In Our Time - Plato's Symposium

Episode Date: January 2, 2014

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Plato's Symposium, one of the Greek philosopher's most celebrated works. Written in the 4th century BC, it is a dialogue set at a dinner party attended by a number of prominent ancient Athenians, including the philosopher Socrates and the playwright Aristophanes. Each of the guests speaks of Eros, or erotic love. This fictional discussion of the nature of love, how and why it arises and what it means to be in love, has had a significant influence on later thinkers, and is the origin of the modern notion of Platonic love.With:Angie Hobbs Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of SheffieldRichard Hunter Regius Professor of Greek at the University of CambridgeFrisbee Sheffield Director of Studies in Philosophy at Christ's College, University of Cambridge.Producer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time. For more details about in our time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. UK slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, Plato's Symposium, one of the masterpieces of Western philosophy, is a dramatic dialogue set at a dinner party in ancient Athens. It begins with the guests agreeing that, having drunk too much the previous night,

they better not overindulge again. The guests include some of the greatest figures of classical Athens, including the playwright Aristophanes and the philosopher Socrates. These eminent individuals have a wide-ranging discussion which focuses on the nature of love, what it is, where it comes from, and what it means to be in love. The symposium has had a lasting effect on our thinking about love and physical desire, influencing writers and philosophers from the early Christian era to the Renaissance and beyond.

With me to discuss Plato's symposium are, Angie Hobbes, Professor of the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, Richard Hunter, Regis Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, and Frisby Sheffield, Director of Studies in Philosophy, at Christ's College University of Cambridge. Angie Hobbes, Plato, 4th century BC, one of the founders of Western philosophy, can we just briefly say something about his life? Yes, he was born sometime between 49 and 43 BC into a wealthy, aristocratic, Athenian family.

he grew up witnessing the vicious civil war between Sparta and Athens, and he would have been expected to go into politics. But he became one of Socrates's closest associates, and he also developed a really keen interest in mathematics. So his tendencies were moving away from politics. And then the final death knell to his any political ambitions came in 399 when the Athenian democracy put Socrates to death. And Plato thought, right, that's it.

I'm now devoting my life. to writing and teaching in 387. He sets up the academy, a sort of a research institute, though that's rather too formal a phrase where he wrote and discussed and taught. Over the door of the institute, according to later sources,

it said, let no one enter who has not studied geometry, which would rule me out. But his most famous student was Aristotle. He also allowed women to come and study there. but he wasn't just training philosophers as he saw it. He was also training future statesmen. And he got embroiled in the very murky world of Sicilian politics,

made three rather disastrous expeditions to Sicily to try to train the young tyrant Prince Adionysius to become a philosopher ruler. It all ended disastrously. With Plato being pretty much imprisoned in the soldiers' quarters at the palace in Syracuse, He had to be rescued by philosopher friends from southern Italy. So he did try to practice what he preached,

and he died in 347 BC, profoundly religious man, didn't marry, didn't have children, his romantic and erotic affections seemed to have been directed towards males, deeply loved by his students, and wrote at least 27 dialogues on absolutely everything, metaphysics, the theory of knowledge, political theory, ethics, aesthetics,

and really lays down the groundwork for future Western philosophy and thought. This is set in a drinking party. They make about meaning not to drink too much, to drink just for pleasure, not to get drunk, and there's hints of hangovers and then drink disturbs the thing at the very end and so on. What was the significance of a drinking party then? Yeah, so the symposium, the drinking party, it's a male aristocratic institution in private houses. It's a kind of gentleman's club. There would be various forms of entertainment, often involving female pipe players who also danced and indeed offered skills beyond music and dancing. These symposia could get quite boredy. But also there was a very strong intellectual and cultural side. So as well as the fun, they could have intellectual and literary discussions about poetry or some philosophic discussion. They could have competitions. And a really important aspect

of the symposium was to initiate the young teenage male into various social and cultural norms of Athens and into various political groupings, often in the context of a male, of a male, or erotic relationship in which an older male, the lover, the Arastez, would guide the younger male beloved, the Aromonos, into Athenian social and political life in return for various fairly strictured sexual favours. And that's, that homoerotic context is going to be very important for our dialogue because we're going to see Plato, both utilising but also subverting all these conventions. Richard Hunter, as Angie said, the symposium was written about 380 BC,

but it was set 30 years earlier. Do you think what is being described is something that might actually have happened? Well, I think in principle, there's no real reason to imagine that something along those lines might not actually have happened. The dialogue itself is set in 416 BC, which is the year, and it's set at the house of the tragic poet Agathon and the purpose of the dinner party is to celebrate his first victory

in the competition for tragedies at Athens and the people who are gathered at this party are all belong to similar kinds of sets as far as we can tell they're broadly speaking come from similar kinds of, for example, social class as we might put it. And so in principle there's no real reason why something along those lines might not have happened.

