Plato, Symposium III & Sappho

Posted: Wed, Feb 4, 2026

Today

  • Socrates’ Diotima
  • Alcibiades’ entrance
  • The ending
  • Loose threads
  • Sappho

Alcibiades

Aristophanes has an objection (he got singled out for critique in Socrates’/Diotima’s speech), but we never get to hear what he has to say because Alcibiades shows up completely “plastered” (212e).

  • Reappearance of the flute-girl
  • Whole drama of him sitting down

Alcibiades is obviously deeply in love with Socrates.

  • But he also accuses Socrates of stealing “the most handsome man in the room” (213c), of not telling the truth (214d), of “trap[ping]” him (216a), of “bit[ing] me in my most sensitive part—I mean my heart” (218a), of “humiliat[ing]” him (219d), …
    • Indeed, even though Alcibiades says he “shall never forgive” Socrates, he still can’t help but adore Socrates’ “magnificent head” (213e).
    • Does Alcibiades’s love for Socrates desire the good? Is it a more bodily or intellectual kind of love? How does this trouble the Ascent of Love?
  • Subversion of pederasty norms: The erômenos is meant to be passively desired as an object of love, and he is not supposed to actively pursue sexual pleasure with the erastês.
  • Is Alcibiades’ love for Socrates beautiful? good? [Xinyuan, Sophia, Leah]
  • Is Socrates a good lover? Is philosophy/reason compatible with love?

The ending

  • As is custom, the men gradually drift off to sleep/go home.
  • The last remaining four are Agathon, Aristophanes, Socrates, and Aristodemus (223c).
    • We are reminded throughout the text that nobody has ever seen Socrates drunk.
    • Socrates persuades Agathon and Aristophanes that a good tragic poet is also a comic poet (223d).
    • In the morning, Socrates goes directly to the Lyceum (gym that’s also a significant social location for pederasty).

Loose threads

  • Is the Symposium a comedy? a tragedy? a comic tragedy?
  • Why does the story of the Symposium need to be told 12 years later through a game of telephone?
    • The failure of the Sicilian Expedition immediately after the symposium.
    • The recent assassination of Alcibiades just before Glaucon and friend’s conversation.
  • The translators’ 1989 introduction: “Plato’s emphasis on homosexual love is not always easy for his twentieth-century audience to understand. It is, actually, a remarkable fact that the Symposium, the first [sic] explicit discussion of love in western literature and philosophy, begins as a discussion of homosexual love and soon leaves behind all love of individuals: the real objects of love, as the concluding parts of Socrates’ speech urge, are fame, beautiful bodies in general, beautiful souls, the beauty in laws, practices, and the sciences, and finally Beauty itself, in all its purity and generality” (xiv).

Sappho

  • Entry in Wittig & Zerg’s Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary.
    • Both “sapphic” and “lesbian” allude to Sappho.
  • Not generally recognized as a lesbian until quite recently.
    • r/SapphoAndHerFriends
    • Translations: Frs. 126 and 102.
    • Patriarchy took my girl: Fr. 31.
    • Too gay to function: Fr. 94.
    • Women are so pretty: Fr. 108.
  • Not generally recognized as a philosopher.
    • In addition to eros, Sappho reflects on desire, longing (“yearn”), memory, change, sorrow, family, [women’s] beauty …
    • But she loves wisdom in an affective (cf. rational—but be careful about drawing a sharp line) way: A focus on the sensual, the bodily, the erotic.
      • Love is the “loosener of limbs, bittersweet and inescapable” which “seizes” us in a full-body experience (fr. 130). [Elizabeth, Sophia]
      • Is Sappho too delicate/soft when sapphic love is so intense? [Maria]
    • Who gets to decide who is a philosopher? What counts as philosophical? What’s at stake? [Shai]
  • “I say someone in another time will remember us” (fr. 147).