Symposium

The historical Socrates is believed to have lived between approximately 469 and 399 BCE, when he was executed by the city of Athens on charges that included corrupting the city’s youth. These are the only biographical details that are beyond debate. In sources of the time, he is portrayed living an acetic lifestyle, shunning money, status, and power, even declining to accept payment for teaching. This has led some to surmise that he was impoverished. However, according to Alcibiades’s speech in the Symposium, Socrates served as a hoplite (a citizen-soldier) during the Peloponnesian war. If true, this suggests that he was at least middle class since hoplites paid for their own relatively expensive equipment. If Socrates wrote down any of his philosophy, it has not survived into modern times. Everything that is known about him comes through Plato’s dialogues, the historian Xenophon, and the comic playwright Aristophanes, who lampooned Socrates in his plays and who is also a character in the Symposium.

Across Plato’s dialogues and in the Symposium, Plato portrays Socrates as the personification of philosophy. This is consistent with how the ancient Greeks portrayed the epic poet Homer, as well as how they personified forces of nature (human and environmental). In Alcibiades’s speech, Love and the figure of Socrates fuse, such that Socrates becomes personified as Love. In the Symposium, Socrates’s speech is the longest and most complex, not only in its ideas (which portray philosophy and the quest for wisdom in mystery rite terms) but also in its structure. The Symposium is already a conversation about a conversation about an event; Socrates’s speech is a conversation within a speech about a conversation.

In addition to personifying philosophy and Love, Socrates also embodies the duality with which the Symposium (and, some might say, ancient Greek thought more generally) is concerned. Socrates can be cruel, making an insult appear to be a compliment. His questions seem genuine but inevitably reveal the limitations of his interlocutor thinking. He exposes himself to the same process in sharing what he learned in dialogue with Diotima, but he still triumphs philosophically in the end. He is described as unattractive and unconcerned with his physical appearance (though he makes an exception, noted by Apollodorus in his recounting), but his simple exterior holds what is, via Alcibiades’s comparison of Socrates to a Sileni statue, a divine core.

The historical Alcibiades (451-404 BCE) was an Athenian statesman and general from a well-connected family. He is perhaps best known as a brilliant but decadent and flamboyant young man seduced, as he himself admits in the Symposium, by money, status, and power, the very things Socrates says one should avoid. Biographical details of significance include his enthusiasm for the Sicilian expedition—Athens’s disastrous attempt to expand its empire while already embroiled in war with neighboring Sparta—and questions surrounding his involvement in the desecration of sacred herma statues just before the expedition’s launch. Though permitted to sail with the expedition, Alcibiades was recalled to Athens, at which time he fled to Sparta. Athens recalled him to serve as general twice, in 411 BCE and 407 BCE, after which he left the city for good; he was assassinated in 404 BCE.

Presumably set in 416 BCE, the Symposium takes place approximately a year before the Sicilian expedition, lending pathos and a prophetic dimension to the characterization of Alcibiades as incapable of overcoming himself. Plato follows Socrates’s profound exploration of Love as a mystery rite with Alcibiades’s sudden drunken appearance and complaints about Socrates. In accordance with the dialogue’s attention to dualities, Alcibiades’s complaints mask his admiration, respect, and awe for Socrates’s courage and self-control and his wish that he could live up to Socrates’s example.

According to Alcibiades, he owes his life to the philosopher. When they served together in 432 BCE at the siege of Potidaea (a precursor to the Athens-Sparta war), Socrates remained with the injured Alcibiades and protected his weapons and equipment, which was essential for preserving his life, as being found without one’s weapons would open one to charges of desertion. Alcibiades also claims to have witnessed Socrates saving a general’s life at another battle in 424 BCE by remaining calm and alert during a retreat. Alcibiades admits to attempting several times, unsuccessfully, to seduce Socrates. Only Socrates can make Alcibiades feel ashamed of his behavior and wish that he could withdraw from politics and focus on bettering himself. As the Symposium is fictional, readers cannot assume that such a conversation actually took place between Socrates and Alcibiades, nor is it possible to determine whether the historical Alcibiades was an admirer of Socrates.

