The Symposium
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~23,200 words · 110 passages
Cite this work
- APAXenophon. (n.d.). The Symposium. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/xenophon/the-symposium
- MLAXenophon. "The Symposium." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/xenophon/the-symposium.
- ChicagoXenophon. The Symposium. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/xenophon/the-symposium.
What it is about
A dinner with Socrates among guests, a jester and some acrobats, ending in a speech on love.
Context and history
It invites direct comparison with Plato's Symposium, which stages the same scene and theme: here the mood is more domestic and funnier, and the love defended is less ascending and more human. Having both is what makes the difference between the two disciples visible.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
This was typed from Dakyns' series, "The Works of Xenophon," a four-volume set. The complete list of Xenophon's works (though there is doubt about some of these) is: Work Number of books The Anabasis 7 The Hellenica 7 The Cyropaedia 8 The Memorabilia 4 The Symposium 1 The Economist 1 On Horsemanship 1 The Sportsman 1 The Cavalry General 1 The Apology 1 On Revenues 1 The Hiero 1 The Agesilaus 1 The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians 2 Text in brackets "{}" is my transliteration of Greek text into English using an Oxford English Dictionary alphabet table. The diacritical marks have been lost. THE SYMPOSIUM← Back to Xenophon