Overview

The Symposium is a discussion on the nature of love, taking the form of a group of speeches, both satirical and serious, given by a group of men at a symposium or a wine drinking gathering at the house of the tragedian Agathon at Athens.

Background

The Symposium is classified as part of a transitional phase between the early and middle dialogues.It was presumably written around the same time as Plato’s Republic and Phaedrus; with those two texts, it is often considered one of Plato’s literary high points.

The Setup

Fifteen years ago the poet Agathon hosted a symposium to celebrate victory in his first dramatic competition, the Dionysia of 416 BCE. A (since famous) discussion on the theme of love took place at this symposium. ARISTODEMUS, who was present, reported the conversation to APOLLODORUS, who checked it with Socrates. Here, Apollodorus is primed to tell the story again to his unnamed interlocutor and friend. From this point on, he will be quoting Aristodemus.

Aristodemus bumps into Socrates one day and is persuaded to join him (uninvited) on his way to the second day of partying at Agathon’s house, who is celebrating an award he won two days prior for a dramatic composition.

It is recommended by Eryximachus and taken up by Socrates that they entertain themselves by speaking in turn on a set topic, love.

Dramatis Personae

In order of speech:

  1. Phaedrus: Regular Platonic interlocutor
  2. Pausanias: The legal expert
  3. Eryximachus: A typical physician
  4. Aristophanes: The famous comic poet
  5. Agathon: Dramatic poet and host
  6. Socrates
  7. Alcibiades: Prominent Athenian statesman, orator, and general

