The Symposium
Platoc. 385 BCEPlato staged a dinner party where some of Athens's sharpest minds take turns explaining what love is, and every answer says more about the speaker than about love.
Read this if you…
- are curious about how the greeks philosophized about love (including the pederasty)
- like a little bit of relationship drama in the middle of debates on love
Skip this if you…
- find men discussing loving younger boys off-putting
Why It Matters
Plato staged a dinner party where some of Athens's sharpest minds take turns explaining what love is, and every answer says more about the speaker than about love. Socrates's version, Diotima's "ladder of love" climbing from physical beauty up to Beauty itself, shaped how the West thinks about love, desire, and reaching for something higher. It's also the most fun any philosophical dialogue has ever been to read.
The 
Take
Wow did the ancient Greeks love loving boys. An entire book of Plato’s devoted to it. Socrates steals the show among 8ish speeches.
Where to go next
- Theogony/Works and Days by Hesiod. The Symposium built on it. - *The Symposium*'s opening speech leans on Hesiod — Phaedrus quotes the *Theogony* to crown Eros the oldest of the gods - "First Chaos came, and then broad-bosomed Earth ... and Love": knowing Hesiod's genealogy first shows you exactly which line Plato is mining and why it settles the argument - It's a small but telling debt — Plato reaches for the oldest cosmogony he knows to give the praise of love an ancient pedigree
- The Iliad by Homer. The Symposium built on it. - Phaedrus' speech argues straight from Homer — "by Homer's account" — making the *Iliad*'s Achilles the highest example of love - His willingness to die avenging Patroclus, the engine of the whole epic, is repurposed here as moral philosophy - Plato even corrects Aeschylus on who loved whom; reading the *Iliad* first shows you exactly what he's adjudicating
- The Clouds by Aristophanes. The Symposium built on it. - The Aristophanes who delivers *The Symposium*'s origin-of-love myth is the same playwright who mocked Socrates in *The Clouds* — Plato seats his old antagonist at the table - Read *The Clouds* first and the casting turns pointed: Plato has Socrates blame that very play for the slander that he "walks on air and studies things in the heavens," then stages a comic-but-serious counter-portrait - The whole gesture is an answer to the comedy that helped sink Socrates
- The Satyricon by Petronius. The Symposium shaped it. - Petronius read the *Symposium* closely enough to turn it inside out - Trimalchio's dinner is the sympotic dialogue gone to seed — the philosophy of eros traded for new-money vulgarity, refined Athenian wit for freedman excess - Watch for Habinnas crashing the party drunk: that's Plato's Alcibiades, ivy-crowned and uninvited, reborn as a stonemason on the make
- The Golden Ass by Apuleius. The Symposium shaped it. - Apuleius was a card-carrying Platonist — he literally wrote a treatise *On Plato and His Doctrine* — and it shows in his fiction - The Cupid and Psyche tale at the heart of the *Golden Ass* is built on Plato's two-Eros doctrine: Cupid's dual nature maps onto the Heavenly and Common Venus of Pausanias and Diotima - Apuleius paraphrases the *Symposium* to point the allegory — the soul (Psyche) in love is Platonic philosophy turned into story
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. The Symposium shaped it. - Wilde read *The Symposium* in Greek at Oxford, and its ladder of love — beauty leading the soul upward toward the highest form — is the scaffolding under Basil's worship of Dorian - Plato's eros between an older mentor and a beautiful youth becomes the Lord Henry–Dorian–Basil triangle - *Dorian Gray* takes the ascent toward ideal beauty and asks what happens when it stalls at the surface
Depicted in Art
Socrates physically drags a half-clothed Alcibiades away from a reclining woman in an opulent interior.
Jean-Baptiste Regnault, 1791
The drunken Alcibiades, half-naked and wreathed in vines, bursts into Agathon's banquet trailed by revelers as the reclining philosophers turn to greet him.
Anselm Feuerbach, 1869
In a sunlit colonnaded courtyard Socrates confronts Alcibiades, who reclines with a hetaera among scattered wine vessels and lounging companions.
Henryk Siemiradzki, 1873
A symposion scene with Alcibiades reclined across a couch beside Socrates in a darkened interior of Mediterranean colour.
Kristian Zahrtmann
Alcibiades, crowned with ivy and supported by a flute-girl, makes his drunken entrance into Agathon's torchlit hall of reclining diners.
Anselm Feuerbach, 1874
Alcibiades in armor turns toward an austere Socrates seated beside him, both isolated against a dark classical interior.
Marcello Bacciarelli, 1777
Recommended Editions
Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff
Hackett Publishing · 1989
Nehamas and Woodruff are the philosophy-class default Symposium. Each speaker sounds like a different person, Alcibiades' drunk entrance actually lands, and the philosophy stays sharp without going dry.
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Deep Dive
What It's About
This summary gives away plot details.
Notable Quotes
“And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love.”
“Love is born into every human being; it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.”
More by Plato
- Apology
c. 399 BCE · Dialogue
- Phaedo
c. 385 BCE · Dialogue
- The Republic
c. 375 BCE · Dialogue
- Phaedrus
c. 370 BCE · Dialogue