The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Plato · a dialogue in reported narration · Stephanus 172a to 223d · Athens, composed in the 380s or 370s BC, set in 416 BC · scored on Plato’s Greek, read from knowledge; no text in hand, Greek quoted only where its words are certain, with Nehamas and Woodruff’s translation for sense
Mode
Dialogue as drama: a contest of speeches in praise of Eros, answered at the end by a speech in praise of one man
Mythos
The round people cut in two and seeking their halves; Eros born of Poros and Penia, a daimon between; the ladder to the beautiful itself; Socrates as Silenus and as Marsyas
Phase
One night in 416 BC, the day after Agathon’s first victory at the Lenaia, told many years after: the arrival, seven speeches, the revellers, the dawn
Presentation
Prose dialogue in reported narration: Apollodorus tells an unnamed companion what he had from Aristodemus, who was there; Stephanus pages 172a to 223d, about 259 sections
Register
Seven prose styles kept apart, from sophistic balance and Gorgianic jingle through comic fable and plain question and answer to the hieratic and the drunk
Scale
One room and one night, seven speakers of the Athenian elite, with the city, the gods and the war beyond the door
Governing Proposition
At a drinking party on the night after a tragic poet’s first victory, seven men each make a speech in praise of Eros. The speeches rise and correct one another, and at their height Socrates reports what a prophetess taught him: that love is the lack of the good, a power between mortal and divine, which climbs from one beautiful body to the beautiful itself. Then the door opens, and Alcibiades, drunk, praises not Eros but Socrates, the one man he could not possess. The wager of the dialogue is that a doctrine of love can be written as a drama that tests it, and that the ladder and the wound, set side by side, disclose more than either could alone.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The dialogue does not open at the party. It opens years after it, with Apollodorus, a follower of Socrates, telling an unnamed companion the story of a night when the speakers were young, as he had it from Aristodemus, who was there, with some points checked with Socrates himself. The night is in 416 BC, the day after the tragic poet Agathon’s first victory at the Lenaia. The work was written a generation later, in the 380s or 370s BC, and everything in it reaches the reader through removes, one teller from another, the frame taking about a ninth of the whole.
The removes are not a convenience. The dialogue is about love as an intermediary, a power that passes between, and its speeches come to us as speech passed on. Socrates himself arrives late: he has stopped on the way and stood in a porch, alone in thought (175a to b), the first sight of a habit the dialogue will make into a portrait. Agathon jokes that Dionysus will judge between them (175e). The flute-girl is sent away (176e), and the company agree to make speeches in praise of Eros, each in turn.
Phaedrus speaks first: love as the source of honour and self-sacrifice, with Alcestis and Achilles as the lovers who would die (179b to 180b). Pausanias follows, at length and in balanced clauses of sophistic prose. He divides Aphrodite in two, and so gives the distinction between love of the body and love of the soul, and he defends the Athenian convention of the courtship of boys (182a to 185b). Neither speech rises far, and both are needed: each puts forward a claim the Socratic part will take up and correct. They are the lowest rungs.
Movement II
It is Aristophanes’ turn, but he has the hiccups. The narrator marks the moment with a jingle that mocks the sophistic style just heard: “Pausaniou de pausamenou”
“Pausanias having paused” (185c). The physician Eryximachus speaks in the comedian’s place while the comedian is cured by sneezing. His speech carries love into medicine and the seasons, a cosmology of opposites brought into harmony. It is the speech most nearly removable, and the one the order can least explain; but the body has disturbed the order, and that disturbance is the dialogue’s theme in comic form.
Then Aristophanes, cured, tells a myth. Human beings were once round, and Zeus cut them in two, as one cuts fruit, and each half goes seeking the other. The farce rises to pathos when Hephaestus offers to weld the lovers into one, and neither would refuse (192d to e). The speech closes on its definition: “tou holou oun tēi epithumiāi kai diōxei erōs onoma”
“the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love” (192e to 193a). It became the founding myth of romantic love in the West. In the work it is the hypothesis the argument must answer.
Agathon, the host and the victor, speaks last before Socrates. He praises the god himself, in Gorgianic parallelisms piled up to the point of parody (197d to e), and Socrates says afterwards that the ending reminded him of Gorgias (198c). The speech is the most ornate in the work and the most confused: it praises love for having what love desires. The five speeches before Socrates take about a third of the dialogue, and the ladder now stands for him to climb.
Movement III
Socrates does not make a speech at first. He asks Agathon questions, and the plain question and answer replaces the jingles (199c to 201c). One who desires desires what is not at hand and what he is not (200a to e). If love is of the beautiful, then love lacks beauty, and Agathon’s praise has given love what belongs to its object. The questioning is short, and it turns the whole contest.
