Plato · c. 385 BCE · translated by Benjamin Jowett
Read Symposium with context
You can read the dialogue and save notes and quotes from it. The Symposium is both a drinking-party drama and a philosophical ascent: each speaker defines eros differently, until Socrates and Diotima turn love toward beauty, wisdom, and immortality. World Lit Reader can also foreground the dialogue's ancient treatment of male-male desire without forcing it into modern categories.
Key Reading Paths
- The frame of retelling: Apollodorus and Aristodemus make the dialogue a remembered story about a remembered party, where desire is already mediated by narration.
- Phaedrus: love and honor: love becomes a public force that teaches shame, courage, sacrifice, and ambition for noble action.
- Pausanias: noble and common love: eros is judged by law, custom, virtue, and education rather than praised as one simple thing.
- Eryximachus: love as harmony: the physician extends love into the body, music, climate, sacrifice, and cosmic order.
- Aristophanes: divided selves: the comic myth imagines human longing as the search for a lost half and a healed original wholeness.
- Agathon: beauty and rhetoric: the poet's brilliant praise of Love sets up Socrates' challenge to beautiful speech that does not yet know what it means.
- Diotima's ladder: love ascends from attraction to bodies toward beauty in souls, laws, knowledge, and finally beauty itself.
- Alcibiades and Socrates: the drunken interruption turns philosophy into drama, exposing jealousy, charisma, shame, self-command, and frustrated desire.