Symposium
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~32,200 words · 153 passages
Cite this work
- APAPlato. (n.d.). Symposium. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plato/symposium
- MLAPlato. Symposium. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plato/symposium.
- ChicagoPlato. Symposium. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plato/symposium.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
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.
have half their strength, and we shall have twice as many sacrifices. He spake, and split them as you might split an egg with an hair; and when this was done, he told Apollo to give their faces a twist and re-arrange their persons, taking out the wrinkles and tying the skin in a knot about the navel. The two halves went about looking for one another, and were ready to die of hunger in one another's arms. Then Zeus invented an adjustment of the sexes, which enabled them to marry and go their way to the business of life. Now the characters of men differ accordingly as they are derived from the original man or the original woman, or the original man-woman. Those who come from the man-woman are lascivious and adulterous; those who come from the woman form female attachments; those who are a section of the male follow the male and embrace him, and in him all their desires centre. The pair are inseparable and live together in pure and manly affection; yet they cannot tell what they want of one another. But if Hephaestus were to come to them with his instruments and propose that they should be melted into one and remain one here and hereafter, they would acknowledge that this was the very expression of their want. For love is the desire of the whole, and the pursuit of the whole is called love. There was a time when the two sexes were only one, but now God has halved them,--much as the Lacedaemonians have cut up the Arcadians,--and if they do not behave themselves he will divide them again, and they will hop about with half a nose and face in basso relievo. Wherefore let us exhort all men to piety, that we may obtain the goods of which love is the author, and be reconciled to God, and find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this world. And now I must beg you not to suppose that I am alluding to Pausanias and Agathon (compare Protag.), for my words refer to all mankind everywhere.…