Symposium by Plato: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download

Philosophy · Dialogue

Symposium

By Plato · (Published c. 385 BC) · Trans. by Benjamin Jowett, 1871 · All Plato books

Word Count ~36,000 words (estimated)

Reading Time Approx. 2.0 hours (estimated)

Copyright Status Public Domain in the US; check local laws

Source Project Gutenberg #1600

Source Edition Project Gutenberg #1600

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Apollodorus on the road from Phalerum

Concerning the things about which you ask to be informed I believe that I am not ill-prepared with an answer. For the day before yesterday I was coming from my own home at Phalerum to the city, and one of my acquaintance, who had caught a sight of me from behind, calling out playfully in the distance, said: Apollodorus, O thou Phalerian (Probably a play of words on (Greek), ‘bald-headed.’) man, halt! So I did as I was bid; and then he said, I was looking for you, Apollodorus, only just now, that I might ask you about the speeches in praise of love, which were delivered by Socrates, Alcibiades, and others, at Agathon’s supper. Phoenix, the son of Philip, told another person who told me of them; his narrative was very indistinct, but he said that you knew, and I wish that you would give me an account of them. Who, if not you, should be the reporter of the words of your friend? And first tell me, he said, were you present at this meeting?

Your informant, Glaucon, I said, must have been very indistinct indeed, if you imagine that the occasion was recent; or that I could have been of the party.

Why, yes, he replied, I thought so.

The excerpt is the opening three paragraphs of the dialogue, before the banquet begins. Apollodorus, coming from his home at Phalerum, is hailed in the road by an acquaintance who asks him about the speeches in praise of love made at Agathon’s supper; he answers that the man’s informant must have been vague if he thinks the occasion recent, and that he could not have been of the party. The third paragraph is the man’s reply that he had thought so. The frame of the dialogue is in place before a word of the speeches is given.

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Further Reading

Read next: Plato’s Republic, and Epictetus’ Enchiridion

Free edition

The Republic

By Plato · The long dialogue that ends with the same ascent out of the cave

Free edition

The Enchiridion

By Epictetus · What a later school made of the love of wisdom

Symposium by Plato: Summary, Ideas & Arguments

This page offers a summary and analysis of the Symposium, with the nine parts of the dialogue set out in reading order and the argument of each speech described as it comes. The text is Benjamin Jowett’s translation, published in 1871 and taken from Project Gutenberg #1600. It prints Jowett’s Introduction first, then the persons of the dialogue and the scene, then the dialogue itself, in which Apollodorus repeats to a friend what he heard from Aristodemus about a banquet at Agathon’s house. Plato wrote the dialogue in his middle years, and Jowett dates it between 384 and 369 BC from an allusion to the division of Mantinea. The Introduction is Jowett’s own essay, and it is kept apart from the dialogue in the summaries that follow. The page follows the order of the evening, so the frame can be read before the first speech is reached. The book belongs with the other Philosophy Classics on this site.

The occasion is a victory feast. Agathon has taken the prize with his first tragedy, and the guests are too drunk from the day before to drink again; Eryximachus the physician proposes that the flute-girl be sent away and that each man in turn, from left to right, make a speech in praise of Love. Phaedrus begins with the god’s antiquity and the courage love gives to lovers and armies; Pausanias separates a heavenly Love from a common one; Eryximachus, who speaks out of turn while Aristophanes has the hiccough, finds the same double power in medicine, music, the seasons and divination. The three speeches treat love as a power whose gifts are praised, and each speaker corrects the one before him. The order is fixed by the seats, and Phaedrus, who is held to be the father of the thought, has the first turn.

Aristophanes then tells the best known story in the dialogue: human beings were once round, with four hands and four feet, and of three sexes, until Zeus cut them in two, so that love is the search for the missing half. Agathon, the host, gives the rhetorical showpiece of the evening, praising a Love who is the youngest of the gods, tender, just, temperate, brave and wise. Socrates says he cannot compete with that kind of praise, which is concerned with appearance rather than truth, and asks Agathon a few questions instead; the questions show that love wants what it does not have. Aristophanes’ story is comic in its images and serious in its conclusion, and it is the one speech in the dialogue that the others quote back at him.