Then Socrates tells what he was taught by a woman, Diotima of Mantinea, a prophetess. Love, she said, is not a god but “daimōn megas”
“a great daimon” (202d), a messenger between gods and men (202e to 203a). She tells his birth, at the feast for Aphrodite’s birthday, of Poros, resource, and Penia, poverty (203b to e): he is poor, barefoot, homeless and resourceful, “metaxu”
“between” wisdom and ignorance. The portrait is of a daimon, and it is drawn so that it fits the barefoot man reporting it.
Love is the desire that the good be one’s own always (206a), and its work is “tokos en kalōi”
“begetting in beauty” (206b), in body and in soul. Mortal nature seeks to outlast itself: animals are ready to die for their young; even in one life the self is renewed rather than kept (207d to 208b); men beget fame, laws and poems, and Lycurgus and Solon are fathers of cities (209d). Diotima names Aristophanes’ halves and refuses them: love is not of the half or the whole unless it is good (205d to e). This teaching, the longest single part of the dialogue, is a sixth of it; and she passes, in the language of initiation, to what is higher (209e to 210a).
Movement IV
The ascent begins (210a). The lover is led from one beautiful body to all beautiful bodies, from bodies to souls, from souls to practices and laws, and from these to knowledge. At each rung the love of one is loosened by the love of many, until the lover is turned toward “to polu pelagos tou kalou”
“the great sea of the beautiful” (210d). The passage moves in steps the reader can count, and the speeches before it have been steps of the same kind.
Then the climb gives way to sight. “exaiphnēs”
“suddenly” (210e), the lover sees a beauty that neither comes to be nor passes away, not beautiful in one part or at one time and not in another (211a to b). It is “auto to kalon”
“the beautiful itself” (211d). The register is hieratic, in the words of the mysteries, and the sentences that were plain question and answer a few pages before now rise toward the vision they describe.
The passage the work is remembered for takes under a twentieth of it (210a to 212c). It is placed after the long teaching of the lower mysteries and before the door, and the dialogue keeps its proportion: the summit is short, the approach is long, and the reader has climbed it as the lover does, through the speeches that were its lower rungs.
Movement V
There is a noise at the door, and Alcibiades comes in, crowned and drunk (212d to e). Asked to praise Eros, he praises Socrates instead. Socrates is like the Silenus figures that open to show gods inside, and like Marsyas, whose music bewitches (215a to e); Alcibiades is ashamed before him, and before no other man (216b). The doctrine has just been stated, and it is tested at once against one man’s love of one man, the particular love the ascent leaves behind.
He tells how he tried to win Socrates, and the night he lay under Socrates’ cloak, and Socrates refused him (217a to 219d). In the telling the offer becomes an exchange from Homer, the armour traded in the sixth book of the Iliad: “chrusea chalkeiōn”
“gold for bronze” (219a). Alcibiades tells of Potidaea, where Socrates stood in thought through a day and a night and prayed to the sun at dawn (220c to d), and of the retreat from Delium, where he walked calmly (221a to b). The witness is the most notorious of Socrates’ associates, on the eve of the Sicilian expedition and the scandals of 415, and Socrates’ death waits beyond the frame: the charge of corruption is answered by the man it was made about.