But that, of course, is very different from saying that either that anything like what happens in the symposium did happen, or indeed that Plato in any sense wanted us to imagine that this was some kind of historical record of what happened. People, for example, I mean, people are often surprised at the presence of Aristophanes at this party, because, as Angie's already mentioned, one of Aristophanes is most famous. comedies is a very strong invective and mockery of the philosopher Socrates. And sometimes people are very surprised that Socrates and Aristophanes should go to the same dinner party. But in fact, I mean, I think it's not difficult to think of modern parallels for this kind of thing. And also, there's no particular reason to think that Aristophanes, as it were,

wasn't able to keep his art and his life as separate as we sometimes do today. Why did Plato writers 30 years later? Were there any historical events which prompted him to do that? Well, as far as why he was prompted in the late 380s or whenever the dialogue was actually written, I think it's very hard to say why he wrote it then. Why did he set it where it was said? I think that is it's much easier to say things about.

In 416, when the dialogue was set, Athens had been involved, as Angie said, in a very bitter war with Sparta of greater or less intensity, which had been going on for some 15 years in 416. And shortly after 416, Athens was to launch a very large and ultimately completely designed. an disastrous expedition to Sicily in the hope both of new territory and new wealth. And it was that expedition to Sicily which first brought a break from Athens for Alcibiades, one of the leading figures of the symposium and certainly one of the leading political figures of the day. And so that particular date is actually a very important kind of junction. And one of the striking thing, one of the most striking,

things that I think that emerges from the symposium is that Plato is painting a picture of a world which somehow disappeared because 12 years after the setting of the symposium, Athens was defeated in 404 BC in Sparta, lost the war, Alcibiades was also the year that Alcibiades himself died. And of course, as Angie said, five years later, Socrates, was executed. So there's an element of kind of historical nostalgia here. Can you give us the cast list at this drinking party? We've mentioned Socrates, you've mentioned Aristophanes,

you've mentioned Alcibiades, but can I just run through the main character? The best known characters are Aristophanes, who are one of the greatest Athenian comic poets, the only comic poet of this period of whom we actually have plays surviving, and some of his best known works, the frogs, the Lysistrita, and several some of the best-known classics of all time.

Socrates, we've already mentioned. The host is Agathone, a brilliant tragic poet, of whom only very, very, very few fragments survive. He seems to have been about 30 at the time the work is set. Alcibiades was perhaps in some ways the best-known politician of the period. was, came from a wealthy family. Pericles, the best known Athenian politician of the whole late 5th century, had been his guardian. Alcibiades was famous not just for, as were, engagement in politics, but also for his wealth and how he spent it. He's, if we thought of Alcibiades

today, he'd be on the news pages and the social pages with equal prominence. And there's a huge anecdotal tradition about his drinking, his woman. and so on and so forth. The other characters we know less about, but for example the first character who speaks Fiedrus, we know was an associate of Socrates and also gave the other character in the other very famous dialogue

that Plato wrote precisely also on the subject of love, namely the Fidris. There are the other characters, Pousanias, another Athenian of intellectual interests, who we know was the lover of Agathon, the host. Eric Simicus is a doctor, and he delivers a sort of medical speech about the nature of love, and those are the principal characters.

Frisbury Sheffield, can we now turn to the themes? What are the major themes which Plato set out to explore in the symposium? Well, the dialogues most centrally about Eros, which is best translated as passionate love or desire. But that takes us to a consideration of much broader ethical themes, such as the nature of virtue and happiness in the dialogue. And I think that's really for two reasons, one of which Angie's already mentioned,

which is that erotic relationships of the kind that are being discussed in this dialogue between an older male lover and a younger male beloved were not uncommon in the fifth and fourth centuries. And they had an important educational component. Feelings of desire and at best concern for the welfare of one's beloved were harnessed for a socially productive end of furthering the education of the young boy at dinner parties very much like this one.