Like Diotima, Alcibiades is both character and symbol in the Symposium. On one level, he represents the city of Athens itself—wanting to ascend to the purest forms of Love but being seduced by power and adulation. His sudden presence in an ivy crown and invitation to heavy drinking also associate him with Dionysus and the ecstatic frenzy associated with Dionysus. On another level, his failed attempts to command Socrates’s attention show that the desire to attain knowledge is not enough; one must have self-control and discipline, qualities that Alcibiades, in this context, lacks.

Aristophanes (450-386 BCE) was a comic playwright whose works were presented at sacred festivals in Athens. Eleven of his plays survive into modern times, including Clouds (423 BCE). The play lampoons Socrates and his followers, the sophists, and is cited in Plato’s Apology of Socrates for contributing to negative perceptions of him. Of the historical figures present at the symposium, Aristophanes is the only one who was still alive and professionally active when the dialogue was presumably composed in 385 BCE.

In the Symposium, Aristophanes’s speech has the most pathos of all those performed—with the exception of Socrates’s—and it is all the more impactful, coming from a comic playwright. Plato was conscious of dramatic genres and their expectations, and he uses Aristophanes to underscore his points about Love. Unlike tragedians, who took many of their plots from myth, comic playwrights drew and commented on contemporary life. Their plays looked at human relationships in Athens at that time, and that sensibility pervades Aristophanes’s characterization of the nature of Love. It is concerned with the intimate and personal details of how humans experience Love. Plato’s concern with the full range of perceptions on the nature of Love makes Aristophanes’s speech an indispensable perspective that adds to the kaleidoscope of perspectives on Love that the dialogue presents as a whole.

The historical Phaedrus (444-393 BCE) is portrayed in ancient sources as an attractive and aristocratic lover of literature and a follower of Socrates. According to at least one ancient source, Phaedrus was involved in a scandal concerning the desecration of the Eleusinian Mysteries in 415 BCE and expelled from Athens. His most well-known portrayals, however, arguably come through his appearance in Plato’s dialogues, including the eponymous Phaedrus.

Phaedrus’s looming disgraceful exit from Athens, like Alcibiades’s, lends poignancy to his portrayal and speech in the Symposium. He portrays Love as a potentially elevating force, driving men to be more courageous out of fear of being shamed before their lovers. Love, then, has a role to play in the education of young men, but apparently, it was not so for Phaedrus himself, given the events that would follow. As with Alcibiades, Phaedrus’s presence in the dialogue suggests the challenge of actuating Love’s potential benefits and the difficulty of extrapolating a concept from one context to another, i.e., that Love makes individuals brave and, therefore, an army of lovers would be the bravest.

None of the tragedies of the historical Agathon (447-401 BCE) has survived into modern times. In 408 BCE, he left Athens for the court of Macedonian king Archelaus and died there in 401 BCE. Oblique references to him can be found in Aristophanes’s Frogs, among other works, in which he is referred to with respect and friendship.

Agathon’s victory the previous day at the theatrical competition provides the premise for the symposium. His speech has a distinctly poetic quality, though its flowery and glowing terms may seem better suited to a comic than tragic playwright; as with Aristophanes, Plato plays Agathon against type for greater dramatic effect. As Agathon’s speech comes immediately before Socrates’s, it provides a stylistic counterpoint. Agathon’s obsequious flattery seems rather shallow (again, perhaps unexpected from a tragedian), set against the meticulous and extensive exploration of Socrates and his interlocutor, Diotima.

The historical Eryximachus (448 to around 415 BCE) was a physician, as was his father. One historical source suggests that father and son were both either exiled or put to death for profaning the Eleusinian Mysteries. He is referenced in Plato’s Protagoras and Phaedrus as a friend of Phaedrus.

Eryximachus’s speech in the Symposium presents the point of view of a doctor. It demonstrates how human experiences and perspectives can be tied to one’s experience, and paradoxically both enable and inhibit the philosophical quest. One is inevitably limited by one’s perspective, but it is also the primary means by which one engages in any quest for knowledge. Hence the importance of dialogue: By bringing perspectives into conversation, a fuller picture can emerge, as shown in Socrates’s speech.