Symposium
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~32,200 words · 153 passages
Cite this work
- APAPlato. (n.d.). Symposium. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plato/symposium
- MLAPlato. "Symposium." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plato/symposium.
- ChicagoPlato. Symposium. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plato/symposium.
What it is about
A dinner at the poet Agathon's house where each guest delivers a praise of love: what Eros seeks, where it comes from, and how one climbs from the beauty of one body to beauty itself.
Context and history
The dinner is set in 416 BC, when Agathon was celebrating the prize for his first tragedy; Plato wrote it decades later, around 385-370. It parades the most celebrated speeches in Platonism — Aristophanes' split beings searching for their other half, Diotima's ladder, the final entrance of a drunken Alcibiades praising Socrates instead of love. No dialogue has been so read outside philosophy: the very idea of 'Platonic love' comes from here, though what Plato actually says is a good deal stranger and more interesting.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Of all the works of Plato the Symposium is the most perfect in form, and may be truly thought to contain more than any commentator has ever dreamed of; or, as Goethe said of one of his own writings, more than the author himself knew. For in philosophy as in prophecy glimpses of the future may often be conveyed in words which could hardly have been understood or interpreted at the time when they were uttered (compare Symp.)--which were wiser than the writer of them meant, and could not have been expressed by him if he had been interrogated about them. Yet Plato was not a mystic, nor in any degree affected by the Eastern influences which afterwards overspread the Alexandrian world. He was not an enthusiast or a sentimentalist, but one who aspired only to see reasoned truth, and whose thoughts are clearly explained in his language. There is no foreign element either of Egypt or of Asia to be found in his writings. And more than any other Platonic work the Symposium is Greek both in style and subject, having a beauty 'as of a statue,' while the companion Dialogue of the Phaedrus is marked by a sort of Gothic irregularity. More too than in any other of his Dialogues, Plato is emancipated from former philosophies. The genius of Greek art seems to triumph over the traditions of Pythagorean, Eleatic, or Megarian systems, and 'the old quarrel of poetry and philosophy' has at least a superficial reconcilement. (Rep.) An unknown person who had heard of the discourses in praise of love spoken by Socrates and others at the banquet of Agathon is desirous of having an authentic account of them, which he thinks that he can obtain from Apollodorus, the same excitable, or rather 'mad' friend of Socrates, who is afterwards introduced in the Phaedo. He had imagined that the discourses were recent. There he is mistaken: but they are still fresh in the memory of his informant, who had just been← Back to Plato