ΣΥΜΠΟΣΙΟΝ
Floyer Sydenham, ed. Thomas Taylor (1804)
Plato · Floyer Sydenham, ed. Thomas Taylor (1804)
Scene: Principally within the City of Athens
At a banquet, each guest gives a speech in praise of Love. The summit is Socrates's account of what he learned from the priestess Diotima: that Love is a great daimon, neither god nor mortal, a longing for the beautiful and the good. Rightly guided, the lover ascends a ladder — from one beautiful body, to all bodies, to beautiful souls, laws, and knowledge, and at last to Beauty itself, the Form of the Beautiful.
The dialogue ends with the drunken Alcibiades' tribute to Socrates, likening him to a Silenus-figure, plain without but full of divine images within.
From the Plato Scroll Encyclopedia · open this entry in the reader
Apollodorus: The affair concerning which ye inquire I think myself now not quite unprepared to relate to you. For it happened a few days since, as I was walking up to the city from my house at Phalerus, that an acquaintance of mine, who was going the same way, seeing me at a considerable distance before him, called out to me; and by way of joke at the same time said, Apollodorus, you Phalerean, will not you stop a while till I come up to you? Upon which I stopped, and stayed for him. As soon as he had joined me, Apollodorus, said he, I was just now inquiring after you; from a desire I have to be thoroughly acquainted with what passed in the conversation between Agatho, and Socrates, and Alcibiades, and the rest who were of the party, at an entertainment where the subject of their discourse was Love. I should be glad to be informed by you what was said on the occasion. For the person who gave me some account of it, such as he received from Phœnix the son of Philippus, told me that you knew every particular: but that, as to himself, he did not pretend to be at all perfect or exact in his relation. Do you then give me an account of it yourself; for you have the best right to relate a conversation in which an intimate friend of your own had the most distinguished share. But first, said he, tell me, were you yourself one of the company?
—It appears plainly, said I, indeed, that your author by no means gave you an exact account of the circumstances of that conversation, if you suppose it passed so lately as to admit a possibility of my being of the company.
—Really I imagined so, replied he.
— How could it be, said I, Glauco? Do you not know that Agatho has not been at Athens for these many years? whereas it is not yet three since I first became a follower of Socrates, and began, as I have continued ever since, daily to observe and study all his sayings and actions. Before that time, running about here and there, wherever chance led me, and fancying myself all the while well employed, no mortal was in so wretched a condition as I: it was such as you are in at present, who give every study and every pursuit the preference to that of philosophy.
—Leave off railing, said he, and tell me when that conversation happened.
—Before we wrote ourselves men, replied I. It was at the time when Agatho brought his first tragedy upon the stage, and won the prize with it. It was the very next day after that himself and his chrous-singers had offered the usual thanksgiving-sacrifice for his victory.
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The Athenian who turned Socratic conversation into a written philosophy and founded the Academy.
Plato was born around 428 BCE into a wealthy and politically prominent Athenian family; through his mother Perictione the family traced kinship to the lawgiver Solon, and his relatives Critias and Charmides were among the oligarchs of the Thirty. A late tradition says his given name was Aristocles and that 'Plato' — from the word for 'broad' — was a nickname. He grew up during the long agony of the Peloponnesian War and came of age amid the violence and disillusion that followed Athens' defeat.
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