Seven Athenians take turns praising Eros at a drinking party, and the last speaker, Socrates, hands the floor to a woman who is not in the room. The other great dialogue on love, in the Greek Plato wrote.
Beta: the opening (172a), Aristophanes on our old nature (189d), and the summit of Diotima's ladder (210e–211a), in Ancient Greek, word by word, with transliteration, in-context gloss, flowing English and the LSJ lexicon. Growing in reading order.
❦ Read the Symposium in GreekA taste of the format — open the reader above to read all of Symposium word by word.
Plato's Symposium in the Greek he wrote, one Stephanus section at a time: the Greek line, its pronunciation, the reading in bold, the fluent English, and a lexicon that shows what the passage unlocked in each word.
Agathon has won his first prize for tragedy, and the guests, hung over from the night before, agree to talk instead of drink. Each praises Eros in turn. Aristophanes tells how humans were once double and were cut in two, so that love is the search for the other half. Socrates reports what Diotima taught him: that love is the wanting of what one lacks, and that it can be climbed, from one beautiful body to the Beautiful itself. Then Alcibiades bursts in drunk and praises not Eros but Socrates.
The narrator was not there. Apollodorus has the whole evening from someone who was, years ago, and has it by heart: the first word he uses of himself is unrehearsed, negated. Diotima's summit is described only by what it is not: not beautiful here and ugly there, not to some and not to others, not a face, not hands, not an argument, not a science.
English gives you 'love' for a word the Greeks kept sharp. The interlinear keeps ἔρως as the ungovernable, bodily wanting it is, and shows the moment the same word is used of a disciple's devotion to Socrates, and the moment it is turned toward the Beautiful itself.
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