Chapter 4. Nostalgia and Virgil’s Pastoral Dream (On the Dangers of Playing Orpheus) Virgil, we are told, “was given a house in Maecenas’ gardens on the Esquiline with the hope of enticing him to Rome.” [1] With this in mind, it would be tempting to identify the Esquiline villa in which the Odyssey Frieze was found with Virgil’s Roman house, particularly since… Read more
Epilogue: The Medallions and Other Magic Gardens Barely visible beneath a century’s accumulation of grime, a limpid lake beckons the viewer, its grassy shores flanked by stands of stately trees, its waters reflecting the clouds that grace a moody sky. On the opposite wall is its pendent, the depiction of a small farmhouse shaded by a grove and accessed by a road winding its way through verdant… Read more
Illustrations Figure 1. Mapping utopia. Map of the wanderings of Odysseus. Figure 2. Blueprint of the ideal polis. Reconstruction: The Shield of Achilles. Figure 3. A landscape “of unusual, even startling interest.” Red-figure pelikē: Odysseus, Elpenor, and Hermes in the Underworld. Figure 4. Alone in the realm of Nature. Attic black-figure amphora: the suicide of Ajax. … Read more
Bibliography Agrest, D. I. 1991. Architecture from Without: Theoretical Framings for a Critical Practice. Cambridge, MA. Alberti, L. B. 1965. The Ten Books of Architecture (1485). Reprint from the Leoni Edition of 1755, ed. J. Rykwert. London. Alden, M. 2000. Homer Beside Himself: Para-Narratives in the Iliad. Oxford. Anderson, M. L. 1987. Pompeian Frescoes… Read more
Diagrams and Illustrations [Due to copyright restrictions, some of the images included in the print version of this book are not available for reproduction online. Where possible, those unavailable images have been replaced by open source images or links to relevant citation information.] Chapter Eight Figure 1. Seating arrangement of the guests at Agathon’s symposion Figure 2. Historical incidents in the aftermath of… Read more
Acknowledgments To our students past, present, and future Each of the essays included in this volume was presented at a conference held at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC, in August of 2005. On behalf of all the conference participants we would like to thank the Director of the Center, Professor Gregory Nagy, Associate Director Douglas Frame, Programs Officer Jennifer Reilly, Executive Assistant… Read more
Introduction In his Symposium Plato crafted a set of speeches in praise of love that has attracted the interest of philosophers, theologians, poets, and artists from antiquity down to the present day. In the third century CE, Plotinus drew on aspects of the Symposium to fashion an account of the nature of the twin processes of emanation and return to “the One.” Following Plotinus’ lead, a… Read more
1. The Symposium as a Socratic Dialogue Christopher Rowe This essay will make one very specific claim: that the Symposium is properly to be treated as a Socratic dialogue. In one way it will of course be quite uncontroversial to describe the Symposium as “Socratic”: Socrates is on any account the focus of the whole dialogue, which ends as it begins, with a celebration of particular… Read more
Two: The Role of the Earlier Speeches in the Symposium: Plato’s Endoxic Method? Frisbee C. C. Sheffield [1] It is well known that there are deep and important differences between Plato and Aristotle. One of these concerns the status and role of endoxa in philosophical inquiry. Although Aristotle appears to find value in the endoxa, that is in “the things… Read more
3. A Platonic Reading of Plato’s Symposium Lloyd P. Gerson 1. The American poet and critic John Jay Chapman (1862–1933) wrote, … to the historical student, to the man who not only knows something of books, but something of the world, the Symposium of Plato is seen to have been in every age since Plato the most effective plea for evil that one can… Read more