The admissions trap Agathon, and Socrates accepts them as the premises of what follows. He then reports what Diotima of Mantinea taught him: that Love is a great spirit between gods and men, the son of Plenty and Poverty, neither wise nor ignorant but a lover of wisdom; that love is the desire to possess the good for ever, and so to give birth in beauty, in body or in soul; and that the mysteries lead from one beautiful body to all beautiful things, to laws, to the sciences, and at last to beauty itself. Jowett calls this the highest summit of the dialogue. He also says that Plato never asks whether the individual is absorbed into that beauty or keeps his own life, and that Plato is content to leave the question open.

Alcibiades breaks in at the head of a band of revellers, crowns Agathon, and instead of praising Love praises Socrates, whom he compares to the busts of Silenus and to the satyr Marsyas. Jowett’s Introduction treats the speeches as rhetoric rather than as steps in an argument, discusses the date of the dialogue and its relation to the Phaedrus and the Phaedo, and writes at length about Greek love. He calls the fault of taste in the dialogue glaring to a modern reader. Readers who want the same ascent in another form can take Plato’s The Republic, and the Enchiridion of Epictetus shows what a later school made of the love of wisdom.

Historical Context

The dialogue is set at a banquet given by the tragic poet Agathon after the sacrifice for his first victory, and its guests are figures of the late fifth century: the physician Eryximachus, the politician Pausanias, the comic poet Aristophanes, the young Alcibiades and Socrates. Plato does not name the year, and the frame holds the occasion at a distance, since Apollodorus heard of it from Aristodemus and was not present. The symposium itself, a drinking party with a settled order of libation, hymn and talk, is the social form the dialogue uses; the flute-girl is dismissed so that conversation can take her place. Alcibiades is the man of the Athenian war, and the dialogue looks back on him from his later career. The fighting at Potidaea and Delium is in the background of his stories, and he tells them as a man who has come through them.

Jowett dates the composition from a single allusion, to the division of Arcadia after the destruction of Mantinea in 384 BC, which fell in Plato’s forty-fourth year. Since Mantinea was restored in 369, he places the dialogue between those years and denies that it is a youthful work. He groups it with the Phaedrus, the only other dialogue in which love is discussed at length, and with the Phaedo, and says that there are no means of fixing the order of the three. Nothing in the text gives a date for the banquet beyond Agathon’s victory, and Jowett’s dates belong to his argument about composition, not to the scene. He offers no other evidence, and no external testimony fixes the year.

The translation is Jowett’s, published in 1871, and the volume prints his Introduction before the dialogue. That essay is editorial: it praises the form of the work, describes the speeches as rhetorical and poetical rather than dialectical, argues that they are not stages of an idea rising to a climax, compares the ascent of the Symposium with that of the Republic, and discusses at length the Greek customs the dialogue assumes. Jowett writes as a Victorian translator with a moralist’s concerns, and he judges the speakers freely; his verdicts are his own rather than Plato’s, and the dialogue is printed after them unchanged. The Introduction also surveys the characters one by one and defends Plato against the charge of recommending what the dialogue only describes.

Key Ideas & Arguments

• The two Loves: Pausanias argues that there are two Loves because there are two Aphrodites: the elder, born of Uranus without a mother, and the younger, daughter of Zeus and Dione. The heavenly love is of the mind and lasts; the common love is of the body and flies off when youth ends. Actions are not good or evil in themselves but according to the manner of doing them.
• The halved human: Aristophanes says the first human beings were round, with four hands, four feet and two faces, and that the sexes were three. They attacked the gods and Zeus cut them in two, so each person is now a tally looking for its other half. Love is the desire and pursuit of the whole, and the pair in the myth would ask Hephaestus to melt them into one.
• Love as a great spirit: Diotima denies that Love is a god. He is a daimon, a power between gods and men, the son of Plenty and Poverty, poor and resourceful by turns, who carries prayers up and commands down. He is neither wise nor ignorant but in a mean between them, which is why he is a philosopher: he wants the wisdom he does not have.
• Birth in beauty: Love is the desire to possess the good for ever, and mortal nature can only reach that by generation, which is why love is of birth in beauty, in body or in soul. The offspring of the body are children; the offspring of the soul are poems, laws and institutions, and the men who made them are remembered as the fathers of immortal children.
• The ladder of love: The greater mysteries begin with one beautiful body and go on to all fair forms, then to the beauty of the mind, then to the beauty of laws and institutions, then to the sciences, until the lover sees a single science of beauty and, at the end, beauty itself, eternal and unchanging. Diotima calls the life spent in that vision the life above all others.
• The Socratic question: Socrates will not praise Love without first asking what Love is. His questions force Agathon to admit that love is of something, that it wants what it does not have, and that it is therefore not itself beautiful or good. The elenchus turns the evening from a contest of speeches into an inquiry, and the inquiry is handed to Diotima, who made the same admissions to Socrates.

