In fact, your question does not find me unprepared. Just the other day, as it happens, I was walking to the city from my home in Phaleron when a man I know, who was making his way behind me, saw me and called from a distance:
“The gentleman from Phaleron!” he yelled, trying to be funny. “Hey, Apollodorus, wait!”
So I stopped and waited.
“Apollodorus, I’ve been looking for you!” he said. “You know there once was a gathering at Agathon’s when Socrates, Alcibiades, and their friends had dinner together; I wanted to ask you about the speeches they made on Love. What were they? I heard a version from a man who had it from Phoenix, Philip’s son, but it was badly garbled, and he said you were the one to ask. So please, will you tell me all about it? After all, Socrates is your friend – who has a better right than you to report his conversation?
About thirty years ago – pre-internet, if you can imagine that – I saw a silly rom-com titled The Butcher’s Wife. The particulars aren’t important, but there’s a scene in which a country bumpkin and a New York psychiatrist bond over the story that people were once bound together in twos, then split-apart, giving us all the urge to find our lost halves. When the naif is shocked that someone else knows the story her grandmother told her, he tells her, “Everybody knows it. It’s Plato. A corruption, but Plato nonetheless.”
I found that odd. In spite of the fact that this guy thinks “everybody” knows Plato, I didn’t know much about Plato – I’d read the Cave thing and some assorted excerpts in college, I don’t think I’d even read Sophie’s World yet – and from what I did know, he seemed too rational to believe something so fanciful. It’s one thing to propose a plane of existence above ours with ideal forms, and another to change biology. But I didn’t know what to do about it.
At some point I encountered some article that indicated this split-apart theory, as I thought of it thanks to Demi Moore, was indeed part of Plato’s corpus, but he’d had it relayed via Aristophanes, a comic dramatist he didn’t particularly respect and who’d written a play ridiculing Socrates. This was Plato’s way of making the idea, and the playwright, seem ridiculous.
That was my first exposure to Plato’s Symposium.
It took me thirty years to read the actual work. And that, friends, is one of the primary benefits to me of the Catherine Project – it gets me to read stuff instead of reading about stuff.
Granted, I didn’t sign up for the Spring Seminar (a one-session group read) only because of that. I’d just finished a Reading Group that included Xenophon’s Symposium, and I was curious to compare the two. That was an interesting exercise as well: whereas Xenophon’s work started out crystal clear and then befuddled me with recursive speeches requiring remembering what a half-dozen people said a few pages ago (my doctor keeps telling me I don’t have any memory problems, and I keep trying to convince her otherwise), Plato starts of in an absolute fog of recursion concerning who is relating the story and who told them before settling down into an orderly progression of individual speeches about love.
I brought up that fuzzy beginning, quoted above – yes, it starts in the middle of a conversation – in the Seminar. While the possibility that some piece has been lost to antiquity can’t be ruled out, there was the feeling that it was a deliberate way to emphasize that philosophy itself is an ongoing conversation. Readers also mentioned it fits with the search for Truth: the person inquiring has a distorted view of what happened, and is driven by a love of the good and beautiful to improve his view.
The primary topic of both Symposiums is Love. The myth related by Aristophanes is intended to explain why we so desperately seek out our perfect match. Most of the speeches, given by a mixed group of Athens gentlemen, try to define love, and its importance in our lives: it makes us courageous, harmonizes our conflicting aspects, is the source of virtue. But the star of the discussion belongs to Socrates, who tells of a discussion he had with the prophetess Diotima long ago: the Ladder of Love, in which lust, love of the beautiful body, is a kind of practice in developing love of the beautiful soul, then love of beautiful institutions, and, eventually, for those who are able to keep learning, love of Beauty itself.
The group discussed many aspects of this piece over two hours. It’s unusual that Socrates had taken to heart the view of a woman, since women were, shall we say, not particularly respected in ancient Athens. In fact, the love being discussed was between men; while men had wives with which to create more Athenians, the important relationships were male and were something like mentoring with benefits. Among the more interesting points was the role of love as the mediator between man and the gods, a way to come closer to divine perfection.
In my preparation for the group, I also found a long-ago lecture – one of many on Youtube by the recently deceased Columbia professor Michael Sugrue – which further tied together structure and meaning, He shows the zigzagging of the discussion from the ridiculous to the sublime: Aristophanes’ hiccups interrupt a beautiful speech on love as mediator of our conflicting passions, and Alcibiades, the Bad Boy of Athens, comes stumbling in right as Socrates finishes his impassioned plea for climbing love’s ladder and hits on him, claiming he loves the beautiful soul of the ugly philosopher. This inability to live up to one’s potential seems to be a common problem with humanity, one we deal with in every era.
It’s through Alcibiades, however, that I feel a renewed need to delve into the history of Athens with more deliberation, as it plays out in every aspect of writing, both philosophical and dramatic. I again made up a quick-and-dirty Timeline of the important events, which include both Symposiums and, to the degree I can, the career of Alcibiades:
- Aristophanes wrote The Clouds in 423 BCE
- Xenophon’s Symposium took place in 422 BCE
- Alcibiades made general for the first time 420 BCE
- The Symposium itself, celebrating Agathon’s winning of the prize for his first play, would have occurred (if it occurred at all) in 416 BCE
- Mutilation of the Herms 415 BCE blamed on Alcibiades; he denied it but skipped to Sparta
- Alcibiades lived with Tissaphernes (Persia) then in 412 deserted Sparta and was welcomed back to Athens.
- Athens lost the Peloponnesian war and banished Alcibiades in 405 BCE.
- Alcibiades was murdered in Phrygia in 404 BCE.
- The account of the Symposium given by Apollodorus – the “action” of the envelope of the story – is set between 406 and 400 BCE
- Plato wrote The Symposium between 385 BCE and 378 BCE
- Xenophon wrote his Symposium in approx. late 360s BCE
I have a lot of work to do to fill this in and, specifically, to better understand how Alcibiades was viewed at the time of the party verses when the story was recalled – and, for that matter, the time when Plato wrote it. A lot happened in between those three moments.
This summer, however, I’m detouring to the Middle Ages in my Catherine Project participation; I hope to go back to 400 BCE next Fall. I believe Socrates, and the rest of them, will be patient and wait.
A Just Recompense 