Symposium
Decide its fate
The record
Time
An eveningA season79 pages, about 2 hours: half the length of a typical book on the shelf.
Getting in
Walk right inSteep climbOne reader would have skipped the dialogue without a prior commitment to reading every Platonic work.
What it gives
Plot and actionIdeas to live byIn 12 reviews from critics and book blogs, none credit the plot and 8 credit the ideas or a change in how they live.
One of a kind
Others do thisNothing else doesA philosophy blog finds the theory of Forms from Plato’s Republic, on the shelf at 324 pages, in Diotima’s account of beauty.
The case for it
on Aristophanes’ myth
“His account of the origin of the sexes has the greatest (comic) probability and verisimilitude. Nothing in Aristophanes is more truly Aristophanic than the description of the human monster whirling round on four arms and four legs, eight in all, with incredible rapidity.”
Benjamin Jowett · Introduction to the Symposium, 1892 on Alcibiades’ entrance
“The other highlight, for me, is when a drunken Alcibiades crashes the party”
a book blog on its charm
“the Symposium is one of his most charming books”
Edward Skidelsky · Five Books, 2012 on the translation
“Overall the translation is quite readable and accurate.”
Iakovos Vasiliou · Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2009
The case against
on relationships with boys
“men who have relationships with adolescent boys may have seemed feasible in Plato’s culture”
a book blog on the multiple speeches
“an interruption by yet another group of people, making it oddly chaotic.”
a book blog on the introduction’s length
“no need for the introduction to be roughly half the length of the entire work!”
a book blog on the absence of women
“their absence seems to haunt the dialogue”
Armand D'Angour · Antigone, 2025
