Plato's Symposium: six speeches in praise of Eros

In the Symposium, written in all likelihood between 385 and 370 BC, Plato imagines an evening in Athens at the house of the tragic poet Agathon, who is celebrating the victory he won in a dramatic contest of 416 BC. The guests, still suffering from the previous day's drinking, decide to drink moderately and to deliver in turn a speech in praise of Eros, the god of love.

A frame of stories

The dialogue is built like a box of memories. Apollodorus tells a friend what he learned from Aristodemus, a follower of Socrates who was present at the party many years before. This narrative distance gives the text the tone of a precious and somewhat uncertain memory, carefully handed on by someone who has heard of an event that has passed into the legend of the Socratic circle.

Phaedrus, Pausanias and Eryximachus

The first to speak is Phaedrus, who celebrates Eros as the oldest of the gods and as a source of courage: an army of lovers, he says, would be invincible, because no one would wish to appear a coward before his beloved. As examples he cites Alcestis, who died in her husband's place, and Achilles, who avenged Patroclus. It is a speech that ties love to civic virtue and honour.

Pausanias distinguishes two Aphrodites, and therefore two kinds of Eros: the Pandemian, or common, which seeks bodily pleasure, and the Uranian, or heavenly, which aims at the formation of the soul. The doctor Eryximachus widens the perspective further, describing love as a principle of harmony governing the body, music, the seasons and the whole cosmos, in a speech with an almost scientific flavour.

The myth of Aristophanes

The most famous speech belongs to the comic playwright Aristophanes, who had had to give up his turn because of an attack of hiccups. He tells how human beings were originally double, round, with four arms, four legs and two faces, and were divided into three kinds: male, female and androgynous. They were so strong and proud that Zeus decided to cut them in half.

Since then each half has sought the other, and love is the name of this desire to become whole again. The myth explains, with a comic and moving image, the experience of feeling incomplete without the beloved, and accounts for every form of attraction, including that between people of the same sex. The idea of the soulmate in Western culture derives in large part from these pages.

Agathon, Socrates and Alcibiades

The host, Agathon, delivers a highly elegant and rhetorical praise of Eros as a young, delicate and most beautiful god. Socrates questions him and shows that love desires what it does not possess, and so cannot itself be beautiful. He then reports the teachings he received from a priestess of Mantinea, Diotima. At the end a drunken Alcibiades bursts in and delivers a passionate eulogy of Socrates, comparing him to the little statues of Silenus.

The variety of voices is the secret of the Symposium. Plato does not offer a single definition of love, but a contest of speeches, each with its own style, from the mythical to the medical, from the comic to the philosophical. That is why the dialogue has been read for centuries as a literary work as well as a philosophical one, and has provided decisive images to poets, painters and writers on love.