And Plato was very interested in the sorts of values that lovers should transmit to their beloved as they pass the wine cup. And so we'll see that in each of these speeches, the speakers present certain ideas about the nature of virtue. For example, Fiedrus thinks heroic deeds on the battlefield are very important. Agatha thinks that poetic expertise is very important, and for Socrates' intellectual virtue is prioritised. But each of them are concerned quite broadly with the sorts of things,

I think, that one should advocate to the young, as things worthy of desire and pursuit. Can you just explain how the theme of love, as it were, strands its way through this dialogue? Well, each of the speeches are really designed to praise Eros. So they set out to show what role really Eros plays in the good life, how desires can be moulded and shaped towards beneficial ends in order to help people lead happy and flourishing lives. The notion of happiness is quite central in all of the speeches.

And I think this really draws on a strand of interest, which runs through many of other Plato's dialogues really, with the role that desires play in the development of good character and how that contributes to the leading of a good life. He was less interested, I think, in the formulation of abstract general principles and moral rules for behaviour, and more interested in how one becomes a good person, how one develops the right sort of virtuous character.

and desires really played a central role in that for Plato. But in the, as it were, I was about to say a story, which is not entirely the wrong word, there's a great deal of joshing between them, isn't there? Which I'd forgotten, I hadn't read for such a long time, between these men as to who sit next to whom on the couch, and who speaks first and who speaks last. I love the fact that Socrates comes out as a kind of diva.

He's at the end of the wrong couch. Oh, dear, I'll have nothing to say. You'll have said it all. Why do I have to say the end? Goodness me, you're also clever. A very good way to put people off. But that sort of thing was, you do get a feeling of fictionalisation.

You get a feeling of them around there, not drinking. Yes. And I think there's quite a lot of play in this dialogue over the fact that Socrates becomes this supremely desirable object, even though he's notoriously ugly and an older male. Snub-nosed and ugly in an older male.

Snub-nosed and ugly. ugly, exactly. He's praised by El Sabiades as being this wonderfully desirable object. And at the start of the dialogue, there are lots of Socrates's associates running around trying to remember his every word and deed.

And I think that's part of this jostling activity, that people are really trying to make sure that they get closest to the most beautiful and wisest person at the dinner party, which is either Socrates or Agathon, depending on... Why do you think that Plato

raptured around in this informal fictionalised way. I mean, to make it more digestible, to make it more fun, why did he do it? It's great, but I wondered why you think he did. Why he thought? Why did it? Well, I suppose, I mean, part of the answer to that probably arises from thinking again about the setting, the symposium.

I mean, I think we could think that one of the reasons he wrote this dialogue is because he's interested in the symposium as this educational forum, as this forum, where these erotic relationships took place. And though he's interested primarily in the educational component of those relationships, the symposium was also a place of great fun and merriment and entertainment. And so I think he also intersperses the very serious themes with things that were more characteristic of a typical symposium. Angie Hobbes, can you briskly tell us about the first three speakers

how they define Eros or physical desire? Okay, so we start with Fidreus, who's a young student of rhetoric and poetry, and he gives us an encomium to romantic love for the individual, both heterosexual and homosexual love. So he does mention women. And in his eyes, this romantic love is entirely beneficial and praiseworthy because he thinks we want to look good in the eyes of our beloved, so we'll behave particularly nobly.

As Frisbee is mentioned, he says, you know, we'll behave very heroically on the battlefield. He even recommends an army, a homoerotic army of lovers. And also after death, if we've sacrificed our life for our beloved, the gods will reward us after death, so there'll be long-term benefits. So in his eyes, it's all rosy. But to us, the reader or the listener, we might think, well, hang on a minute. It all seems very risky. And there's also a lot of dying young in this version of romantic.

love. And he's also very selective in his use of quotes. So he quotes the early poet Hesiod about how love is one of the most venerable of all the gods. And what he admits to say is the next line in Hesiod, which is that love subdues the mind, which is not, of course, what Socrates or Plato would want at all. So he's very selective. Then we get Palsanias, who's a legal expert and for Palsanius, the quality of eros, the quality of erotic love, depends both on the object of your love and also the manner of your love. And he divides erotic love into the heavenly and what he calls the popular or the common. And heavenly love is the love of an older male for a younger male beloved and it focuses, at least in theory, on the younger male

spiritual development. Pausanius might be going in for a bit of self-justification here because he's in a long-term relationship with Agathaun. There are all these subtexts going on. Common or popular love focuses on the body and the love object can be either male or female. And again, he sees heavenly love is entirely good. But we might think, well, actually, it's fraught with tension because the passive role of the younger male beloved has to stop at adulthood.

