Symposium

Introduction

In the year 416 BC the young poet Agathon won the prize for tragedy at the Lenaea festival in Athens, and on the following evening he gave a dinner for a few friends. Among them were the physician Eryximachus, the comic poet Aristophanes, and Socrates. Instead of drinking hard, the guests agreed to spend the evening in speeches, each praising Love, the god Eros, as beautifully as he could. Years later, after Agathon had left Athens and Alcibiades was dead, the whole evening is retold by Apollodorus, a devoted follower of Socrates, who heard it from Aristodemus, who was there. The Symposium is that retelling: a dialogue in the form of a banquet, and one of the most perfectly made works of ancient literature.

The speeches rise one above another. Phaedrus praises Love as the oldest of the gods and the source of courage and self-sacrifice. Pausanias distinguishes a common love of bodies from a heavenly love that seeks the virtue of the beloved. Eryximachus extends love to the whole of nature, to medicine, music and the seasons. Aristophanes, cured of his hiccups, tells the famous myth of the round human beings cut in two by Zeus, each half for ever seeking its other half. Agathon, in a dazzling display of style, praises Love as the youngest, most delicate and most beautiful of the gods.

Then Socrates speaks, and the dialogue changes key. By a few questions he shows Agathon that love is always love of something it lacks, and so cannot itself be beautiful. He then relates what he once learned from Diotima, a wise woman of Mantinea. Love, she taught him, is neither god nor mortal but a great spirit between the two, the child of Resource and Poverty, always in need and always contriving; and that is why Love is a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. What all human beings desire is that the good should be theirs for ever; and since mortal nature can share in immortality only by bringing forth, love is a giving birth in beauty, in body and in soul — in children, in poems, in laws, in virtue.

At the heart of the dialogue stands Diotima's account of the ascent of love: from one beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, from bodies to souls, from souls to practices and laws, from these to the sciences, until at last the lover beholds beauty itself — eternal, unchanging, pure and unmixed, in which all beautiful things share. There, she says, if anywhere, human life is worth living. These pages have shaped the whole later tradition of thought about love and beauty, from Plotinus and Augustine through Dante and the Renaissance to the present day; the very phrase "Platonic love" comes from them.

Then the door bursts open and Alcibiades enters, drunk and crowned with ivy. Instead of praising Love, he praises Socrates: a silenus figure, ugly outside and full of golden images of the gods within; a man who resisted his beauty, endured the frosts of Potidaea barefoot, saved his life in battle and walked calmly through the rout at Delium. The portrait of Socrates that emerges is the fullest in all of Plato. The banquet ends at dawn, with Socrates still talking, the others asleep, and the philosopher going off to spend the day as he always did. This translation is made from the Greek text of John Burnet's Oxford edition. The numbers in the margin (172a, 172b …) are the Stephanus references used in every edition and translation of Plato, so that any passage can be found and cited.