A. Posner, a U.S.
Federal Appeals Court judge:
Two events . . . set me on the research path that has culmi-
nated in this book. The first was an attempt to plug one of
many embarrassing gaps in my education by reading Plato’s
Symposium. I knew it was about love, but that was all I knew.
I was surprised to discover that it was a defense, and as one
can imagine a highly interesting and articulate one, of homo-
sexual love. It had never occurred to me that the greatest
figure in the history of philosophy, or for that matter any
other respectable figure in the history of thought, had at-
tempted such a thing. It dawned on me that the discussion

13 Lacan
(a) –.
14 Lear
() –  discusses the fundamental differences between the aims
of psychoanalysis and the philosophical ascent described by Diotima.

 | Plato’s Symposium

 of the topic in the opinions in Bowers v. Hardwick [the deci-
sion in which the Supreme Court in  upheld the con-
stitutionality of state laws criminalizing homosexual sodomy]
was superficial, although that did not mean the decision was
incorrect. The second event was the decision of my own
court to hear . . . a case involving the constitutionality of a
state statute that had been interpreted to forbid striptease
dancers to strip to the buff. Unusually for our court, the case
generated fifty-three dense pages in the Federal Reporter. (The
decision by the Supreme Court, reversing our  –  decision
by a –  vote, generated four opinions — none of which
commanded the support of a majority of the justices.) It will
be apparent to anyone who takes the trouble to read these
opinions that nudity and the erotic are emotional topics even
to middle-aged men and elderly judges and also that the domi-
nant judicial, and I would say legal, attitude toward the study
of sex is that “I know what I like” and therefore research is
superfluous.15
Whether Plato would have welcomed the description of the Sym-
posium as “the first document of sexology”16 may be doubted (and
he probably had little time for female strippers), but Greek intel-
lectuals more generally would have welcomed in Posner another
convert to the fold of a historicizing approach to questions of “na-
ture” and “custom.”
For those with a different agenda, of course, the very same fea-
tures of the Symposium which had opened Judge Posner’s eyes make
the work utterly abhorrent. Thus, for example, the great Jewish
intellectual Philo of Alexandria (late first century bc– early first
century ad), who was steeped in Plato and knew the Symposium
well, can represent its promotion of pederasty, which for Philo is
contrary to “nature,”17 as the cause of “the end of civilisation as we

15 Posner
()  – ; also cited in part by Nussbaum () – .
16 Posner
() .
17 For such attitudes in Greek, rather than Jewish, tradition, cf. Goldhill ()

chapter .

The Morning After | 

know it.” He is writing in praise of a community of Jewish ascetics
and contrasts their way of life with the banquets of Greece:
The chief part [of the Symposium] is taken up by the common
vulgar (pandêmos) love which takes away the courage (andreia)
which is the virtue most valuable for the life both of peace
and war, sets up the disease of effeminacy in their souls and
turns into a hybrid of man and woman (androgynoi) those
who should have been disciplined in all the practices which
make for valour. And having wrought havoc with the years
of boyhood and reduced the boy to the grade and condition
of a girl besieged by a lover (lit. of a female erômenos) it in-
flicts damage on the lovers also in three most essential re-
spects, their bodies, their souls and their property. . . . As a
side growth we have another greater evil which affects all
the people (pandêmos). Cities are desolated, the best kind of
men become scarce, sterility and childlessness ensue through
the devices of these who imitate men who have no knowl-
edge of husbandry by sowing not in the deep soil of the
lowland but in briny fields and stony and stubborn places,
which not only give no possibility for anything to grow but
even destroy the seed deposited within them.18 I pass over
the mythical stories of the double-bodied men. . . . these are
seductive enough, calculated by the novelty of the notion to
beguile the ear, but the disciples of Moses trained from their
earliest years to love the truth regard them with supreme
contempt and continue undeceived. (Philo, De vita contem-
plativa .– ; trans. F. H. Colson, adapted)
For Pausanias, of course, it was heterosexual relations which came
under pandêmos erôs; the andreia instilled by pederasty was praised (in
their different ways) by Phaedrus (d–a), Aristophanes (a–),
and Agathon (c–d), and the androgynoi of the Symposium were
18 As
commentators note, Plato himself has the “Athenian stranger” describe
male homosexual intercourse with this same image at Laws .e– a. For an even
stronger Philonic attack on homosexuality, but one sharing many of the same terms
and images as the passage quoted, cf. Spec. Leg. . –.

 | Plato’s Symposium

the male-female creatures of Aristophanes’ myth (e, d),
not “womanly men” (which is the standard sense of the Greek
term); Philo here turns the language of Plato’s work on its head
to make his point about Greek decadence. Such moralizing has,
of course, no monopoly on misrepresentation. In Achilles Tatius’s
novel (second century ad), a pederast and a committed hetero-
sexual, both of whom have interests firmly rooted in the physical,
argue about whether boys or women are more “heavenly” (ouranios;
Ach. Tat. . –).
The middle course in these debates has always been steered by
those who admire Plato and the Greek achievement but feel the
need to apologize for and/or explain away the apparent promotion
of homosexuality. Many such apologies, as indeed do other, more
scholarly explanations, trace in Greek homosexuality an outlet for
emotions whose “natural” path was blocked by the low status of
women. Thus, for example, immediately after translating the Sym-
posium in , Shelley composed what amounted to an introduc-
tory essay to the translation, “Discourse on the Manners of the
Antient Greeks relative to the Subject of Love”;19 for Shelley, who
saw in the partial advancement of the position of women20 and the
parallel abolition of slavery “the most decisive [improvement] in
the regulation of human society” to be put down to the credit of
“modern Europeans,” the explanation for Greek homosexuality lay
precisely in the position of women, who are in principle “the legit-
imate object” of sentimental passion. Women had, said Shelley,
been reduced to the position of slaves, and the result was inevitable:
The women, thus degraded, became such as it was expected
that they should become. They possessed, except with extra-
ordinary exceptions, the habits and qualities of slaves. They
were probably not extremely beautiful; at least there was no
such disproportion in the attractions of the external form

19 The
translation and the “Discourse” are published together in a volume ed-
ited by R. Ingpen (London: ).
20 Shelley knew that there was a long way to go and has strong words about the

failure of his own society to abolish “totally” the inferior position of women ().

