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Plato's Symposium1 CDC Reeve It Is Notoriously Difficult to Discover The Colloquium 3 Telling the Truth About Love: Plato's Symposium1 C.D.C. Reeve It is notoriously difficult to discover the truth about erotic love, difficult even to discover who we ought to learn it from (Freud, Darwin, the family doctor, a more experienced friend, a more experienced lover, a less experienced lover ...?). It is this latter difficulty that the Symposium addresses? It is about eros, about erotic love, certainly, but it is as much about authority in things erotic as it is about ta er6tika themselves. My discussion, which outlines an approach to the Symposium as a whole, will proceed in four stages mingling topics as seems appropriate. In Part I, I discuss Agathon, Pausanius, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and Phaedrus; in Part II, Socrates and his examination of Agathon; in Part III, Diotima's Speech; and in Part IV the speech of Alcibiades. I The collection of people at Agathon's dinner party is presented as being more or less accidental - these just are the people who happened to be there. But, as is always true of Plato's dialogues, 1. This is a revised version of a paper presented in the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy at Brown University and read subsequently at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Questions from Martha Nussbaum, comments from Mary Whitlock Blundell, and a very useful letter from Michael Pakaluk led me to make some important changes in Section III. Mark Bedau and Jennifer Dellner helped me inprove an earlier version. 2. Translations of the Symposium are based on Nehamas A., and Woodruff P., 1989. the list of characters is in fact carefully chosen to further the pur- poses of the dialogue itself. I am not confident that I have got to the bottom of the Symposium's list, but I am pretty sure that I have gone some significant way towards it. Agathon, Pausanius, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and Phaedrus are representatives of the various kinds of people from whom Athenians (or Athenian men, at any rate) acquired their views about erotic love: we have a tragic poet (Agathon), a comic poet (Aristophanes), a doctor (Eryximachus), an erastes (Pausanias), and an eromenos (Phaedrus).3 These are the equiva- lents of the erotic authorities from whom we learn about love: novelists, journalists, movie makers (Agathon, Aristophanes), and doctors (Eryximachus). We lack an exact equivalent for Pausanias and Phaedrus because our culture does not have the ritualized form of homosexuality, through which young men were supposed to learn arete or virtue, that they represent. But the sometimes recommended "older man" or "younger woman" are no doubt rough analogues.4 The speeches are interesting and I used to believe that they are intended to be mapped in some way onto the stages of the ascent of love Diotima discusses, but I no longer believe that or 3. The dramatic date of the Symposium is 416 BC, the year of Agathon's first victory. The historical Phaedrus was then probably in his mid-thirties - a bit old for an er6menos. But Phaedrus' speech suggests that this is his preferred erotic identity. 4. In the Protagoras, Socrates distinguishes between a "symposium of common, vulgar fellows" and a "symposium [cr'IJIl7tÓ1:al] of well-bred, educated people beaM1. -':홢:'1a901.]" (347c ff.). Flute-girls feature prominently in the former but are absent from the latter, where the members of the symposium "entertain one another with their own conversation without any such childish trifles, speaking and listening in turn in a dignified fashion, even if they drink a great deal" (347d5-el). The fact that the flute-girl is dismissed from Agathon's symposium (176e) pegs it as a symposium of -.:aM1. -.:åya9oL But, as Manuela Tecusan points out, in a brilliant study of Plato's various treatments of the symposium, "at the same time it [Agathon's symposium] does not fulfil this ideal, on account both of the rhetorical quality of the logoi and of the general descent into revelry at the end. So it might stand as an example of that kind of second-best a-ogn6atov alluded to in Protagoras 347c5-7, which, failing to meet the standards of a o,ovou(yia 8t' Èa'IJ1:rov, remains at least a owouofa 8i' eav2wv 7wyiuv, all the more so as Socrates himself delivers there the right sort of %6yo; 홢ro1l7t01:l-':óç, essential- ly different from those of the others." See Tequsan 1990. .
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