The Speeches

  1. PHAEDRUS’ SPEECH: ENCOMIUM TO EROS
    1. Phaedrus opens by citing Hesiod, Acusilaus and Parmenides for the claim that Eros is the oldest of the gods, with no parents.
      1. Hence the greatness of the benefits he confers, inspiring a lover to earn the admiration of his beloved, as by showing bravery on the battlefield, since nothing shames a man more than to be seen by his beloved committing some inglorious act. “A handful of such men, fighting side by side, would defeat practically the whole world.”
      2. Lovers may even sacrifice their lives for the beloved: Alcestis was willing to die for her husband Admetus, and the gods rewarded her by allowing her to return from Hades. (By contrast Orpheus, by comparison Achilles).
      3. Interesting distinction here: Phaedrus here takes Aeschylus to task for making Achilles the “lover”, claiming instead that Achilles was the beautiful, still-beardless, younger “beloved” of Patroclus and citing Homer in his support. (Note: Greek eros is asymmetrical?)
    2. Phaedrus concludes his short speech in proper rhetorical fashion, reiterating his statements that love is one of the most ancient gods, the most honored, and the most powerful in helping men gain honor and blessedness.
  2. PAUSANIAS’ SPEECH: PEDARASTY AND ATHENIAN LAW
    1. Pausanias, the legal expert of the group, begins by taking Phaedrus up on his examples, asserting that the love that deserves attention is not the kind associated with Aphrodite Pandemos (Aphrodite common to the whole city) whose object may equally be a woman or a boy, but that of Aphrodite Urania (Heavenly Aphrodite), which “springs entirely from the male” and is “free from wantonness”; the object of this kind of love is not a child, but one who has begun to display intelligence and is close to growing a beard.
    2. Pausanias says that Athenian law makes a firm distinction between the lover who should be encouraged by the boy and the lover who should be discouraged. He says that when a boy surrenders to sex out of hope for money, political favors, or in a cowering fear that he will suffer abuse (a beating?) from the lover, his surrender is contemptible. Only when the boy is hoping to become wise and virtuous is his surrender to the older man not offensive to human decency. Pausanias thinks that the law addresses itself to children and their “motives” for surrendering to adults.
  3. ERYXIMACHUS’ SPEECH: LOVE PULLS THE MAGNETS TOGETHER
    1. Eryximachus ends up speaking instead of Aristophanes, who does not recover from his hiccups soon enough to take his place in the sequence.
    2. Eryximachus claims that love “governs” medicine, gymnastics and astronomy, and states that its principle “regulates” hot and cold and wet and dry and that this results in health.
      1. In a similar manner to the way that the two types of love are defined by their object in Athenian law, qua Pausanias, so it is that the body has its loves both fair and foul. And in such consists the physician’s art.
      2. The analogies he gives are harmony in music (all the musical notes at once are clearly a disharmony), and the seasons/astronomy (wanton love being licentious blight and famine, one supposes, vs. harmonious love in which the balance of wet and dry, sun and shade does good for man and beast), and in divination, etc.
      3. Essentially, I read this all as a sort of classical equivocation of the sense of love that we call “affinity”.
  4. ARISTOPHANES’ SPEECH: THE RESULTS OF AN OLYMPIAN COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS
    1. His speech is an explanation of why people in love say they feel “whole” when they have found their love partner.
      1. It is, he says, because in primal times people were globular spheres who wheeled around like clowns doing cartwheels. There were three sexes: the all male, the all female, and the “androgynous,” who was half man, half woman.
      2. The creatures tried to scale the heights of heaven and planned to set upon the gods. Zeus thought about just blasting them to death with thunderbolts, but did not want to deprive himself of their devotions and offerings, so he decided to cripple them by chopping them in half.
      3. After chopping the people in half, Zeus turned half their faces around and pulled the skin tight and stitched it up to form the belly button. Ever since that time, people run around saying they are looking for their other half because they are really trying to recover their primal nature.
      4. He says some people think homosexuals are shameless, but he thinks they are the bravest, most manly of all, and that heterosexuals are mostly adulterous men and unfaithful wives.
  5. AGATHON’S SPEECH: THE MUSE OF HUMANITY
    1. Agathon complains that the previous speakers have made the mistake of congratulating mankind on the blessing of love, that they have failed to give due praise to the god himself.
    2. He says that love is the youngest of gods and is an enemy of old age.
      1. The god of love shuns the very sight of senility and clings to youth.
      2. Love is responsible for putting poetry into every person.
      3. He also implies that love creates justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom.
  6. SOCRATES’ SPEECH: THE MIDDLE-ROAD TO IMMORTALITY
    1. Socrates starts with typical irony by stating that he might not want to be involved in this, as he didn’t realize we were just going to say whatever good things you can say about anything about love, regardless of their verity. He was just planning on saying some true things about it.
    2. Love is the child of Poverty and Plenty; it is not smooth and light-footed, as one might believe, but beggarly and harsh. It longs for beauty (being born on Athena’s day), which it wants to possess.
      1. Note that just because Love is not beautiful, it is not necessarily the opposite of that. This seems to anticipate an argument that’s going to be forthcoming much later in Sophist.
      2. If the beautiful is equitable with the Good, then love wants to possess the Good, so that it may be happy (which is what the natural result of possessing the Good is).
      3. Further, that obscure object of desire is actually none other than immortality, either in its bodily form (via children, a “line”) or in its soul-form - in the form of art or laws.
      4. That is, the highest good, absolute beauty, is the object that one comes to realize that one seeks, once one comes to the highest rung of the “love-ladder”; the essence or Form of Beauty is indeed the immortality that all love seeks, whether overtly or covertly.
  7. ALCIBIADES’ SPEECH
    1. Alcibiades’ speech is an encomium to Socrates, and also an admonition to Agathon against sleeping with Socrates. This doesn’t work, because Socrates is the playa’s playa.
    2. Alcibiades was so in love with Socrates - “it was obvious,” the Symposium tells us - that when asked to speak of love, he speaks of his beloved. No general theories of love for him, just the vividly remembered story of the times he spent with a man so extraordinary there has never been anyone like him - a man so powerfully erotic he turned the conventional world of love upside down by “seeming to be a lover (erastês) while really establishing himself as a beloved boy (pais) instead”.
  8. NOTES ON LOVE IN THE SYMPOSIUM
    1. The stories of all the other symposiasts, too, are stories of their particular loves masquerading as stories of love itself, stories about what they find beautiful masquerading as stories about what is beautiful.
      1. For Phaedrus and Pausanius, the canonical image of true love - the quintessential love story - features the right sort of older male lover and the right sort of beloved boy.
      2. For Eryximachus the image of true love is painted in the languages of his own beloved medicine and of all the other crafts and sciences. For Aristophanes it is painted in the language of comedy. For Agathon, in the loftier tones of tragedy.
      3. In ways that these men are unaware of, then, but that Plato knows, their love stories are themselves manifestations of their loves and of the inversions or perversions expressed in them. They think their stories are the truth about love, but they are really love’s delusions - “images,” as Diotima will later call them. As such, however, they are essential parts of that truth. For the power of love to engender delusive images of the beautiful is as much a part of the truth about it as its power to lead to the beautiful itself.
    2. Love is really “two things”: good Uranian love, whose object is the soul, and whose aim is to instill virtue in the younger male; and bad Pandemotic love, whose object is the body and whose aim is sexual pleasure for the older lover. What causes the split is the need Pandemotic love has to mask itself as Uranian love in order to preserve the illusion that the young man’s participation in it is compatible with his status as a future male citizen. It cannot, then, be motivated by a reprehensible desire to adopt a passive, slavish, female pleasure-seeking role. Instead, another motive must be invented for it - a willingness to accept “slavery for the sake of virtue”.
    3. “If only wisdom were like water which always flows from a full cup into an empty one when we connect them with a piece of yarn. If wisdom were that way too, I value the place beside you very much indeed; for I think I will be filled from you with wisdom of great beauty”. What actually happens, however, is the very reverse. Socrates responds to Agathon’s fancy speech about love with an elenchus, so that his emptiness, his lack of knowledge, flows into Agathon, destroying the wisdom of great beauty that had won his tragedy a first prize the day before.
    4. The story of Platonic love is, one might say, the story of the Platonizing of Socrates.
    5. But the true story of love, the story that is Plato’s Symposium itself, is the story of all these stories. In the Symposium, it takes the form appropriate to its genre and audience. But in the Phaedrus, we learn of the longer more technical road it might take in the future, when armed with a scientific psychology and rhetoric it becomes a matter for experts.