The Morning After | 

 between the female and male sex among the Greeks, as ex-
ists among the modern Europeans. They were certainly de-
void of that moral and intellectual loveliness with which the
acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of sentiment
animates, as with another life of overpowering grace, the
lineaments and the gestures of every form which it inhabits.
Their eyes could not have been deep and intricate from the
workings of the mind, and could have entangled no heart in
soul-enwoven labyrinths. (Shelley, “Discourse” – )
Both the ancient Greeks and the “modern Europeans” had arrived
“at that epoch of refinement, when sentimental love becomes an
imperious want of the heart and of the mind,” but only in modern
times has the improvement in the position of women meant that
both “the sexual and intellectual claims of love” can be satisfied in
one union with “no gross violation in the established nature of
man.” When it comes to the physical details which lay behind the
high Greek ideals, Shelley is more restrained than some modern re-
searchers into Greek sexual practices: “We are not exactly aware,—
and the laws of modern composition scarcely permit a modest writer
to investigate the subject with philosophical accuracy,— what the
action was by which the Greeks expressed this passion [of man for
man].” Nevertheless, whether it imagined celibate high-mindedness
or occasional anal intercourse as the Greek norm, Shelley reminded
his own society that it had no cause for self-satisfaction, when it
considered the horrors “endured by almost every youth of England
with a diseased and insensate prostitute.” Shelley’s gaze upon Other-
ness seems indeed almost Herodotean:
Nothing is at the same time more melancholy and ludi-
crous than to observe that the inhabitants of one epoch, or
of one nation, harden themselves to all amelioration of their
own practices and institutions and soothe their consciences
by heaping violent invectives upon those of others; while in
the eye of sane philosophy their own are none the less de-
serving of censure. (Shelley, “Discourse” )

 | Plato’s Symposium

The past is, of course, always contested, never more so than when
it is used to justify our own patterns of behavior. In , passages
of both the Symposium and the Laws were expounded and argued
about in a Colorado court, which had to decide the legality of a
state constitutional amendment forbidding any state agency from
designating any form of gay or bisexual “orientation, conduct, prac-
tices, or relationships” as a basis for protected legal status.21 At issue
between the expert witnesses summoned by both sides of the case
was whether there was indeed a strong non-Christian tradition in
the West which regarded gay sex as unnatural and immoral. Oppo-
nents of the amendment won.

 | Sympotic Revisions

E choes of and allusions to the Symposium are legion in antiquity,

particularly from the period of the so-called Second Sophistic,
a brilliant flowering of Greek culture in the Roman Empire of the
late first and second centuries ad. At the heart of this culture was a
rethinking, and indeed often reliving, of the classical past through
its great texts and monuments. Plato played a central role in this
life of the imagination. Thus, for example, Plutarch’s Erôtikos (or
Amatorius) is the record of conversations between Plutarch and his
friends at a Boeotian festival for Eros and the Muses; the part of
Plato’s Apollodorus is played by Plutarch’s son, who seems to have
memorized a very full account of what went on at the festival. The
work, littered with verbal echoes of Plato, combines ideas taken
from the Symposium and the Phaedrus with a quite un-Platonic nar-
rative of a local woman’s passion for a younger man.22 As frequently
in the Second Sophistic, a central structuring opposition, again
traceable to Plato’s Pausanias, is a debate about the relative merits of
21 Cf. Clark (). For the views of the competing authorities, cf. Nussbaum

(); Finnis ().

22 Cf. Rist ().

The Morning After | 

loving women and boys. In this same period, at least one (now lost)
commentary on the Symposium was written.23
As we have already noted, the Symposium became the founda-
tional text for all literary dinner parties which followed. Among its
most famous progeny is the dinner party of Trimalchio which forms
the centerpiece of our surviving extracts of Petronius’s Satyrica (first
century ad). At this party, the obsession of the host and guests with
the quality of food and drink reverses the intellectual fare on which
Agathon’s guests feed, but the entry of Trimalchio’s friend, the
stonemason Habinnas, obviously reworks the entry of Alcibiades to
Agathon’s party:24
Meanwhile, an official’s attendant knocked on the dining
room doors and a reveller (comissator) dressed in white came
in trailing a large crowd of followers. . . . He was already
drunk and ploughed along after his wife with his hands
propped on her shoulders. A bunch of wreaths were piled
on his head and scented oil streamed down his forehead into
his eyes. He sat down in the seat of honour and immediately
called for wine and hot water. Charmed by his high spirits,
Trimalchio ordered a larger bowl of wine for himself, and
asked how his friend had been entertained at another party.
“We had it all—except for you,” he said. (Petronius, Satyrica
.– ; trans. Branham and Kinney)
The narrator of the Satyrica, Encolpius, is addicted to seeing, in his
own life, patterns familiar from the great literature of the past: if,
then, he is at a dinner party, there has to be an “Alcibiades.” The
Satyrica as a whole is the story of the adventures of Encolpius and

23 Significant parts of the same unknown author’s commentary on the Theaete-

tus survive; cf. Corpus dei Papiri Filosofici Greci e Latini III (Florence: ); for the
Symposium commentary, cf. pp.  –, col. LXX –.
24 Cf. Cameron (). More generally on Petronius’s use of the Symposium, cf.

Dupont (); Bessone (), with further bibliography. Alcibiades also enters
drunk in Iris Murdoch’s “Above the Gods,” the second “Platonic” dialogue in Acas-
tos (London: ).

