Symposium

⚖The case for it

Aristophanes stands up and explains that humans were once double creatures, split apart, looking for the other half ever since, and readers name that speech as the best writing Plato did. Diotima’s ladder, from one attractive body up to Beauty itself, is the payoff the dinner has been building toward. Then Alcibiades arrives drunk and uninvited and tells the room how he failed to seduce Socrates, grounding the theory in one wounded man. Six people taking turns rather than one argument, so it “flows easily and is very understandable.” Critics call it “one of his most charming books.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The speeches are built to be argued over rather than read, and readers report needing a second pass to follow them. The early ones, before Aristophanes, are “a lot of tediousness to be gotten through.” The frank endorsement of relationships between grown men and adolescent boys stops modern readers cold, one calling the whole frame “an incredible way to justify their homosexuality and pederasty,” with “the misogyny or sexual conduct of Athenians” the other objection. Plato stacks contradictory speeches without adjudicating. Even an annotated edition “assumes knowledge that a student new to the Symposium” lacks.

— the honest librarian

2h

honest hours

3

sittings