Symposium

What It Is

A dialogue of about seventy pages, written around 385 BC and set at a private party in 416 BC, the night after the playwright Agathon won his first victory at the dramatic festival. The guests, hungover from celebrating, agree to drink lightly and make speeches instead. Each in turn will praise Eros.

It is the most enjoyable thing Plato wrote and the least like philosophy as we now practise it. There is a comic playwright, a doctor, a tragedian, a lawyer, Socrates, and a great deal of wine. Some of the speeches are brilliant. Some are pompous. One of them is delivered under conditions no philosopher would choose.

The Symposium is the strongest evidence for the claim that Plato was the finest prose artist in Greek as well as its greatest philosopher. He is writing comedy, drama and argument at once, and the argument is built out of the collision.

Why It Matters

This is where the West got its vocabulary for love. The most quoted account of romantic love in circulation entered our culture from one of these speeches, delivered by a speaker whose profession should make you suspicious of it. The phrase Platonic love comes from the Renaissance reading of these pages, and Ficino's commentary of 1469 set the terms for three centuries of European poetry.

Underneath the party is a serious proposal: that desire is not a defect to be managed but the engine of everything human beings do, and that what such an appetite can be trained to reach for is the question the evening finally turns on. Whether that is liberating or a piece of high-minded evasion is the question the dialogue leaves with you. Nietzsche and Freud both took it seriously enough to argue with it.

Before You Read

Two hours, and one of the very few philosophical works that is a pleasure the whole way. Read it in one sitting. It is an evening, and it should be taken as one.

A little context pays for itself. Athens in 416 BC was rich, brilliant and about to make the most catastrophic decision in its history. Plato's first readers knew what the following decade would bring, and they could not read this evening without that knowledge. The party has a shadow on it that no summary conveys.

The speeches are not equal, and they are not meant to be. Resist the urge to treat the early ones as filler on the way to Socrates. Plato gave those arguments to men who half-believe them, and half is where most of us live.

Which Translation to Read

• Robin Waterfield (Oxford World's Classics) — recommended. The best-sounding Symposium in English. Waterfield can hear the difference between a doctor being pedantic and a poet showing off, and he renders each voice as a voice. His introduction and notes give you the historical room without pre-empting the reading. The cost: he is freer with the Greek than the Hackett version, and where a term is technical he sometimes takes the graceful English over the exact one. View on Amazon →
• Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Hackett, 1989). The philosophers' Symposium and the American classroom standard, precise on the vocabulary of desire and knowledge, with a first-rate introduction on the argument. The cost: the drama is flatter. You get what the speeches mean more clearly than you hear how they sound.
• Christopher Gill (Penguin Classics). Clear, reliable modern English with strong notes on Athenian sexual and social convention, which matters more here than in any other dialogue. The cost: safe. It rarely does anything wrong and rarely does anything memorable.

Take Waterfield to enjoy the evening, Nehamas and Woodruff to argue about it afterwards, Gill if you want the social world explained as you go.

The Folio Society has issued the Symposium in an illustrated edition with artwork by Tom Phillips: the handsomest way to own it, and not the text to learn from.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it as a play. Note who interrupts, who flatters, who is drunk, who is performing for whom. Plato gives every speaker a manner, and the manner is an argument about the man. Ask of each speech what kind of person would find it convincing; that is the question the dialogue is really putting, and it is putting it to you.

Read the introduction afterwards. Most of them walk through the speeches in order, which spends the best evening in Greek literature before you have arrived at it.

The commonest mistake is to skim to Socrates and treat the rest as a warm-up. The speeches before him are the reason his lands. The second is to assume that because this is a book about love, it will be reassuring about it.