This web page provides some brief background remarks before listing in the order of the reading assignments (see syllabus) all the study questions for The Symposium.  You should print out this entire document before you begin reading the work.  Please note that the individual study questions cite the text not by page but by the numbers/letters given in the margins of the 1999 Penguin edition, which follows the standard citation form for editions of Plato ("Stephanus" numbers).

Before you start reading The Symposium, here is a little background information.  All of the philosophical writings by Plato (c.427-347 B.C.E.), known as "dialogues," represent fictional conversations between Plato's teacher and mentor, Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.), and various Athenians and others, often including well-known figures.

Socrates invented the so-called Socratic method (also known as the "dialectic"), an attempt to use reasoning in the pursuit of objective truth, using a questioning style of examination to show how commonly held beliefs contain contradictions or are otherwise inadequate.  Socrates left no writings of his own.  What we know about his philosophical views and method comes from the writings of his contemporaries, esp. the Platonic dialogues.  The Athenian state executed Socrates in 399 B.C.E. on bogus charges.  The trial and last days of Socrates are portrayed in the dialogues Apology, Crito, and Phaedo.

The Symposium purports to describe, many years after it supposedly took place, a philosophical discussion of love during an after-dinner drinking party or symposium, held in 416 B.C.E. at the house of Agathon, a tragic poet who had just won first prize in the drama competition.

The dialogue's form is complex and at first very confusing, because Plato reports the conversation indirectly by setting up an elaborate outer frame to the main discussion.  According to this frame story, in the year 404 B.C.E. Socrates's friend Apollodorus is stopped on the street by an unnamed companion who had just heard a report of the symposium from Aristodemus, who had been present at the drinking party.  Before Apollodorus tells the story of the party (which begins on p. 5 at 174a), he explains that "the other day" he was asked to describe the party by Glaucon, who had earlier received a third-hand account of it.  Apollodorus told Glaucon that he had derived his information of the party from Aristodemus.  So both Apollodorus and the nameless companion obtained information from Aristodemus, an eye-witness to the party.  Now Apollodorus will tell his version to the nameless companion as they are walking on the road to Athens (173b).

Students who miss my background lecture on Greek homo-eroticism will find that the section in Gill's Introduction (xiii-xv) covers the main points.

List of characters in The Symposium

Outer Frame (404 B.C.E.):

• Apollodorus, friend of Socrates
• Companion (unnamed)

• Agathon, a tragic poet, has just won first prize; host of the party
• Socrates
• Aristodemus
• Phaedrus (c.450-400 B.C.E.), member of Socrates's philosophical circle of friends
• Pausanias, Agathon's lifelong "boyfriend"
• Eryximachus, a physician
• Aristophanes (?-c.385 B.C.E.), comic poet
• Alcibiades (c.450-404 B.C.E.), arrives late to party; a brilliant general and statesman; his ambition and irregular private life alienated him from Athenians; assassinated abroad.
• Diotima: although not present at the drinking party, Socrates reports at length her theory of love and its "mysteries"; she appears to be entirely Plato's invention.

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• Why does Socrates arrive late for dinner?
• What reason does Agathon give for wanting to share a couch with Socrates?
• What are Phaedrus's main points about Love (Eros), summarized at 180b?
• Explain Pausanias's distinction between Heavenly Love and Common Love.
• According to Pausanias, when is it right for a "boyfriend" to "gratify his lover"?

• In Aristophanes's myth of the original state of human nature, what explains the "innate desire of human beings for each other" (191d)?
• How does Aristophanes redefine love at 193a?
• What does Aristophanes mean by "the ideal" situation for human beings with regard to love (193c)?
• As you read Agathon's speech, underline any sentences or phrases in which he either forecasts what he will say or recaps or confirms what he has just said.
• In Agathon's introduction to his eulogy (195a), what are the two divisions or subtopics that he plans to cover?
• What does Socrates pretend to admire about Agathon's speech, especially its end (198b)?
• What does Socrates "naively" believe is the proper goal of a eulogy (198d)?  What, by contrast, does he think characterizes all the previous eulogies (198d)?
• In his dialogue with Agathon, what does Socrates get him to concede is necessarily true about the direction of desire and love (200e)?
• What does Diotima claim lies midway between wisdom or knowledge and ignorance (202a)?

• According to note 106, what does Diotima identify with "beautiful things"?
• How does Diotima "sum up" her definition of love at 206a?
• According to Diotima, what do "men who are pregnant in mind" (209a) give birth to?
• Study carefully Diotima's description of the process of ascending the "staircase" in the "mysteries" of love (210a-212a), because it concerns the core idea of Plato's philosophy.  Her speech will make more sense if you know something about what historians of philosophy call Plato's "theory of  Forms."  Scholarly consensus attributes the theory of Forms to the dialogues of Plato's middle period; in other words, it was not Socrates but Plato well into his own career who came up with it.  Roughly speaking, the Platonic theory of Forms posits that the "really real" reality exists not in the material world known through our five senses but on a higher plane of Reality that it is the aim of philosophy to understand.  In the Introduction to the new Penguin translation, Christopher Gill explains the theory thus:
Though never fully expounded in the dialogues, the core of the theory seems to be this.  There are certain "Ideas" or "Forms" which constitute the ultimate, objective ground of being, knowledge and meaning.  Here [i.e. in Diotima's speech] the stress falls on the unchanging, uniform and universal character of the Form.  To reach an understanding of this Form is to understand what beauty really is, as an objective reality, by contrast with our normally partial and localized grasp of beauty.  The recognition of beauty "in itself" enables the lover to go as far as any human being can in achieving the overall aim of desire in general.  (xxxii; italics in original)
In addition to Gill's discussion in the Introduction, see his note 123.
• What is Alcibiades's story about spending the night in bed with Socrates (219b-e) designed to illustrate about the philosopher's moral character?

• What is the "great gap in Classical Athens" (xiv) with respect to love, according to modern norms?
• According to Gill, what "general Platonic theme" (xx) does the "form" of the dialogue stress?
• What does Eriximachus's expansion of "the scope of love" (xxii) anticipate?
• In Diotima's final mysteries, what are the "two principal types of progression" (xxxii)?
• What does Alcibiades's eulogy of Socrates unwittingly exemplify (xxxv)?