And so you've got this shadow looming over it. And then Eric Simicus, the doctor, again he divides erotic love into good and bad. But he then broadens out erotic love into a cosmic force. It's now the attraction of one element for another. And good attraction, good erotic love leads to harmony and health. And bad attraction leads to illness and disease. And we see this at work reconciling opposites in medicine, in music, in the climate and in farming. And again, it's really interesting, I think, that a doctor thinks that erotic love is an entirely appropriate subject for medicine to explore.

And that it's crucial for our mental and physical health, as Frisbee was saying. Richard Hunter, and then we come to Aristophanes. parts of whose speech have become the common parlance today even. So can you explain what the main drifter? He keeps telling it. Again, I love it. He says, you know, I don't you to laugh. I'm serious here. I know I'm a kind, but please, I'm not having any love to while I'm getting away my serious point.

And the serious point is? Well, the serious point is what the nature of love is. And one of the reasons that Aristotle uses his speech is, as you said, has become such a classic, is that it actually claims to speak to our own experience. And what Arasofne says is what we have to do is we have to understand what love is. And in order to do that, he tells us its history. And he tells a story in which once upon a time we weren't like we are now, we were all double, by which he means we had two faces on a single head, we had four arms, we had four legs. You could think of it a bit, a little bit perhaps like two people standing,

back to back with their arms and legs. But I always think of that Einstein drawing, the Da Vinci drawing of man, and these characters, these double people, moved by rolling. Anyway, in this story, they got out of hand and they wanted to storm Olympus and the Greeks knew numbers of stories

about how giants tried to storm Olympus. So what Zeus decided to do, as it were, take them down a peg or two, was to split them all in half. So he and his fellow gods literally split these people down the middle, turned the faces around, and sort of stitched up the bits of skin around the stomach to what we now call our navel,

so that there are only just half people now. And what Aristophanes then says happened is that these half people went around looking for their previous other half. and when they found them, they embraced them. But of course, one thing that gods hadn't done is move the genitals around. So when they found their other half, there was not much they could do with the other half.

So Zeus took pity on us and decided to move our genitals around so that when you found your other half, you could embrace him or her. And that is what love is. And Aristotovini finishes by saying, that's why we must pay due respect to love because love can do the greatest things for us

like it might help us find it's love which will make us find our other half if however we are impious and rude to the gods again then they will split us in half again now what's you know quite so... I'm afraid the design pursuit of the whole comes out of the world indeed and so in fact he Aristophanes says that therefore what love is is the desire and pursuit of the whole.

Can I come to you for us before the next question? And then, Angie, please come in. We move on in the symposium to Agathon, in whose, for whom the feast that drink is being given. He's won this great competition. How does he move the discussion on? Well, he gives this dazzling rhetorical performance, which receives the largest applause from the other guests,

and yet Socrates is going to go on to say it shows no concern with the truth at all and give it quite a lot of airtime in his own criticism of it. But I think the main point of his speech... Agathon speech and where it really does move the discussion forward is he says that the other speakers have praised the benefits that Eros brings. For example, it creates heroic deeds on the battlefield,

in Fudris' speech as Angie's discussed, and Eros acts as a healer in Aristophanes' speech. And Agatha says none of the other speakers have really clarified the nature that's responsible for those sorts of beneficial effects. And that's the main purpose of his speech. And he says that, well, you can't give to another what you don't have yourself. So we must suppose that Eros is himself, or lovers rather, are themselves supremely beautiful and good in every way.

And then he lists just about all the virtues that you could have. imagine and says love is it graceful and beautiful and wise and just and honourable. And because they're so bountiful themselves, that's why they can induce all these wonderful, creative and productive effects. And then we go to come to Socrates, Angie Hobbes, has been moaning that he's been left to the lesson, we'll have nothing to say and produces the longest, most complicated and most memorable speech in the book. He says that he knows about love. He doesn't know about anything. He's the man who knows about nothing, but he knows about this, because he was taught by a woman called Diotima.

