Plato, Symposium I

Posted: Mon, Jan 26, 2026

Today

  • Wrap up course logistics
  • Introduce the Symposium
  • Phaedrus, Pausanias, Aristophanes’ hiccup, Eryximachus
  • Aristophanes’ comedic myth

Plato’s Symposium

Dialogue: Philosophical conversation written as fictional play/drama, often using real historical figures as characters.

Symposium: “Drinking together” for aristocratic men.

  • Held in the andron (men’s room/man cave) of the house, with couches lined against the walls.
  • Dignified women (wives and daughters) are prohibited; courtesans (but not hookers) may be hired for entertainment and sex.
  • Functions to facilitate intellectual as well as bodily pleasure—eat, drink, recite poetry, talk philosophy, and enjoy sex.
  • Also serves as an important site for pederastic relationships among male Athenian aristocrats.

Pederasty: Our best interpretation today of how pederasty worked in the ancient Greek world has grown out of Kenneth Dover’s pathbreaking 1978 book Greek Homosexuality.

  • An older erastês (“lover”) pursues a younger erômenos (“beloved”).
  • “Younger”: ~16- to 19-year-old on the verge of full manhood (i.e., adult height but not yet fully-beard); the erastês may not be that much older than the erômenos.
  • Martha Nussbaum characterizes the erômenos as so perfectly beautiful that “[h]e is something like a god, or the statue of a god,” who “is aware of his attractiveness, but self-absorbed in his relationship with those who desire him. He will smile sweetly at the admiring lover; he will show appreciation for the other’s friendship, advice, and assistance. He will allow the lover to greet him by touching, affectionately, his genitals and his face, while he looks, himself, demurely at the ground” (The Fragility of Goodness, p. 188).
  • The relationship is educational: The erastês provides moral and intellectual mentorship for the erômenos, which the erômenos repays with sex.
  • Gender roles: The erastês is the active party, whom the passive erômenos submits to.

Penetration is a special gendered land mine.

  • Penetration is culturally coded as agentive and masculine.
    • Contemporary satire: “New Gender-Inclusive USB Standards Rename Connectors to Dom and Sub” (also check out gender changers)
    • This is our interpretation, as “this same act could instead be described in terms of the woman’s vagina ‘consuming’ the man’s penis” (Julia Serano, Sexed Up, p. 86).
    • As we will see, penetration also takes up a philosophical significance in Aristophanes as the (transient) fusing of two bodies/halves.
  • Aristocratic customs condemn being penetrated as unbecoming of manhood.
    • Dover’s interpretation: Intercrural penetration provides a workaround.
    • But: The erômenos is still not supposed to enjoy being penetrated—too submissive and womanly!
    • But: The erômenos is still not supposed to desire back with arousal—too active and threatening of the erastês’s manhood!
  • Dover on ancient Greek art depicting pederasty: “The penis of the erastes is sometimes erect even before any bodily contact is established, but that of the eromenos remains flaccid even in circumstances to which one would expect the penis of any healthy adolescent to respond willy-nilly” (p. 96).
    • Nussbaum: “Dover may not be justified in supposing that these pictures display unvarying cultural facts; what is more important is that they clearly depict cultural norms” (p. 468 n. 45)

The symposium in Plato’s Symposium

What we know:

  • The tragic poet Agathon won the big prize at a dramatic festival in 416 BCE.
  • The following year, Alcibiades (who appears later in the dialogue) led the Sicilian Expedition, eventually suffering a disastrous defeat and defecting to the Spartans—the turning point of the Peloponnesian War.
  • The story we hear from Plato is told third-hand, likely in 404 BCE, just after Alcibiades was assassinated.
  • We believe that the text of the Symposium itself was written between 385 and 370 BCE.

What Plato tells us:

  • There was a celebratory party on the night of Agathon’s victory.
  • Everybody was hungover the next day but threw another party.
  • Socrates (born 469 BCE) attended the festival but not the first party.
  • This symposium, whose story the Symposium tells, is the second party.

The opening

  • The narrator Apollodorus is a latecomer to philosophy (philosophía, lit. “love of wisdom”), completely obsessed with philosophy in general and Socrates in particular (173c–d).
    • Erôs: “Passionate love”; an erastês’s love for the erômenos.
    • Philía: More “friendly” (by contemporary light), affectionate/non-passionate love.
    • Agapé: Selfless, benevolent, unconditional love.
    • “Platonic love,” ironically, is erôs.
  • The layers:
    • We hear the story of Apollodorus telling an unnamed friend the story of him telling Glaucon the story of the symposium.
    • Apollodorus heard the story from Phoenix, who heard it from Aristodemus who was at the party.
    • Why this elaborate setup?
  • Aristodemus was not originally invited; Socrates, looking fabulous in his “fancy sandals,” takes him as a plus-one (174a–d).
  • Except Socrates then gets (literally) lost in thought. We are not told what he was thinking.
  • Agathon (the symposiarch & tragic poet laureate) invites Socrates to sit next to him so he can “catch a bit of the wisdom that came to you under my neighbor’s porch” (175d). Socrates makes fun of him.
  • Pausanias (Agathon’s lover) proposes that they go easy on drinking tonight.
  • Eryximachus (a physician) dismisses the “flute-girl” (“let her play for herself, or if she prefers, for the women in the house”) so they can engage in serious philosophical conversation. [Sierra]
  • He then proposes that they all make speeches in praise of Love, a suggestion that he credits Phaedrus for.
  • So Phaedrus gets pressured into going first. The speeches will get competitive—the next speaker will try to one-up the previous speaker and argue that he was wrong about something (flirty? negging? erotic?).

