Symposium

The Dinner Party

It is 416 BCE. Agathon, a tragic playwright, has just won at the Lenaia festival. He throws a dinner party. The guests — including Aristophanes, Socrates, and later the drunken general Alcibiades — agree to give speeches in praise of Eros, the god of love.

Each speech is a theory: Phaedrus argues that Love is the oldest god and inspires courage. Pausanias distinguishes heavenly from common Love. Aristophanes tells his famous myth of the divided humans. Agathon delivers an elegant but shallow encomium. Then Socrates speaks — reporting not his own views but those of Diotima, a wise woman who taught him.

Diotima’s Ladder

Diotima’s argument is the dialogue’s intellectual centre: Eros is not a god but a great daemon — intermediate between mortal and divine. Its function is ascent. Starting from love of one beautiful body, one ascends to love of all beautiful bodies, then to love of beautiful souls, activities, and knowledge, and finally to beauty itself — the Form of the Beautiful, identical with the Good.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Symposium apart: The literary occasion is beautifully constructed — each speaker embodies their theory; Aristophanes’s myth of the divided humans is funny, tender, and philosophically serious; and Alcibiades’s drunken speech at the end — about Socrates’s strange nature — is the most vivid portrait of Socrates in any dialogue. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Core Ideas

The central arguments the book develops are worth summarising. Aristophanes’s myth: humans were originally spherical beings split in two by Zeus, and love is the search for our other half — the most influential folk theory of romantic love ever told. Diotima’s ladder: starting from love of a beautiful body, one ascends to love of beautiful souls, then beautiful activities, then knowledge, then beauty itself — which Plato equates with the Good. Alcibiades’s portrait of Socrates as a satyr who conceals golden figures inside reveals Plato’s method — Socratic ugliness conceals philosophical treasure. These ideas are grounded in evidence and example rather than speculation, which distinguishes this book from comparable titles that rely on anecdote alone.

Why It Endures

Symposium belongs to the literary canon for reasons that become clear on reading. Plato’s command of the form was exceptional for their era and remains impressive today. The social observation is precise, the characterisation is economical, and the underlying moral intelligence is never heavy-handed. These are the properties that separate enduring literature from period curiosity.

Limitations

The ascending ladder of Diotima is more beautiful than convincing — the transcendence of physical love is asserted rather than argued. Short — leaves many questions open. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers new to Plato — the most accessible and beautiful of the major dialogues — and anyone interested in the philosophy of love and beauty.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Plato’s most beautiful dialogue — philosophy dressed as literature, at the point where they are inseparable.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Plato
• The Republic by Plato — Full Review

The Dramatic Setting and the Afterlife of Aristophanes’s Myth

The Symposium was written c. 385–370 BCE. Its dramatic setting is a drinking party held in 416 BCE at the house of the tragedian Agathon, celebrating his first victory at the Lenaia festival, with Socrates, Aristophanes, Alcibiades, and others as guests. Each speaker is asked to give a speech in praise of Eros; the speeches range from the epideictic to the philosophical, building toward Socrates’s account of what he learned from the priestess Diotima of Mantinea.

Aristophanes’s contribution to the Symposium — the myth of the original spherical beings, humans of three sexes (male-male, female-female, and male-female) who were sliced in two by Zeus as punishment and who spend their lives searching for their other half — has become the most widely circulated idea about love in Western culture, the philosophical origin of the concept of the soulmate. Aristophanes is unusual as a literary figure: a comic playwright whose serious views on Eros appear in a philosophical dialogue, where they are granted genuine weight rather than satirical treatment.

Marsilio Ficino translated the Symposium into Latin in 1484 and wrote an extensive commentary that coined the term amor platonicus (“Platonic love”) — a concept that differs from Plato’s own views, which treat love as a vehicle for philosophical ascent toward the Good rather than as a chaste or purely spiritual emotion. Ficino’s Neoplatonic reading dominated Renaissance interpretation and influenced lyric poetry across Europe. The dramatic climax — the drunk Alcibiades bursting in, garlanded with ivy and violets, to deliver a speech praising (and accusing) Socrates — is among the most vivid passages in all of Greek prose.

First Printed Edition

Plato’s Symposium was included in the Aldine Press edition of Plato (Venice, 1513), the first printing of Plato’s works in Greek, which established the text for European scholarship. Marsilio Ficino’s Latin translation (1484) and commentary had already introduced the Symposium to the Italian Renaissance and generated the concept of amor platonicus; the Aldine edition gave scholars access to the Greek original and triggered a century of renewed Platonic scholarship across Europe.

The Symposium is one of the few Platonic dialogues in which Socrates is not the dominant speaker; Diotima of Mantinea, whose speech on Eros Socrates reports, allows Plato to explore desire through a female voice — a structural choice whose gender politics scholars continue to debate. The dialogue is widely considered Plato’s most literary composition.