The Symposium

Summary

The Symposium is a framed dialogue about eros, memory and ascent. Apollodorus repeats what Aristodemus told him about a banquet at Agathon’s house after the poet’s tragic victory. Because the guests drank heavily the previous night, they agree to moderate the wine and give speeches praising Love. Phaedrus honors eros as the source of courage and noble shame. Pausanias distinguishes common from heavenly love, using the language of education and social custom. Eryximachus, the physician, expands love into a cosmic principle of harmony in bodies, seasons, music and sacrifice. Aristophanes offers the famous comic myth of original round humans split in two, explaining desire as the search for one’s lost half. Agathon praises Love as young, beautiful and virtuous. Socrates then questions him and reports the teaching of Diotima, a wise woman from Mantinea. She defines eros not as possession but as desire for what one lacks: the wish to possess the good forever. Love seeks immortality through children, fame, laws, knowledge and finally contemplation of Beauty itself. The ladder of love moves from one beautiful body to all bodies, souls, laws, sciences and the Form of Beauty. The philosophical mood is shattered by Alcibiades, drunk and garlanded, who praises Socrates as erotically irresistible because he awakens longing while refusing ordinary seduction. The dialogue ends in disorder, with Socrates still awake and arguing that the same poet should write tragedy and comedy. The Symposium matters because it treats desire as lack, wound, education and possible therapy. It is also a social document of drinking, same-sex eros, jealousy, charisma and the unstable boundary between philosophy and intoxication. Because every speech partly reveals the speaker, the dialogue is also a gallery of intellectual temperaments. Comic myth, medical harmony, poetic ornament, priestly instruction and drunken confession all compete to define love. Plato’s art lies in making eros both the topic of conversation and the force that distorts, energizes and exposes the conversation itself.

Plot or Argument

• A remembered banquet

  Apollodorus narrates Aristodemus’ memory of Agathon’s party, making the dialogue a performance of transmission.

• Early praises of Love

  Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes and Agathon offer civic, erotic, medical, comic and poetic accounts of eros.

• Socrates and Diotima

  Socrates reports Diotima’s teaching that love desires lasting possession of the good and ascends toward Beauty.

• Alcibiades interrupts

  The drunken Alcibiades praises Socrates as a strange beloved who exposes the soul’s shame and longing.

• Afterparty and wakefulness

  The gathering dissolves, but Socrates remains awake, moving between comedy, tragedy and philosophy.

Characters

• Socrates, philosopher

  Questions Agathon and reports Diotima’s transformative teaching on eros.

• Diotima, teacher in Socrates’ account

  Priestess or wise woman who defines love as desire for the good and beautiful.

• Alcibiades, drunken speaker

  Charismatic Athenian politician who describes his frustrated erotic pursuit of Socrates.

• Aristophanes, comic poet

  Explains desire through the myth of divided original humans.

• Eryximachus, physician

  Turns love into a principle of bodily and cosmic harmony.

• Agathon, host and tragedian

  Gives an ornate praise of Love before Socrates questions him.

Lessons

• Desire reveals lack

  Diotima makes eros a sign that we do not possess what we seek. Love becomes diagnostic: it shows the soul its poverty and direction.

  • What does each speaker think love lacks?
  • Is lack painful, creative or both?

• The body can educate the soul

  The ladder of love does not simply despise bodies; it begins with them and asks desire to widen. Plato imagines sublimation as training.

  • Does the ladder preserve or abandon personal love?
  • What gets lost in ascent?

• Philosophy competes with intoxication

  The banquet setting matters: wine, jealousy and erotic display surround the search for truth. Socrates’ sobriety is itself a dramatic claim.

  • How does Alcibiades change the dialogue?
  • Is Socrates cruel or therapeutic?

Context

The dialogue looks back to elite Athenian sympotic culture before the full disaster of Alcibiades’ career and the Peloponnesian War’s end.

Composition

Usually dated to Plato’s middle period, perhaps the 380s BCE. Its dramatic date is shortly after Agathon’s first tragic victory in 416 BCE.

Reception

The Symposium shaped later theories of Platonic love, beauty, sublimation, queer classical reception and philosophical eros.

Comparisons

• phaedrus-and-letters-vii-and-viii

  Both dialogues make eros a force that can degrade or elevate the soul toward beauty and truth.

• on-friendship

  Montaigne’s friendship is particular and mutual, unlike Diotima’s ascent from individual beauty to form.

• twenty-love-poems-and-a-song-of-despair

  Neruda’s erotic lyric remains bodily and personal, offering a modern counterweight to Platonic sublimation.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The frame at the opening: Apollodorus repeats a story he heard from Aristodemus about a party held years before. Ask why Plato makes the conversation reach us secondhand, through people who loved Socrates.
• Aristophanes' hiccups, which force him to give up his turn so that Eryximachus the physician speaks first. Notice how even this comic interruption puts the doctor and the comic poet side by side.
• Aristophanes' myth of the original round human beings split in half by Zeus, so that each half longs for its lost other. Compare its picture of love as restoration with Diotima's picture of love as ascent.
• Socrates' questioning of Agathon, which ends with Agathon admitting he did not know what he was talking about, and Socrates' report of Diotima's teaching on the birth of Eros from Poverty and Resource.
• The entrance of the drunken Alcibiades, who compares Socrates to the Silenus statues that look grotesque outside but hold images of gods within, and tells of Socrates at Potidaea and at the retreat from Delium.

Key terms and names

Symposium

A Greek drinking party held after dinner, with wine, entertainment, and conversation. At Agathon's party the guests agree to drink moderately, send away the flute girl, and give speeches in praise of Love.

Eros

Love as desire, honored by the earlier speakers as a god. Diotima teaches that Eros is not a god but a spirit between gods and mortals, because he desires the beauty and good he lacks.