 | Plato’s Symposium

his promiscuous boyfriend, Giton, a pairing which is entirely car-
nal, but out of which Encolpius fantasizes higher romance. It would
be easy enough to see this lowlife narrative as a satire on the high
educational pretensions of, say, Pausanias’s speech in the Symposium,
though the most lovable hypocrite in the work is not in fact En-
colpius, but rather Eumolpus, a lecherous poet and “educator” whose
famous story of “the Pergamene boy” brilliantly replays Alcibiades’
narrative of his night with Socrates.25 Eumolpus tells how, by pre-
tending to be a stern moralist scandalized by any mention of ped-
erasty, he was allowed unfettered access to the handsome son of his
hosts at Pergamum. While the boy appears to sleep, Eumolpus per-
forms a series of increasingly intimate physical acts with him; the
boy, however, is far from unaware of what is happening and proves
in the end so insatiable for sex that it is Eumolpus who has finally
to repeat the punch line that we have already had from the molested
youth: “Go to sleep, or I’ll tell father!” The story ironizes Pausanias’s
account of the attitudes of an erastês and an erômenos toward their
roles in an ideal relationship by exploiting the idea of the straight-
forward “exchange”—sex for wisdom—which Alcibiades offered
Socrates and in which Socrates seemed to have so little interest.
The Satyrica is often seen as, in part, a parodic inversion of the
pattern of narrative best illustrated, though with significant differ-
ences, by the extant Greek novels (all probably later in date than
Petronius) of Chariton, Xenophon of Ephesus, Achilles Tatius, and
Heliodorus: a heterosexual pair of lovers is separated and endures
incredible adventures and threats to their chastity, but they remain
faithful to each other until they are finally reunited. Such a plot,
driven by the single-minded obsession with each other of a pair of
lovers, an obsessive search to fill the hole left by the beloved’s dis-
appearance, seems to find an archetype not just in the travails of
Odysseus and Penelope, but also in Aristophanes’ story in the Sym-
posium of the double-people and our constant search for our other
half. Achilles Tatius in fact uses a distorted echo of this myth for a

25 Cf.
Hunter () –  for a fuller discussion.

The Morning After | 

very particular effect at the beginning of his work. The principal
narrator, Clitophon, is speaking about his father’s intention to marry
him to his half sister Calligone:
When I was in my nineteenth year, and my father was pre-
paring to celebrate our nuptials the following year, Fortune
set the drama in motion. I had a dream in which my lower
parts were fused up to the navel with those of my bride,
while from there we had separate upper bodies. A huge, ter-
rifying woman with a savage countenance appeared: her eyes
were bloodshot, her cheeks rugged, and her hair made of
snakes. She was wielding a sickle in her right hand, and a
torch in the other. This creature attacked me with furious
passion: raising her sickle she brought it down on my loins,
where the two bodies were joined, and lopped off my bride.
(Ach. Tat. .. – ; trans. T. Whitmarsh)
Readers who know their Symposium, and for Achilles that means all
implied readers, will recognize that the systematic distortion of the
Platonic text—here a Siamese twins effect, there complete union,
here a chthonic Fury with a sickle, there the Olympians with their
more precise tools, here a nightmare, there a dreamlike wish fulfill-
ment of perfect bodily union — strongly suggests that Calligone is
not Clitophon’s “other half ” in the Aristophanic sense; and so it is
to prove.
Another novel which parades its links with the Symposium is
Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (or The Golden Ass), the tale of a man called
Lucius, whose curiosity about magical practice leads to his trans-
formation into an ass; after many sordid adventures, he is returned
to human shape by the intervention of the great goddess Isis, whose
priest he becomes. Within this picaresque narrative, characters tell
many amusing tales of the kind which look forward to Chaucer and
Boccaccio, and the middle of the novel is occupied by the inserted
tale of Cupid’s love for Psyche (Soul), her search for him and the
labors she must endure, and her final ascent to Olympus to be
united with him. “Cupid and Psyche” has clear Platonic elements,
taken most notably from the Phaedrus and from Diotima’s speech in

 | Plato’s Symposium

the Symposium, and it is also plainly an allegory of the soul’s search
for higher reality. Moreover, it also offers at one level an allegorical
interpretation of the story of Lucius’s fall to asshood and subsequent
recovery which frames it, and this interpretation depends upon a
distinction between “carnal” pleasures, which led Lucius astray and
with which the world of the novel is overly full, and “higher” love,
such as both Psyche and Lucius ultimately obtain; this dichotomy
may be traced back to Pausanias’s speech in the Symposium, to where
we may perhaps also trace the very notion of a duality of love in
pagan and Christian traditions.26 Plato had, moreover, shown the
way structurally as well as thematically. Thus Diotima’s speech (par-
ticularly the myth of Eros’s birth) may similarly be read not merely
as itself an allegory requiring interpretation, but also as an allegori-
cal interpretation of the (very physical) narrative of Alcibiades’ re-
lations with Socrates which immediately follows it. Where Plato
led, Apuleius (as so often) followed.
The Symposium is indeed a classic text for the history of inter-
pretation: Alcibiades’ image of Socrates and his words as a Silenus
who needs to be “opened up” to reveal “the divine things” inside
has proved, as we have already noted (above, pp. –), to be a pro-
ductive way of imaging critical interpretation, which has found no-
table imitators. Central to the interpretive practices, both pagan and
Christian, of later antiquity and the Byzantine period is the fact that
a text, an idea, or a concept (such as erôs) may be understood at var-
ious levels, which can often be represented as of increasing com-
plexity and sophistication, from the literal “rising upward” to the
richly allegorical. Even when the pattern of the Symposium is not
explicitly invoked by later authors, its influence may be felt all over
the voluminous theological and scholastic writing of these periods.
Those wishing to create Platonic authority for their own interpre-
tive practices may be tempted to find in the series of encomia of erôs
in the Symposium an ever-increasing level of sophistication, culmi-
nating in the speech of Socrates/Diotima, and such an “ascent” in
the pattern of the speeches then finds its analogy in the ascent of the