Now, what's her significance? Diotema, she's a priestess. She's almost certainly fictional, and she has some kind of prophetic powers as well. And she serves a number of functions in the dialogue. Socrates claims that as a young man, he had conversations with her and that he made some of the mistakes about love

that Agathaon has just made and that she put in Ryan, taught him everything about erotics. There's clearly some ribald Dublon Trond going on here with his fellow symposziasts. Partly just bringing in another character allows the question and answer that's been going on between Socrates and Agathaun to continue. But it allows the question and answer to continue tactfully. So rather than directly attacking his host, who has given, as Frisbee has suggested, and not particularly intellectually incisive speech, Socrates can make his criticisms saying, oh, I made this.

say mistakes as you. May I interrupt for one second? Just to make it absolutely clear. In a sense, it could be said that diatima Diotima turns into Socrates. She places, she is saying the things that Socrates would say and he is the willing pupil saying,

oh, I didn't think about that. Oh, you must be right there. He gives her the lines that are his, doesn't it? I think so to a large extent. But we've got the really interesting facts. One is her gender, of course, and two are her religious functions. So why has Plato brought in a female fictional character at this point?

Because earlier we had the female pipe player banished before the discussion got underway because it was said that a female pipe player would be distracting and they wouldn't be able to have a proper philosophic conversation. So we've had the female presence banished and now we've got this fictional woman brought in, of course voiced by a male, Socrates. it's really so important that she's got this religious function because she's going to take Eros into a very religious dimension and going to use the language of the mystery religions.

So the drive of what she's saying is that Eros is not a god, it's a dimone. It's this intermediary force, neither mortal nor immortal, but which connects the mortal and the immortal, rather as Ereximachus was saying earlier. and that Eros itself is neither good nor bad, neither beautiful nor ugly, but it is this connecting force. And it's what inspires the individual human to ascend what she calls the ladder of love. Do you want me to...

No, can I move on at the moment? But, sorry, there's one really, really important thing we need to say in connection with her femaleeness, is that she has this extraordinary claim. It's one of the most extraordinary claims in Plato, which is that all humans are pregnant, both in body and in soul, that we're all born with these sort of embryonic creations inside us, the ability to create physical children,

but also the ability to create works of art and science and philosophy. But we need the inspiration of erotic love and a guide like diotema to help us get these embryos out of us. Can I go to Frisby now and talk about the ladder of love that you introduced, Frisby Schaffer. Can we talk about that, please? Well, first, if I might just put the ladder of love in a bit of context, because I think it leads us to such a lofty, abstract height, this contemplation of ideal beauty, that we perhaps need to understand it in its context and think about what Socrates thinks that Eros is aiming at. And he starts by saying, well, all desire

occurs for the sake of some end. When we desire something, we're aiming at the attainment of some goal. And this, he argues, is happiness. That's what we really and fundamentally want as human beings, happiness. And in order to secure that end, we need some kind of creative or productive work

because human beings are not like gods. We are mortal and subject to flux and change, and we're not just born happy and in possession of the good things that will make us happy. so we need some kind of productive or creative activity. And the ascent, the ladder of love, is really an account of a certain kind of creative activity, which Socrates thinks will best satisfy our desire for happiness.

And it's called a ladder of love because it's a series of attractions to a hierarchy of different beautiful objects. For example, bodies and souls and laws, and practices and so on. And I think one way to understand the ascent is that Socrates thinks that in order to create some kind of good that will satisfy our desire for happiness, we need to ensure that we understand

what sorts of things are really valuable. So we start off by reflecting on what makes beautiful bodies beautiful and what makes one beautiful body similar to another beautiful body. and we then consider beauty in the area of beautiful souls and think about whether there's any unitary feature in the class of beautiful souls. And we consider beauty ever more widely in laws and practices and finally look at what Socrates calls the wide sea of beauty

until we can understand the source of all beautiful things, the form or idea of beauty itself. Richard Hunter, does that take us to the idealised forms of blood? Does that take us into Plato's idea of idealised forms? Yes, and as Frisbee was just saying, for Plato, at least in some of the dialogues, forms what we call forms or ideas, are the true object of knowledge. And these are what we might call mental concepts, although people debate today or whether they should be called paradigms.