Diotima

The wise woman of Mantinea whose teaching Socrates reports instead of giving a speech of his own. Through her, Socrates presents himself as a student rather than a master of love.

Poros and Penia

Resource and Poverty, the parents of Eros in Diotima's myth, who conceived him at the feast for Aphrodite's birth. Eros inherits his mother's neediness and his father's cunning pursuit of the good.

The ladder of love

Diotima's ascent from love of one beautiful body to all bodies, then to beautiful souls, laws, and branches of knowledge, until the lover suddenly sees Beauty itself, unchanging and unmixed.

Silenus figures

Carved statues of the satyr-like Silenus that open to reveal small images of gods. Alcibiades uses them to describe Socrates, whose ugly face and plain speech hide something divine.

Encomium

A formal speech of praise. Each guest offers an encomium of Love, and each one reveals as much about the speaker's profession and character as about Love.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What does each of the first five speakers, Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and Agathon, praise Love for doing or being?
2. Comprehension According to Diotima, why is Eros neither beautiful nor ugly, neither wise nor ignorant, and neither a god nor a mortal?
3. Interpretation Aristophanes says lovers seek their lost other half, but Diotima says lovers seek only the good, and will cut off even their own limbs if they are diseased. Which account better explains what the lover wants, and why does Plato let both stand in the dialogue?
4. Interpretation Socrates refutes Agathon gently and then speaks as Diotima's pupil. Why might Plato have Socrates present his own teaching about love as something he was taught by someone else?
5. Interpretation Alcibiades arrives after the speeches are over and praises Socrates rather than Love. In what ways does his speech confirm Diotima's teaching, and in what ways does it challenge it?
6. Interpretation At the end, while the others sleep, Socrates argues that the same poet should be able to write both tragedy and comedy and then goes off to spend the day as usual. What does this closing image suggest about Socrates and about the dialogue itself?
7. Big Question Does climbing Diotima's ladder toward Beauty itself fulfill our love for particular people, or does it leave them behind?

Faith Connections

• 1 John 4:7-16 (Scripture)

  John teaches that God is love and that love comes from God. Diotima denies that Eros is a god because love lacks what it desires; the contrast between love as need and love as the overflowing nature of God is one of the great hinges between Plato and Christian thought.

• 1 Corinthians 13 (Scripture)

  Paul describes a love that seeks not its own and ends in seeing face to face rather than in a mirror. Students can set Paul's account of love beside Diotima's ascent, which also ends in a direct vision but begins in desire to possess the good forever.

• Augustine, Confessions X.27 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine addresses God as a Beauty ancient and new whom he loved too late, having sought beauty in created things. He takes up the Platonic movement from lesser beauties to Beauty itself and finds that the Beauty he sought was a Person who called to him.

• C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, chapter on Eros (Great Conversation)

  Lewis treats eros as a noble love that becomes destructive when it is worshipped as a god. His warning answers the Symposium's first speakers, who honor Love as a god, and agrees in part with Diotima, who lowers Eros to an intermediary spirit.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Everyone loves what is beautiful and good, and one desires only what one lacks. Therefore Love itself is not beautiful or good but needy, an intermediary between mortal and divine. Since love desires to possess the good forever, and mortals cannot possess anything forever, love seeks immortality by begetting in beauty, through children, fame, laws, and knowledge. Therefore the highest love rises from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself, where the lover begets true virtue.

Rhetorical device: elenchus (Socratic cross-examination). Before reporting Diotima's speech, Socrates questions Agathon until Agathon agrees that Love desires what it lacks and therefore lacks beauty, overturning Agathon's own claim that Love is the most beautiful of gods. The refutation clears the ground for Diotima's teaching by showing that the confident praise before it rested on an unexamined premise.

Debate: Resolved: Aristophanes' myth of the lost other half describes human love more truly than Diotima's ladder.

Memory Work

He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty

Writing Prompts

Essay: Each speaker at Agathon's party praises Love in a way that reflects his own profession or character. Choose three speeches, including Diotima's, and argue how Plato uses the speakers' characters to judge their accounts of Love.

Comparison with Confessions: Diotima describes an ascent from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself, and Augustine in Confessions Book IX describes the vision at Ostia in which he and Monica rise beyond created things toward God. Compare the two ascents and argue what Augustine keeps from Plato and what he transforms.

Medical Lens

The Symposium is relevant through Eryximachus the physician, the managed drinking-party, and eros as a condition of body and soul. Eryximachus medicalizes love as harmony and disorder in bodies, seasons and music. Diotima’s ladder can be read as philosophical therapy or sublimation, but modern psychoanalytic language should be used as analogy, not as Plato’s own frame. Alcibiades’ intoxicated speech highlights alcohol, shame and erotic obsession.

• Eryximachus speech

  A physician defines love as harmony and disorder in bodies, medicine, music, seasons and sacrifice.

  Physicians Doctors Mind Body
• Symposium setting

  The guests regulate drinking after earlier excess, making intoxication part of the social frame.

  Alcohol Altered States
• Diotima speech

  Love ascends from bodies to souls, laws, knowledge and Beauty itself as a therapeutic education of desire.

  Philosophy AS Therapy Sexuality Medicalized
• Alcibiades speech

  A drunken Alcibiades describes erotic fixation, shame and failed seduction of Socrates.

  Alcohol Obsession Monomania Sexuality Medicalized

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Let Diotima and a psychodynamic therapist compare sublimation, longing and the education of desire.

• Essay

  Trace how the frame narrative makes memory itself erotic: everyone wants access to a vanished conversation.

Further Reading

• Plato: Symposium, Plato

• The Fragility of Goodness, Martha C. Nussbaum

• Plato’s Erotic Dialogues, William S. Cobb