26 For
the Symposium and Christian theology, cf. Rist (); Osborne ().

The Morning After | 

soul within the speech of Socrates/Diotima itself. Thus as a text
which itself requires interpretation, which contains models and pat-
terns of interpretation within it (Diotima’s allegory, Alcibiades’
Silenus image, the idea of higher understanding as a “mystery”), and
which, through the succession of different understandings of erôs,
gives structural embodiment to the process of interpretation as a se-
ries of stages of increasing sophistication and complexity, the Sympo-
sium was determinative of the way in which classical and Christian
texts, including of course Plato himself, were read. More broadly,
in its mixture of interconnectedness and fragmentation, its provo-
cative challenge to fit the parts into a whole, and our constant need
to reevaluate what we have already read in the light of the subse-
quent speeches, the Symposium both reproduces and shapes the very
practice of critical interpretation, if not indeed of reading itself.
Diotima’s myth is, of course, one of the most discussed and in-
terpreted parts of the Symposium; her own seerlike status and her
quasi-mystical language of psychic pregnancy and “giving birth in
the beautiful” were an irresistible provocation to those who cease-
lessly harried the Platonic text to find the metaphysical truth. Her
teaching about daimones which mediate between gods and men was
extremely influential in the later Platonic traditions; Apuleius’s On
the God of Socrates is a prime example.27 Plotinus (third century ad),
the most important of the neo-Platonists, expounded Diotima’s
myth of the birth of Eros at least three times, including a full-scale
exposition in the essay “On Erôs” (Ennead .).28 In this reading the
heavenly Aphrodite is Soul, and her father, Kronos, is Intellect
(nous); the following extract gives a fair flavor of the interpretation:
Plenty (i.e., Poros), then, since he is a rational principle in
the intelligible world and in Intellect, and since he is more
diffused and, as it were, spread out, would be concerned
with soul and in soul. For that which is in Intellect is con-
tracted together, and nothing comes to it from anything else,
27 This
is most accessible in Harrison, Hilton, and Hunink ().
28 Cf.
Dillon (); Osborne () –. For Plotinus’s other interpreta-
tions, cf. Enn. .., ...

 | Plato’s Symposium

 but when Plenty was drunk his state of being filled was
brought about from outside. But what could that which is
filled with nectar in the higher world be except a rational
principle which has fallen from a higher origin to a lesser
one? So this principle is in Soul and comes from Intellect,
flowing into his garden when Aphrodite is said to have been
born. And every garden is a glory and decoration of wealth;
and the property of Zeus is glorified by rational principle,
and his decorations are the glories that come from Intellect
itself into the soul. Or what could the garden of Zeus be but
his images in which he takes delight and his glories? And
what could his glories and adornments be but the rational
principles which flow from him? The rational principles all
together are Plenty, the plenitude and wealth of beauties, al-
ready manifested; and this is the being drunk with nectar.
For what is nectar for the gods but that which the divinity
acquires? (Plotinus, Ennead ..; trans. A. H. Armstrong)
Plato, perhaps, had only himself to blame: never had the invitation
to interpretation which the Symposium playfully holds out been em-
braced with such enthusiasm.
Not, of course, that Plotinus was the first to have struck out
along this path. Plotinus explicitly cites, in order to reject, an inter-
pretation which made Diotima’s Eros stand for the universe (kos-
mos); an instance of such a reading is preserved in Plutarch’s essay
On Isis and Osiris, which seeks to harmonize Greek and Egyptian
speculation about the origins of the world:
This subject seems in some wise to call up the myth of Plato,
which Socrates in the Symposium gives at some length in
regard to the birth of Love, saying that Poverty, wishing
for children, insinuated herself beside Plenty while he was
asleep, and having become pregnant by him, gave birth to
Love, who is of a mixed and utterly variable nature, inas-
much as he is the son of a father who is good and wise and
self-sufficient in all things, but of a mother who is helpless
and without means and because of want always clinging

The Morning After | 

 close to another and always importunate over another. For
Plenty is none other than the first beloved and desired, the
perfect and self-sufficient; and Plato calls raw material Po-
verty, utterly lacking of herself in the Good, but being filled
from him and always yearning for him and sharing with
him. The World (kosmos), or Horus, which is born of these,
is not eternal nor unaffected nor imperishable, but, being
ever reborn, contrives to remain always young and never
subject to destruction in the changes and cycles of events.
(Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris c– e; trans. F. C. Babbitt)
Christianity was also to claim a privileged place in the history of
such mystical readings of Platonic texts. Very few reworkings of the
Symposium are as remarkable as the Symposium of the Lycian bishop
Methodius (second half of third century ad), in which ten Christian
virgins deliver encomia of Virginity (parthenia, here etymologized,
in a manner familiar to readers of Plato’s Cratylus, as partheia, near-
ness to god). The host is no longer the Platonic “Mr. Good,” but
rather Arete (Virtue), daughter of Philosophia, and Socrates is re-
placed by Saint Thecla, a “martyr” like her classical predecessor,
whose speech contains large elements from both Diotima in Plato’s
Symposium and the mystic Socrates of the Phaedrus.29 The high point
of Christian readings of the Symposium is, however, the commen-
tary upon this work by the great Florentine humanist and philoso-
pher Marsilio Ficino ( – ), whose life work included trans-
lating into Latin all of Plato and Plotinus. Under the patronage of
Cosimo de’ Medici, Ficino was at the center of a Florentine “Acad-
emy” devoted to the celebration and exposition of Platonic philos-
ophy. His commentary on the Symposium () is as dramatic in its
structure as the text on which it comments; here is the opening in
which Ficino explains its origins:
Plato, the father of philosophers, passed away at the age of
eighty-one after the food had been cleared away at a banquet

29 English translation is in Musurillo (); for discussion cf. Brown ()

– .

 | Plato’s Symposium

 on his birthday, November . This banquet, which commem-
orated both his birthday and the anniversary of his death,
was renewed every year by all the early Platonists down to
the time of Plotinus and Porphyry. But for twelve hundred
years after Porphyry these annual feasts were not observed.
At last in our own day, the illustrious Lorenzo de’ Medici,
wishing to reestablish the Platonic symposium, appointed
Francesco Bandini Master of the Feast and so, when Bandini
had declared November  the date for the celebration, he
entertained in regal splendour at the villa, at Careggio,30 nine
guest Platonists: Antonio Agli, Bishop of Fiesole; Ficino, the
physician [Marsilio’s father]; Cristoforo Landino, the poet;
Bernardo Nuzzi, the rhetorician; Tommaso Benci; Giovanni
Cavalcanti, our dear friend, whom because of his virtue of
soul and noble appearance, they named Hero of the feast;
the two Marsuppini, Cristoforo and Carlo, sons of the poet
Carlo Marsuppini; and finally, Bandini wished me to be the
ninth, so that with the addition of the name Marsilio Ficino
to those already mentioned, the number of the Muses might
be rounded out.
When the food had been cleared away, Bernardo Nuzzi
took the volume of Plato which is inscribed Symposium on
Love and read all the speeches of this Symposium. When he
had finished reading, he asked that each of the guests ex-
plain one of the speeches. They all consented, and when the
lots had been drawn, the first speech, that of Phaedrus, fell
to Giovanni Cavalcanti to explain. The speech of Pausanias
fell to the theologian Agli; that of Eryximachus, the physi-
cian, to the physician Ficino; that of the poet Aristophanes
to the poet Landino; that of Agathon, the young man, to
Carlo Marsuppini; to Tommaso Benci was given the dis-
course of Socrates, and finally the speech of Alcibiades fell
to Cristoforo Marsuppini. Everyone approved the lot as it

