The other Symposium. The rich Athenian Callias throws a dinner for young Autolycus, who has just won the pankration at the games, and late in the evening Socrates stands up to talk about love.
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Xenophon, a soldier and a follower of Socrates, wrote his own account of a dinner party with him, set in 422 BC at the house of Callias. A showman from Syracuse brings a dancing girl and a boy who plays the lyre, and there is a great deal of joking. In chapter 8 Socrates turns serious. There are two Aphrodites, he says, a heavenly one and a common one, and the love that cares for a friend's soul is better than the love that wants only the body. We are pressing chapter 8 first. It is being pressed now and can't be read here yet. Support it and it opens sooner.
Xenophon wrote it decades after the evening it describes, around the time Plato wrote his own Symposium. Which of the two came first is still argued over.
Everyone at the table knows Callias is in love with Autolycus, and Socrates says so out loud. The party ends with two performers acting out the wedding night of Dionysus and Ariadne so convincingly that the unmarried guests swear to marry and the married ones hurry home to their wives.
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