A second band of revellers breaks in, and the order of the evening is gone. Most of the company sleep. At dawn Socrates is still talking with the tragic poet and the comic poet, pressing them to grant that the same man should know how to make comedy and tragedy (223d). Socrates goes to the Lyceum and spends the day as he would any other (223b to d). The last word is given to a life, not a thesis.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtract and see what goes. The five speeches before Socrates are not ornament: each puts forward a claim the Socratic part takes up and corrects. Phaedrus’ love as the source of honour and self-sacrifice is the lowest rung; Pausanias’ two Aphrodites give the distinction between love of the body and love of the soul that the ladder rebuilds; Aristophanes’ halves give the doctrine of lack, which Diotima names and refuses (205d to e); Agathon confuses love with its object, and the questioning exposes it. The frame’s removes carry the theme of the intermediary, and Alcibiades is required as the particular love the ascent leaves behind. What holds the axis lower is Eryximachus’ medical cosmology, the speech most nearly removable, and Pausanias’ length.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Desire is of what one lacks: Socrates draws it from Agathon, that one who desires desires what is not at hand and what he is not (200a to e). Love is the desire that the good be one’s own always (206a), and its work is “tokos en kalōi”
“begetting in beauty” (206b), in body and in soul; mortal nature seeks to outlast itself through children, fame, laws and poems, and even within one life the self is renewed rather than kept. And the work discloses what that costs: Alcibiades, ashamed before one man only (216b), shows the beloved who cannot be possessed. The objection that the ladder makes the person a rung is staged inside the work; that is why the axis stands this high.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Elevation of more than one kind, and repeated. The ascent (210a to 212a) is among the highest passages of Greek prose: the lover turned toward “to polu pelagos tou kalou”
“the great sea of the beautiful” (210d), and then, “exaiphnēs”
“suddenly” (210e), the sight of a beauty that neither comes to be nor passes away. Aristophanes rises from farce to pathos when Hephaestus offers to weld the lovers into one and neither would refuse (192d to e). Alcibiades gives Socrates standing in thought through a day and a night at Potidaea and praying to the sun at dawn (220c to d), and walking calmly in the retreat from Delium. Frequency holds it at 9.0: Phaedrus, Pausanias and Eryximachus are witty, learned and level, and the first third does not rise.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Myth here is built, and three constructions bear the load. Aristophanes’ round people, cut in two by Zeus and seeking their halves, became the founding myth of romantic love in the West, and in the work it is the hypothesis the argument must answer. Diotima’s birth of Eros from Poros and Penia at Aphrodite’s birthday feast (203b to e) makes love a daimon, “metaxu”
“between”, poor, barefoot, homeless and resourceful; and the work shows Socrates barefoot, standing alone in thought, a man between wisdom and ignorance: the particular becomes the archetype the myth described. Alcibiades makes him the Silenus figure that opens to show gods inside, and Marsyas whose music bewitches. Held below the top because some imagery, Dionysus as judge, is evoked more than built.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The turn: the contest of praise speeches at a drinking party, a game of the Athenian elite, is made the vessel of a philosophy of love, and the courtship of boys that Pausanias defends (182a to 185b) is converted into the pursuit of wisdom. The teaching is given to a woman and a prophetess, at a party of men from which the flute-girl has been sent away. The night stages a contest with poetry itself: the tragic poet at his victory, the comic poet beside him, and at dawn Socrates pressing them to grant that one man should know how to make comedy and tragedy. The stake was real: Socrates was dead, Alcibiades the most notorious of his associates, and the dialogue answers the charge of corruption by having Alcibiades testify that Socrates refused him. Held below 9 because the Socratic dialogue was already a form practised by others.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Turn it into a treatise and it loses what it knows. The sequence of speeches is itself a ladder, rising and correcting, so that the reader climbs as the lover does. The narration through removes, Apollodorus from Aristodemus, Socrates from Diotima, enacts love as the intermediary and the begetting of speech in another. The order is disturbed by the body: the hiccups put the physician before the comedian, the theme in comic form. After the ascent the door opens on Alcibiades, crowned and drunk, so that the doctrine is tested at once against one man’s love of one man; the drama answers the speech, and a treatise could not hold both and leave the tension standing. The close gives the last word to a life, not a thesis.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: some twenty-four centuries of return without exhaustion. Plotinus built on it (Enneads I.6 and III.5); Ficino’s commentary De amore made it the source of Renaissance love theory. Modern reading keeps finding new work in it: Dover on Greek homosexuality (1978), Nussbaum on Alcibiades in The Fragility of Goodness (1986), Irigaray and Halperin on why Diotima is a woman, Lacan’s seminar on transference built on the scene of Socrates and Alcibiades. Each school finds a different centre: the ascent, the myth of halves, Alcibiades, the frame, the comedy. The formal depth yields as the semantic does: whether the drama undercuts the doctrine is not settled, and the question does not wear out.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The field is Greek literature of the fourth century BC, prose and poetry together, where philosophy competed with tragedy, comedy and rhetoric for the education of Athens. The work made a philosophical argument into drama equal to the poets’, gave the sympotic dialogue its model, and set out a theory of love as lack ascending to the good that reorganised thought about desire. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the literary symposium after it, Plutarch’s Table Talk, Athenaeus, Macrobius, Methodius’ Christian Symposium, Kierkegaard’s “In Vino Veritas”; through Plotinus and the Christian Platonists, a language of eros toward the divine; through Ficino, Castiglione’s fourth book, Spenser’s hymns and the Renaissance love lyric; Shelley’s translation; Freud’s appeal to Aristophanes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle; the common phrase “my other half”. Discounted a little for the Latin West’s long gap.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence. The text survives whole, in the Byzantine manuscripts of the Plato corpus, the oldest of AD 895, with no lacuna that touches its structure; nothing is charged to form. It was copied and read in Greek without break from Plato’s school through the Neoplatonists to Byzantium and after. In the Latin West it was unknown through the Middle Ages and returned with Ficino’s Latin translation, printed in 1484. It is now among the most widely read and taught works of ancient philosophy, translated into every major language. The Western gap of about nine centuries is real, but the text was never lost. Set at the foot of the band for a text whole over millennia, for that gap and for a presence led more by philosophy than by the widest reading.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The making is load-bearing. Plato writes seven prose styles and keeps them apart: Pausanias’ sophistic balance, mocked in the narrator’s own jingle, “Pausaniou de pausamenou”
“Pausanias having paused” (185c); Eryximachus’ technical pedantry; Aristophanes’ comic fable, bodies cut like fruit; Agathon’s Gorgianic parallelisms piled to the point of parody; Socrates’ plain question and answer; Diotima’s hieratic register, in the words of the mysteries; Alcibiades’ drunken, broken, candid speech, with Homer turned to a joke, “chrusea chalkeiōn”
“gold for bronze” (219a). Stage business is managed with economy: the late arrival, the hiccups, the crowning, the second band of revellers. Judged on the command of register and structure; the music of the Attic prose is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Aristophanes’ hiccups and the sneezing that cures them, and the sight of the beautiful itself (211a to b). One law governs both: eros as the intermediate, the body and its lack pressing on the soul and the soul reaching past the body. The claim at dawn that one maker should command comedy and tragedy states the law of the whole, and the work obeys it: comic and tragic poet, physician, lover and philosopher stand on one scale of desire. Alcibiades does not break the law; he shows its lower rungs from inside. Held at 9.2 because Eryximachus’ cosmology of opposites harmonised sits loosely in the physics, and because the range, wide in idea, is held within one room and one class.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Judged at the dialogue’s scale. The orders held: the body and its desire; the soul; generation and the family, the animals ready to die for their young; the city, its laws and lawgivers, Lycurgus and Solon as begetters (209d); the sacred, the daimonic as messenger between gods and men and the language of initiation; the natural order, in Eryximachus’ seasons and medicine; knowledge; and history by shadow, with Alcibiades in 416 on the eve of the Sicilian expedition and the scandals of 415, and Socrates’ death beyond the frame. Diotima’s ladder holds them in one order, not a list. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the world rendered: one evening, seven men of the Athenian elite, labour absent, women present only as Diotima and the dismissed flute-girl.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.5, then The Living Form, Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 9.4. Some twenty-four centuries of return in which each school finds a different centre; a text whole and never lost; a form in which the speeches are themselves the ladder and the drama answers the doctrine; a reach from the literary symposium through Plotinus and Ficino to Freud; and seven prose styles kept apart in one dialogue.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.0, held by the world rendered: one evening and seven men of the Athenian elite, labour absent, women present only as Diotima and the dismissed flute-girl, though the ladder holds body, family, city, the sacred and knowledge in one order. Next, The Inevitable at 8.7, held by Eryximachus’ speech, the most nearly removable, and Pausanias’ length; then, among the gated axes, The Swerve at 8.9, held because the Socratic dialogue was already a form practised by others.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.4, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.5, Pressure on Tradition at 9.4, The Unconcealment at 9.3, The Archetypal Deep at 9.2 and The Swerve at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, The Swerve by four tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.7, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Plato’s Symposium (Sumposion), scored as the dialogue transmitted in Greek: one work, complete, Stephanus pages 172a to 223d, with no rival versions and no textual crux that touches its structure. It was composed in the 380s or 370s BC; an apparent reference at 193a to the Spartan dispersal of Mantinea in 385 BC is the usual earliest limit. Its dramatic date is 416 BC. The Plato corpus survives whole in Byzantine manuscripts, the oldest of which, the Clarkianus at Oxford, is of AD 895; in the Latin West the dialogue returned in Ficino’s translation, completed in the 1460s and printed in 1484, with his commentary De amore. It is weighed here as written work, its thought through its form. No text was in hand, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Plato’s Greek. Greek is quoted only where its words are certain, in transliteration, with a close English rendering beneath; references are to Stephanus pages and sections, approximate to within a section. The proportions given are measured in Stephanus sections, about 259 in all, to within one section. Translations · Nehamas and Woodruff (Hackett, 1989), close and readable, for sense; Benardete’s version and Dover’s commentary (Cambridge, 1980), known less fully; Shelley’s translation (made 1818), in parts. None is quoted, and no translation’s shortfall is charged to the dialogue. The sound of the Attic prose is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. Matters that could not be verified, among them the base edition of the modern texts, the papyrus witnesses, the length in words, the origin of the phrase “Platonic love” and whether Xenophon’s Symposium came before or after this one, are not given.