30 A
town on the hills outside Florence where Cosimo had given Ficino a
house.

The Morning After | 

 had fallen out; but the bishop and the physician were called
away, the one to the care of souls, the other to the care of
bodies, and they resigned their parts to Giovanni Cavalcanti,
to whom the rest then turned and fell silent, ready to listen.
(trans. S. R. Jayne)31
For us, Renaissance Florence seems another brilliant society which
appeals, like classical Athens, as much to our imagination as to our
historical sense; Ficino’s narrative encloses that brilliance within a
single space, just as did Plato’s. In replaying the Symposium, but at
the level of interpretation, Bandini’s guests move a further step be-
yond the role playing which is already inherent in Plato’s text
(above, p. ); as their speeches interpret the speeches which Plato
had put into the mouths of Agathon and his guests, so Ficino him-
self plays Plato, for he is of course the real author of the speeches
which fill the commentary.
Just as it was accepted that Plato had revealed some of his great-
est mystic truths in this work, so Ficino lays out in the commentary
a Christianizing vision of metaphysical “Platonic love” in which
love between human souls is secured by their love for God, the
supreme principle of Beauty and Goodness, and God’s love for
them. The whole hierarchy of structures in God’s world is illu-
mined and kept in harmonious balance by Love: God is at the cen-
ter of four circles— Mind (associated with the “Heavenly Venus”),
Soul (associated with the generative power of Venus, daughter of
Jupiter and Dione), Nature, and Matter — which, being derived
from God, are always turned toward him by Love and forever strive
to return to him. Ficino, like Diotima before him, appropriates
Pausanias’s duality of Aphrodite for a vision in which all Love, if
properly respected (physical sex between men was, of course, “un-
natural”), serves higher purposes:
Venus is two-fold: one is clearly that intelligence which we
said was in the Angelic Mind; the other is the power of gen-

31 S. R. Jayne, Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium (Columbia,

Miss.: ).

 | Plato’s Symposium

 eration with which the World-Soul is endowed. Each has as
consort a similar Love. The first, by innate love is stimulated
to know the beauty of God; the second, by its love, to pro-
create the same beauty in bodies. The former Venus first
embraces the Glory of God in herself, and then translates it
to the second Venus. This latter Venus translates sparks of
that divine glory into earthly matter. It is because of sparks
of this kind that an individual body seems beautiful to us, in
proportion to its merits. The human soul perceives the
beauty of these bodies through the eyes.
The soul also has two powers. It certainly has the power
of comprehension, and it has the power of generation. These
two powers in us are the two Venuses which are accompa-
nied by their twin Loves. When the beauty of a human body
first meets our eyes, the mind, which is the first Venus in us,
worships and adores the human beauty as an image of divine
beauty, and through the first, it is frequently aroused to the
second. But the power of generation in us, which is the sec-
ond Venus, desires to create another form like this. There-
fore, there is a Love in each case: in the former, it is the de-
sire of contemplating Beauty; and in the latter, the desire for
propagating it; both loves are honorable and praiseworthy,
for each is concerned with the divine image. (Commentary on
the Symposium, second speech, chap. ; trans. S. R. Jayne)
Through Ficino and his followers, the mystical ideas of the Phaedrus
and the Symposium exercised enormous influence upon subsequent
literature, thought, and art.32 Our postmodern world is suspicious
of all-encompassing systems, particularly ones which could easily
be parodied as New Age babble avant la lettre, but this should not
blind us to the power of an intellectual conception which combined
the most haunting texts of exploratory pagan philosophy with the
confirming strength of a revealed and certain truth.

32 Cf.,
e.g., Festugière ().

The Morning After | 

This page intentionally left blank
 Bibliography and Further Reading

There are many readily available translations of the Symposium. Particularly

recommended are that of Robin Waterfield in the Oxford World’s Classics
series (), which has been used in this book, and that of A. Nehamas
and P. Woodruff (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, ). Rowe () offers a
Greek text, facing English translation, and very helpful notes in which vir-
tually all Greek is transliterated.
There is a convenient and brief account of the classical Athenian sym-
posium in Davidson (); much of the large bibliography on this subject
can be traced through Murray (a) and Slater (); the best introduc-
tion to the rich iconography of the Greek symposium is Lissarrague ().
For the place of poetry in the symposium, Gentili (), Stehle (),
and Ford () offer interesting and reliable guides.
Calame () offers an introduction to the whole range of issues con-
nected with the literary representation of erôs. On homosexual relations in
Greek antiquity the classic study is Dover (), and see now Hubbard
() for a collection of sources in translation; a useful overview of work
since Dover can be traced through the notes of Hubbard (). Halperin
(), the second chapter of Winkler (), and chapter  of Cohen
() raise particularly important considerations.
The following lists all works cited by short title in the notes and guid-
ance offered above, together with certain other works which will help those
who wish to pursue these subjects further.


