The Center for Hellenic Studies

Chapters

Book Chapter

Part III. The Symposium, Sex, and Gender10. Agathon, Pausanias, and Diotima in Plato’s Symposium: Paiderastia and Philosophia, Luc Brisson

10. Agathon, Pausanias and Diotima in Plato’s Symposium: Paiderastia and Philosophia Luc Brisson My goal in this contribution [1] is to shift the center of interest of Plato’s magnificent dialogue the Symposium on two points. First, by showing that the dialogue develops a critique of a specific form of education within the framework of paiderastia , [2]… Read more

Book Chapter

9. The Virtues of Platonic Love, Gabriela Roxana Carone

9. The Virtues of Platonic Love Gabriela Roxana Carone Socrates’ speech on Love in the Symposium (201–212), reporting his conversation with the Mantinean priest Diotima, stands as prima facie counterintuitive. First, it is not clear that it has anything to say about interpersonal love at all; and even if it does, it might seem to offer a view that conforms pretty well to our popular… Read more

Book Chapter

8. Tragedy Off-Stage, Debra Nails

8. Tragedy Off-Stage Debra Nails Plato weaves strands of the tragic and the comic, high seriousness and low bawdiness, into his Symposium; that much is uncontroversial. If someone should miss the sweep of the plot from the celebration of Agathon’s prize for tragedy to the waves of drunken revelers, the kômos, there is a telling reminder at the end. With snores in the background, Socrates is… Read more

Book Chapter

7. Where is Socrates on the “Ladder of Love”? Ruby Blondell

7. Where is Socrates on the “Ladder of Love”? Ruby Blondell On the Road “Where is [Socrates]?” Agathon asks Aristodemus, when the latter shows up at his house a couple of pages into Plato’s Symposium (174c12). Later Alcibiades tacitly likens Socrates to Odysseus (220c), the archetypal wanderer, thus obliquely raising the question of where he is in his larger “travels.” [1]… Read more

Book Chapter

6. A Study in Violets: Alcibiades in the Symposium, C. D. C. Reeve

6. A Study in Violets: Alcibiades in the Symposium C. D. C. Reeve [1] Agathon’s drinking-party has reached its philosophical apogee in Socrates’ vivid, Diotima-inspired description of the ultimate object of all love and desire, the Platonic form of beauty—the beautiful itself. All of a sudden, there is a commotion and loud knocking. Someone “very drunk and shouting loudly” is… Read more

Book Chapter

3. A Platonic Reading of Plato’s Symposium, Lloyd P. Gerson

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

Book Chapter

Part I. The Symposium and Plato’s Philosophy1. The Symposium as a Socratic Dialogue, Christopher Rowe

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