Lecture on Plato’s Symposium
Theme of the dialogue (which is not really a dialogue, but a series of speeches with
incidental banter): What is this thing called love? (Cole Porter)
Theme of the lecture: Plato and the life of the mind.
Road Map To The Lecture
Preliminaries:
(1) concerning Socrates and Plato: philosophy and the quest for knowledge
(2) concerning homosexuality in 5th century BCE upper class Athens
(or: Pausanias, pederasty, and perversion)
(3) concerning Apollodorus and the introductory dialogue (which is a dialogue, albeit
brief)
Fictional context: A private, invitation only supper chez Agathon, an ancient Athenian
celebrity, young, tragic poet of considerable physical beauty who has just won first prize
in the annual festival of tragedies. A larger victory party had been held the previous
evening. The date of the opening discussion has been estimated to be about 400 BCE, a
year or so before Socrates’s trial for blasphemy and corrupting the youth. The banquet
cum drinking party itself would have been held some16 years earlier.
Historical context: The dialogue appears to have been written between 384 and 369 BCE.
During this period Plato was: (I) writing his four great “middle dialogues” −The
Republic, about justice; the Phaedrus, about love and rhetoric; the Phaedo, about the
immortality of the soul, and our work about the nature of eros, and (ii) founding the
Academy (so-named because it was located on land outside Athens near a grove sacred to
a minor deity named Hecademus), the Western world’s first university
Socio-cultural context: the upper class ancient Athenian custom of “beautiful boy love”.
The Introduction to our edition of the dialogue provides a useful summary account of this
on pages xiv-xv. The English word “pederasty” derives etymologically from the
vocabulary of this custom, with the “ped” part deriving from “pais”, young boy (also
child in general, hence pediatrics, pedagogy, and encyclopedia, among others), and
“erastes”, lover.
Overview of the Dialogue:
I. Introductory, framing material involving an unnamed “friend” (of Apollodorus’s),
Apollodorus, Glaucon (Plato’s brother perhaps), and Aristodemus.
(172a-178a)
Question: Why is this preliminary material so elaborate and convoluted?
Overview of the six speeches by invited guests
Group One:
Phaedrus
Pausanius
Eryximachus
Each of these speakers takes love to be instrumentally beneficial, good (when it is good)
because of its good effects), and Pausanius and Eryximachus explicitly distinguish
between a good eros and a bad eros. Eryximachus, the culminating speaker of this trio, is
a doctor (one who sees to the health of the body) who discourses about the role of love in
the physical universe. (Note that E was supposed to have followed Aristophanes, not
preceded him; consider also that Aristophanes might have contracted hiccups in an effort
to stifle laughter at Pausanius’s pomposity).
Group Two
Agathon
(tragic poet)
Socrates −−−Diotima
(philosopher) (priestess)
Aristophanes
(comic poet)
Each speaker in this series takes love to be intrinsically good, good as such. The series
culminates with the Socrates-Diotima speech, which:
(i) begins with two mini Socratic interrogations, one by Socrates the other of him (by
Diotima)
(ii) is given by individuals who aim to promote the health of the soul (a philosopher and a
priest)
and
(iii) argues that love is a “messenger” “shuttling back and forth between men and gods”,
between the world of the forms and the physical universe
The Ladder of Love (210a6-212b1)
According to Diotima, love is a developmental force disposed by nature to move those
inspired by it from one kind of object to another, in six distinct stages.
Love of BEAUTY ITSELF 9210e3-212b1)
Love of beauty in the form of the soul’s truly characteristic activity, theoretical inquiry,
the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake (210c7-e2)
Love of beauty in the form of the soul’s highest practical activity, the creation of political
order (laws and customs) (210c3-6)
Love of beautiful souls (210b7-c2)
Love of physical beauty in general (as such) (210a8-b6)
Love of one particular beautiful body. I.e. love of one particular beautiful person, sparked
by attraction to their beautiful body. (210a7-8)
Denouement: The Speech of Alcibiades
Alcibiades crashes the party and makes a drunken, highly ambivalent speech, not in
praise of love, but in praise (and reproach) of Socrates, who, amongst other things:
−always turns up when least expected (213c1-3
−is the only man in the world who has made [Alcibiades] feel shame (216b1)
and
− begins by presenting himself as your lover and ends by driving you to distraction for
love of him and his singular ideas and arguments (222b3),
More drunken revelers arrive, and the evening ends with Socrates trying to convince
Agathon and Aristophanes that “the skilful tragic dramatist should also be a comic poet”
(223d6-7). Unfortunately but not surprisingly, they are too drunk and tired to be able to
follow his argument.