Bacon, H. H. . “Socrates crowned” Virginia Quarterly Review :
 – .
Barthes, R. . A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (trans. R. Howard), New
York.
Bessone, F. . “Discorsi dei liberti e parodia del ‘Simposio’ platonico
nella ‘Cena Trimalchionis’” Materiali e Discussioni : –.
Blondell, R. . The Play of Character in Plato’s Dialogues, Cambridge.
Bowie, A. M. . “Thinking with drinking: wine and the symposium in
Aristophanes” Journal of Hellenic Studies : – .
Bowie, M. . Lacan, Cambridge, Mass.
Brown, P. . The Body and Society, New York/London.
Burkert, W. . Greek Religion, Oxford.
Burnyeat, M. F. . “Socratic midwifery, Platonic inspiration” Bulletin of
the Institute of Classical Studies :  –.
Bury, R. G. . The Symposium of Plato, d ed., Cambridge.
Calame, C. . The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece, Princeton, N.J.
Cameron, A. . “Petronius and Plato” Classical Quarterly : –.
Carpenter, E. . Love’s Coming-of-Age, th ed., London.
Clark, R. B. . “Platonic love in a Colorado courtroom: Martha Nuss-
baum, John Finnis, and Plato’s Laws in Evans v. Romer” Yale Journal of
Law and the Humanities : –.
Clay, D. . “The tragic and comic poet of the Symposium” in J. P. Anton
and A. Preus (eds.), Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy, Albany, N.Y.,
 – .
———. . “Plato’s first words” Yale Classical Studies : –.
———. . Platonic Questions, University Park, Pa.
Cohen, D. . Law, Sexuality, and Society, Cambridge.
Davidson, J. . Courtesans and Fishcakes, London.
———. . “Gnesippus paigniagraphos: the comic poets and the erotic
mime” in D. Harvey and J. Wilkins (eds.), The Rivals of Aristophanes,
London,  – .
Dillon, J. . “Enn. III : Plotinus’ exegesis of the Symposium myth”
AGWN :  – .
Dover, K. J. . “Eros and nomos (Plato, Symposium A–C)” Bul-
letin of the Institute of Classical Studies :  –.
———. . “The date of Plato’s Symposium” Phronesis : – ( = Dover
[]  – ).
———. . “Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium” Journal of Hel-
lenic Studies :  – ( = Dover [] – ).

 | Bibliography and Further Reading

———. . Aristophanes, Clouds, Oxford.
———. . Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle,
Oxford.
———. . Greek Homosexuality, London.
———. . Plato, Symposium, Cambridge.
———. . The Greeks and Their Legacy, Oxford.
———. . The Evolution of Greek Prose Style, Oxford.
Dupont, F. . Le plaisir et la loi, Paris.
Edelstein, L. . “The role of Eryximachus in Plato’s Symposium” Trans-
actions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association :  –
( = Ancient Medicine: Selected Papers of Ludwig Edelstein [Baltimore, Md.:
]  – ).
Ferrari, G. R. F. . “Platonic love” in Kraut () –.
Ferrari, Gloria. . Figures of Speech, Chicago, Ill.
Festugière, J. . La philosophie de l’amour de Marsile Ficin e son influence
sur la littérature française au XVIe siècle, Paris.
Finnis, J. M. . “Law, morality, and ‘sexual orientation’” Notre Dame
Law Review :  –.
Fisher, N. . “Symposiasts, fish-eaters and flatterers: social mobility
and moral concerns” in D. Harvey and J. Wilkins (eds.), The Rivals of
Aristophanes, London, – .
Ford, A. . The Origins of Criticism, Princeton, N.J.
Forster, E. M. . Maurice, London.
Foucault, M. . The Use of Pleasure, New York.
Freud, S. . Beyond the Pleasure Principle (trans. J. Strachey), d ed.,
London.
Gentili, B. . Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece, Baltimore/London.
Goldhill, S. . Foucault’s Virginity, Cambridge.
Gribble, D. . Alcibiades and Athens, Oxford.
Griffith, M. . “Slaves of Dionysos: satyrs, audience, and the ends of
the Oresteia” Classical Antiquity : –.
Halperin, D. . “Platonic erôs and what men call love” Ancient Philoso-
phy : – .
———. . One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, New York/London.
———. . “Plato and the erotics of narrativity” in J. C. Klagge and
N. D. Smith (eds.), Methods of Interpreting Plato and His Dialogues, Ox-
ford, –.
Harrison, S., J. Hilton, and V. Hunink, . Apuleius, Rhetorical Works,
Oxford.

Bibliography and Further Reading | 

Henderson, J. . “The life and soul of the party: Plato, Symposium” in
A. Sharrock and H. Morales (eds.), Intratextuality, Oxford, –.
———. forthcoming. “Anselm Feuerbach’s Das Gastmahl des Platon” in
M. B. Trapp (ed.), Socrates in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,
Aldershot.
Hobbs, A. . Plato and the Hero, Cambridge.
Hubbard, T. K. . “Popular perceptions of elite homosexuality in clas-
sical Athens” Arion : –.
———. . Homosexuality in Greece and Rome:A Sourcebook of Basic Docu-
ments, Berkeley, Calif.
Hunter, R. . “Response to J. Morgan” in A. H. Sommerstein and
C. Atherton (eds.), Education in Greek Fiction, Bari, Italy,  – .
———. . Theocritus, Encomium of Ptolemy Philadelphus, Berkeley, Calif.
Huss, B. . Xenophons Symposion: Ein Kommentar, Stuttgart/Leipzig.
Janaway, C. . Images of Excellence, Oxford.
Jenkyns, R. . The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Oxford.
Johnson, W. A. . “Dramatic frame and philosophic idea in Plato”
American Journal of Philology :  – .
Jouanna, J. . “Rhétorique et médecine dans la collection hippocra-
tique” Revue des Études Grecques : – .
Kahn, C. H. . “Aeschines on Socratic eros” in P. A. Van der Waerdt
(ed.), The Socratic Movement, Ithaca, N.Y./London,  – .
———. . Plato and the Socratic Dialogue, Cambridge.
Konstan, D. . Sexual Symmetry, Princeton, N.J.
Konstan, D., and E. Young-Bruehl. . “Eryximachus’ speech in the
Symposium” Apeiron :  –.
Kraut, R. (ed.) . The Cambridge Companion to Plato, Cambridge.
Lacan, J. a. Écrits:A Selection (trans. A. Sheridan), London.
———. b. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (trans.
A. Sheridan), London.
Lear, J. . Open Minded, Cambridge, Mass.
Lissarrague, F. . The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet, Princeton, N.J.
Lloyd, G. E. R. . “The hot and the cold, the dry and the wet in Greek
philosophy” Journal of Hellenic Studies : – .
———. . Magic, Reason and Experience, Cambridge.
Lowenstam, S. . “Paradoxes in Plato’s Symposium” Ramus :  –.
Ludwig, P. W. . Eros & Polis, Cambridge.
McGrath, E. . “‘The drunken Alcibiades’: Rubens’s picture of Plato’s
Symposium” Journal of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes : – .

 | Bibliography and Further Reading

Macleod, C. . “The comic encomium and Aristophanes, Clouds –
” Phoenix :  – ( = Collected Essays [Oxford: ] – ).
Martin, J. . Symposion: Die Geschichte einer literarischen Form, Paderborn,
Germany.
Mattingly, H. . “The date of Plato’s Symposium” Phronesis :  –.
Morrison, J. S. . “Four notes on Plato’s Symposium” Classical Quarterly
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Bibliography and Further Reading | 

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 Index of Passages Discussed

Pages devoted to analysis of the individual speeches are marked in bold; not all
references to passages within the speeches are noted separately.