Phaedrus

  • The educational function of pederasty is achieved through love (178c).
    • More generally, Love directs a person to virtue, “even if she’s a woman” (179b).
  • A teleological theory of X: An account of what X is in terms of its end/purpose (télos). [Elizabeth]
    • The télos of an acorn is an oak tree.
  • Erôs plays a role in the good life.
    • It operates psychologically through shame and honor. [Elsa, Tiffany, Joselyn]
    • But how does this work for the beloved, who is not supposed to experience a reciprocal erôs for his lover?
    • And what about when Love makes us sad, jealous, angry, unreasonable, insecure, reckless, etc.? [Elizabeth, James]

Pausanias

  • Two lurking problems:
    • Could the educational and ruinous sides of erôs be reconciled?
    • What’s in it for the eromenos?
  • Pausanias (Agathon’s lover): There are two kinds of Love, because there are two goddesses of Love. [Amelie, Eva, Inica, Lindsay, Jemma, Natalie]
Aphrodite Pandemos Aphrodite Urania
Motherless daughter of Uranus Daughter of Zeus and Dione
Common/Vulgar Heavenly
Attracted to the body Attracted to the soul
Attracted to women Attracted to “what is by nature stronger and more intelligent”
  • Love is directed at the Beautiful.
  • The pursuit of virtue makes it okay to submit to another man. Coping?

Aristophanes (false start)

  • Aristophanes is supposed to go next, but gets bad hiccups, and so it’s Eryximachus’s turn now (185c).
    • Eryximachus’ name means literally ‘hiccup fighter.’
    • We are invited to imagine Aristophanes hiccuping through Eryximachus’ speech.
  • If the Symposium is meticulously orchestrated by Plato, why?
    • Comic significance?
    • Dramatic significance?
    • Philosophical significance??

Eryximachus

  • As a physician, Eryximachus cautions that Love also “occurs within the animal kingdom, and even in the world of plants. In fact, it occurs everywhere in the universe” (186b).
    • Broader scope of what falls under Love
    • Importance of temperance
    • Stress that Love is not a [mere] feeling but a cosmic force [Lang]
  • He also stresses the effects of Love on the body/material world:
    • When Vulgar Love “controls the seasons, he brings death and destruction”; when Heavenly Love is in charge, “men and all other living things are in good health” (188a). [Sophia]
  • Aristophanes flirts with Eryximachus (189a–d).
    • Is there an implicit objection?

Aristophanes (finally!)

  • Aristophanes writes comedies, and the story he’s about to tell us is hilarious—but is he also serious?
  • There used to be three genders: Male (the sun), female (the earth), and “androgynous” (the moon) (189e–190c).
    • The original human beings were spherical, with one head, two faces, four legs, four arms, etc.
    • They were too powerful and tried to overthrow the gods.
    • The gods were not happy about this but didn’t want to kill all the humans (then they can’t worship the gods).
  • So Zeus proposed cutting the humans in half, turning their face around to look at their wounds, and warning them that if they get bratty again they’ll be split in half again (190d).
    • An original spherical man -> two gay men.
    • An original spherical woman -> two lesbian women.
    • An original spherical androgynous person -> a straight man and a straight woman.
    • Bisexuals? Aro/ace? Poly? (Somewhat resolved in Diotina?)
  • This didn’t work: The halves would not do anything but embrace each other trying to become one again, not even eat (191a–b).
  • So Zeus tried again: He moved everybody’s genitalia around too (191c).
    • So when a male-half embraces a female-half, they can make babies (reproduction “by the man in the woman”).
    • So when a male-half embraces a male-half, “they would at least have the satisfaction of intercourse, after which they could stop embracing, return to their jobs, and look after their other needs in life.” (What about the lesbians?)
    • The men split from the original spherical men are “most manly in their nature,” and are the only ones “who grow up to be real men in politics. When they’re grown men, they are lovers of young men, and they naturally pay no attention to marriage or to making babies” so they get to do the serious stuff (192a–b).
    • Is it gay and/because emasculating for men to love women?
  • Love: Longing to become whole with your other half, your meant-to-be (191d–192e). [June, Luyu]
    • Is wholeness achievable? Not even penetration can fuse two halves into a lasting whole.
    • Is wholeness desirable? Vulgar love sits closest to wholeness.
    • Is the comedy a closeted tragedy?
  • Socrates flirts with Agathon, whose turn it is now to speak.