Core Arguments & Influence

• Desire and lack: The argument of the dialogue turns on a single move: love is desire, and desire is of what is absent. Love is therefore not a god who has everything but a power that wants, and his parentage, Plenty and Poverty, states the same thing in narrative form. He is in a mean between wisdom and ignorance, which is the position of the philosopher, so that philosophy itself becomes a form of love rather than a possession of truth. Jowett notes that the same want in the soul which other men satisfy by having children may become the highest intellectual desire, and that the dialogue’s ascent begins from that want.
• The desire for immortality: Because love wants the everlasting possession of the good, it is finally a desire for immortality, and mortal nature can only reach it by leaving something behind in place of itself. The body renews itself part by part; the mind loses and recovers what it knows; and men who cannot bear children in the body bear them in the soul, as poets and lawgivers did. Diotima’s examples are Homer, Hesiod, Lycurgus and Solon. Jowett observes that Plato never asks whether the individual survives, only that the soul seems capable of partaking of the eternal; the question is left standing.
• The ascent: The ladder of love is the dialogue’s answer to the question of what love is for. It moves from one body to many, from bodies to minds, from minds to laws and institutions, and from them to the sciences, until the lover sees beauty itself, not fair in one respect and foul in another, but separate and always the same. Jowett compares this summit with the summit of the Republic and calls the vision of beauty the good seen from another side, and he says that the absorption of all other loves in the love of knowledge is the beginning of Neoplatonism. The steps are the argument, not a decoration of it.
• Jest and earnest: The dialogue mixes comedy with argument. Aristophanes, the comic poet, tells a myth of round monsters cut in two; Agathon, the tragic poet, delivers a parody of the rhetorician’s praise; and Socrates ends by compelling the two of them, half asleep, to agree that the same man can write comedy and tragedy. Jowett treats these speeches as fanciful and partly facetious performances which are also serious, and denies that they form a ladder of ideas rising to a climax. The mixture is the method, not an ornament, and it is one reason the dialogue has been read so differently. Agathon’s speech is a poem in prose, and Aristophanes’ is a fable; the two kinds of writing sit inside the same discussion.
• The mask of Silenus: Alcibiades compares Socrates to the carved busts of Silenus which open to show images of gods inside, and to Marsyas the flute-player, whose music possessed the souls of men. The image covers his talk as well as his face: the words are common, about smiths and cobblers, and the meaning inside them is divine. Alcibiades’ praise is also a confession of his own failure to be improved, and Jowett reads the whole scene as the outward man exhibited after the inward vision, with Socrates as a saint who has won the victory over his own nature. It is the last word of the dialogue about its own hero, and the one speech in it that praises a man rather than a god.

Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of Symposium?

The download is the whole book. Jowett’s Introduction comes first, then the persons of the dialogue and the scene, then the dialogue itself from Apollodorus’ walk out of Phalerum to Socrates’ bath at the Lyceum and his ordinary day. Every speech is here, including Eryximachus on medicine and Alcibiades on Socrates, and no part of the text is replaced by a summary of it. The Introduction is given entire, so its judgements can be checked against the speeches.

The page is arranged to be read beside the text. Nine groups follow the order of the evening and stop where each speaker stops; six notes explain the ideas the argument turns on; five themes take the two Loves, the desire for immortality, the ascent, the mixture of jest and earnest, and the mask of Silenus. A short historical section keeps Jowett’s editorial matter apart from the dialogue it introduces, and the reading order is the same in the text and on the page.

The files come in three formats with the same text. The EPUB opens in most readers, the AZW3 is the file for a Kindle, and the KEPUB is the one Kobo devices read best. Nothing needs an account, and the translation is Jowett’s throughout, so a passage found here can be looked up in any printing of it. The page adds no commentary inside the text itself and leaves nothing out of the translation.

• Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #1600 — the complete text in Jowett’s translation, with his Introduction and the dialogue unabridged.
• Jowett’s Introduction in full The long essay printed before the dialogue is given entire, so his account of the date, the speeches and the Greek customs can be read against the text it introduces.
• Nine groups, one for each part Every stage of the evening has its own summary, from the walk from Phalerum to the last argument at dawn, and each stops where that part of the dialogue stops.
• EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with the divisions intact and nothing to install beyond the reading app you already use.

Part of: Philosophy Classics · Plato