Achilles Tatius Petronius

Leucippe and Clitophon 1.3.3–4, 128 Satyrica 65.3 –9, 126
Alexis 85– 87, 127
fr. 247 Kassel-Austin, 20 Philo
Amphis De vita contemplativa 7.60– 3, 121 – 23
fr. 15 Kassel-Austin, 49–50 Plato
Aristophanes Apology 19c, 104
Clouds 365–411, 66 23a–b, 87
Frogs 1425, 104 28c1 –d4, 110
Women at the Thesmophoria 39–265, Charmides 154d1 –e6, 94
75 –77 Phaedo 58d5–6, 27
Athenaeus 60b–c, 66
Sophists at Dinner 5.187c, 10 Phaedrus 228a–b, 29
237b7 –d4, 43–44
Hesiod Republic 3.403b5 –c1, 49
Theogony 120–2, 40 6.495b8 –c6, 85
Homer 9.573d1, 82 n.6
Odyssey 8.265 –366, 8– 9 Symposium 172a–3e, 20– 29
9.3 – 11, 8 173b5–6, 28

145
Plato, Symposium (continued) 204d–e, 87 n.12
174a3–d3, 29–33 206c5–6, 88– 89
175b1– 2, 32 206d3–e1, 88
175d, 26, 33 209a8–c3, 90– 91
175e, 33 210e2–11d5, 95–97
176e4–5, 5 n.4 211c1, 93 n.21
177a3, 54 211d5– 8, 83
177b5 – 6, 36 212b1, 99 n.27
177d2 –3, 36 212b2, 97
177d5, 5 212c1 – 3, 36
178a5–80b9, 38–42 212d3 –7, 98
179c1 –2, 39 214a–b, 5
179d4–5, 39 215a5 –22b7, 98– 112
180c– 85c, 43–53 215a6 –b3, 100–101
180e4–81a6, 42 215e1 – 2, 101
184d3 –e4, 106– 7 216e4 –7, 10
185a5–b5, 106–7 217a5, 26, 101
185d1–e2, 54–55 218b–d, 14, 105– 7, 129
185e6–88e5, 53–59 218b5, 14 n.16
186c5–d1, 55– 56 218d3, 90
188a–b, 66 218e2–6, 107
189a3 – 4, 60 219a1, 105
189b6 –7, 60 219a8–b2, 107–8
189d1, 60, 61 220b7 – 8, 108
189c2 –93e3, 60– 71 220c3 –d5, 32
191c6 – 7, 61 221c4–5, 110
191e7– 92a1, 64 –65 221e4– 7, 10– 12, 30
192c3–d2, 68 222a7, 99 n.27
194e4–97e8, 71–77 222c1, 8
196d6 –e6, 72– 73 223d, 19, 79
197d1–e3, 73– 74 Plutarch
197e6–8, 74 Amatorius 762c, 103– 4
198c6–99a6, 36 How to Study Poetry 10c–d, 13
199b1, 78 On Isis and Osiris 374c–e, 131– 32
199b4–5, 36 n.36
199c5–212c2, 24, 78–98 Xenophanes
200c–e, 80, 81 fr. 1, 6– 7
201d3 –5, 81 Xenophon
201d5 –e2, 24 Memorabilia 1.2, 103–4
202e3–3a7, 84 1.2.29, 53
203b1 –4a6, 85–87, 130–32 Symposium 8.3, 40 n.2
203c6 –7, 34 8.9, 45
204b1, 85 n.8 9.6, 16

146 | Index of Passages Discussed

 General Index

Not every occurrence of the name of the principal speakers in the Symposium is
recorded.

Achilles, 38, 39, 40, 41, 89, 110 Apollodorus, 4, 20–29, 32, 82, 98,
Achilles Tatius, 18, 123, 127–28 111, 114
Aeschylus, 39 Apuleius, Metamorphoses, 128– 29
Aesop, 65, 66 On the God of Socrates, 130
Agathon, 58, 71–81, 83, 84, 87 n.11, 109 Archelaos of Macedon, 4
in comedy, 75–77 Archilochus, ‘Cologne Epode’, 89
poetic style of, 54, 75–77 n.16, 108 n.41
Aischines of Sphettos, 81 Ares, 8, 10
Ajax, 109 Ariadne, 13, 16
Alcestis, 38, 39– 40, 41, 89 Aristippus of Cyrene, 46
Alcibiades, 4, 10– 14, 42, 50, 51, 53, Aristodemus, 4, 23–32, 82, 98, 111– 12
82, 90, 98– 112, 114, 119–20, 126 Aristogeiton, Athenian hero, 52
Alexis, comic poet, 19–20 Aristophanes, 53 –54, 60–71, 84,
Allen, Woody, 119 117– 19, 127
Antisthenes, 11 Acharnians, 65, 70
Anytus, prosecutor of Socrates, 103 Birds, 64
Aphrodite, 8, 10, 16, 44 – 47 Clouds, 13, 52, 62, 66, 67, 92, 104
‘Ourania’, 44 –47, 117 Frogs, 92
‘Pandemos’, 44 – 47, 117 Knights, 61, 70
Apollo, 8, 57, 61, 62, 65 Lysistrata, 66, 70

147
Aristophanes (continued) Epictetus, 11
Peace, 60, 64, 70 Epicurus, 15
Wealth, 70, 85 epideixis (‘display’), 28, 29 –37, 54, 108
Women in Assembly, 70 Er, myth of, 81, 97
Women at the Thesmophoria, 58, 75–77 Erasmus, 11– 12
Aristotle, 15, 19 Eros/erôs, passim, esp. 15– 20
Asclepius, 57 Eryximachus, 14, 53–61, 66, 73, 81, 84
Aspasia, 81–82 Euripides
astronomy, 59 Hippolytus, 17–18
Athenaeus, 10, 31 n.33 Medea, 17
Trojan Women, 17
Barthes, Roland, 113
Beauty, Form of, 19, 83, 96–97, 101, 106 Feuerbach, Anselm, 113
beauty, stimulus to creativity, 91 Ficino, Marsilio, Commentary on Plato’s
Boeotia, 46 Symposium, 132 –135
Brasidas, Spartan general, 110 Forms, Platonic, 97. See also s.v.
Brecht, Bertolt, 109 n.43 Beauty, Form of
Forster, E. M., 115–117
Carpenter, Edward, 116, 117 frames, narrative, 22–23
Christ, Jesus, 12 Freud, Sigmund, 118– 119
Colorado, legal status of gay sex in, 125
Comedy, 30, 60, 61, 65, 79 n.1. See Giants, 62
also s.v. Aristophanes Glaucon, 23, 32
conversion to philosophy, 24–25 Gorgias, 33, 74–75, 101
cooking, 58 Encomium of Helen, 74
Critias, Athenian politician, 53, 103 Great Dionysia, 3 n.1

daimones, 84, 130 Harmodius, Athenian hero, 52

Delium, Athenian retreat at, 109 Hedwig and the Angry Inch, rock-opera,
Delphic Oracle, 92 67, 69 n.35, 119 n.11
Demodocus, bard in Homer, 8, 10 Hephaestus, 8 –9, 63–64, 68, 69
Demosthenes, 19 Heraclitus, 55
Diogenes the Cynic, 11 Hermes, 8
Dionysus, 6, 13, 16, 18, 19, 33, 99, 100 Herodotus, 14, 17
Diotima, 9, 14, 19, 28, 31, 34, 57, 59, Hesiod, 38, 44 –45, 65
69, 70, 78, 81–98, 99, 100, 106, hiccups, 55
108, 129, 130–32 Hippias, 38, 52
doctors, 33, 54, 61. See also s.v. Eryxi- Hippocrates, Hippocratic corpus,
machus; medicine 55–56, 61
Homer, 8 –10, 16, 31, 42, 109
Elis, 46 homosexuality, female, 45. See also s.v.
encomium, 34– 37, 56–17, 71 pederasty
rules for, 35, 71 hybris, 12, 13, 46

148 | General Index

Ion of Chios, 14 Petronius, Satyrica, 126– 27
irony, 11. See also s.v. Socrates Phaedrus, 14, 35– 36, 38 – 42, 51, 52,
80, 109, 110
Lacan, Jacques, 117– 120 philia, 16– 17, 39–40, 48, 80, 91
Lenaian festival, 3 n.1 Philo of Alexandria, 121– 23
‘likenesses’, sympotic game, 5, 100–102 Pindar, 46 n.8, 72
Lucian, Symposium, 22 n.20 Plato, passim. See also s.v. Symposium
Lucretius, 26 Apology, 37, 87, 92, 110
Lycurgus, Spartan lawgiver, 92 Gorgias, 51, 71
Lysias, 38, 39 Laws, 58
Menexenus, 82
Mantinea, 81 Meno, 89– 90, 101–2
Marsyas, 101 Parmenides, 22, 23
medicine, 54, 55–56, 58 Phaedo, 3, 22, 27, 85, 89 – 90
Menander, 19 Phaedrus, 3, 19, 29, 33, 38, 39, 43 –
Methodius, Symposium, 132 44, 50, 106, 115, 116, 135
midwife, Socrates as, 90, 93 Protagoras, 41, 43, 52
Murdoch, Iris, 126 n.24 Republic, 3, 24, 27, 81, 97, 105 n.38
musical theory, 56, 57– 58 Theaetetus, 22, 24, 90
Mysteries, Eleusinian, 4, 14, 92–93 Plotinus, 130–31
of erôs, 92, 99 Plutarch, 15
Amatorius, 46, 125– 26
Nestor, 110 poetry, claims of opposed to philoso-
novels, ancient, 68, 127–28 phy, 31–32, 39, 110– 11
Polemon, Platonic philosopher, 25
Odysseus, 102, 109–10, 127 Polycrates, Accusation of Socrates, 103
Oedipus, 59 Polymnia, Muse, 58
Orpheus, 38, 39 Poros (‘Resource’), 85
Posner, R. A., judge, 120– 21
Pandora, 16, 65 pregnancy, psychic, 82– 98, 100
parody, 9 – 10, 41, 54, 77 Prodicus, 33, 43
Patroclus, 39, 110 Protagoras, 33, 52
‘Pausanian love’, 116
Pausanias, 40, 42, 43 – 53, 56 – 57, Rabelais, 12
68, 82, 89, 91, 94, 105, 106, 114, ‘recollection’ (anamnêsis), 90
127 rhetoric, 34 –37, 75
pederasty, Greek, 19, 43–53, 114–25, ‘Rhetoric to Alexander’, 35
and passim Rolfe, F. W. (‘Baron Corvo’), 117
Peloponnesian War, 4 Rubens, 113
Penia (‘Poverty’), 85, 100
Pericles, 110 Sappho, 17
‘Funeral Speech’, 42, 114 satyr drama, 99

General Index | 149

Second Sophistic, 125 symposium, conduct of, 5– 15, 34, 41,
seercraft (mantikê), 56, 59, 81 81
Seneca, 26 in Homer, 8
Shelley, P. B., 123–124 literature of, 6– 7, 19– 20
Sicily, Athenian expedition to, 3, 4, of the Seven Sages, 15
14, 17
Silenus, 6, 10, 11–12, 13, 70, 100– Teiresias, 59 n.25
101 Testa, Pietro, 113
Sirens, the, 102 Theognis, 15, 18, 49
Socrates, passim Thucydides, 42, 114
trial of, 4, 95, 104 tragedy, Attic, 110–111. See also s.v.
Solon, 92 Agathon
sophia, 72
sophists, the, 52 ‘Uranians’, 116
Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, 59
Trachiniae, 17 wine, 5, 18
Sparta, 4, 110
speech, direct/indirect, 23–24 Xenocrates, Platonic philosopher, 25
Speusippus, 15 Xenophanes of Colophon, 6– 7, 62
Spice Girls, the, 69 n.35 Xenophon, 103–4
spoudaiogeloion, 9 –13, 36, 50, 98 Cyropaideia, 19
Symposium (Plato), passim Symposium, 13, 15, 60
date of, 3
dramatic date of, 4, 22 Zeus, 62, 63, 64

150 | General Index