What these are are unchanged. ideas or concepts which exist out of time and space, which are the true object of knowledge, which we perceive with our soul, not with our eyes or our ears or any other of our organs. We contemplate with our soul, and we get there through as, and there's a kind of reciprocal relationship with particulars, with any particular, for example, with beauty, with any particular kind of beauty.

So as Frisby explained in the symposium, it's explained how we can grow to actually eventually come to understand with our soul, the idea of beauty by a stage process of contemplating particular instances of beauty. On the other hand, from the other perspective, Plato argues that all beautiful things, to some extent, participate in or share in the form of beauty, But whatever happens to any particular beautiful thing or even idea doesn't affect the form of beauty itself. And one of the most brilliant and memorable images that he produces for what this kind of thing is, is a famous image in the Republic where the philosopher escapes from the underground cave in which we all live in a world of shadows and sees the sun. and that is an image for what actually it might be like to see a form. But of course you're not seeing it in that sense

because you're contemplating it with your soul. But I'm very conscious I have experts in ancient philosophy sitting on my right here. Can we go to the drunken disruptive entrance of Alcibiades? They're having this. And there's more to say, there's massive more to say about a long speech of Socrates. He in a very gentle, I really like you way, he tears there all their arguments to bits. He just in the kindest possible way, he says you're all wrong.

Then in comes Alcibiades to disrupt proceedings. Absolutely. So there's this sudden hammering at the door and a very beautiful, glamorous, but very drunk Alcibiades staggers in. He's supported by a female pipe player, exactly the kind of class of woman who's been banished earlier but he can't stand up. He's clearly in no state to climb a ladder. He's wreathed with violets and ivy and ribbons and he sort of brings in both comedy but also tragedy I think to

the symposium. It's a very complex speech and Plato's doing a lot of things with it. And what Plato does is give him this very moving and powerful speech in praise of Socrates. He says, I'm too drunk, I can't give you a philosophic discussion on discussion. of love, but I'm going to tell you about my love for Socrates. And he gives us the sense of the joy and the pain of passionately loving an individual, who you perceive to be a unique and irreplaceable individual. It's unrequited, love, that's the main thing. Exactly, exactly.

Well, it's physically unrequited. There's some very funny accounts of Socrates trying to seduce, there's a very funny account of Alciabides trying to seduce Socrates. And the question is whether Plato sees Alcibiades and his account of Eros as a direct serious challenge to what Deotem has just been saying, or whether Alcibiades is meant to be a warning, or whether simply to alert us to the fact that it's going to be very difficult to climb the ladder of love and to move away from the human and to leave all that so-called mortal trash behind. But he's also saying that love is an adoration of knowledge. he talks about the beauty of Socrates being the mind,

and that is something that he can and does love massively, and so that's why he wants to be close to Socrates. He does, but he doesn't quite act on that. He says that's why he loves Socrates, but it's clear he wants his body as well, and he never really quite gets up the ladder. He loves the right man in the wrong way. Also in the speech about Sabadius,

I'm coming to you, Prid, but just to say quickly, we have great incommia about Socrates, He is terrific on the battlefield. He doesn't seem to feel cold. He can spend a sleepless night and be the same the next morning and so on and so forth. How does the work end? The work ends with a tantalizing puzzle. So after Alcibiades' speech, lots of drunken revelers disrupt the order of the evening so far.

There's lots of drunkenness and people start nodding off, but Socrates alert as ever is trying to persuade Aristophanes the comic poet and Agatha the tragic poet that one and the same person should write both tragedy and comedy. And this is very puzzling because we don't have any idea of what this argument would have looked like, more pressingly perhaps why this is relevant to the topic of Eros. But I think there are certain clues. If we go back to Socrates's account of the nature of Eros, and his interchange with Agathaon,

and think about the kinds of characteristics that he ascribed to Eros, then I think perhaps we can see why tragedy and comedy are both relevant to understanding Eros in particular. So, for example, if we start by thinking about the sorts of characteristics that were appropriate for comedy in particular, these were lowly, base characters seen in all their own. sort of mortal deficiency in a way on the comic stage. And in tragedy, we saw more heroic sorts of characters.

And if we apply that to the account of Eros that we have in Socrates' speech, we can see why comedy and tragedy are appropriate. Because according to Socrates, love is not, as Agathaun had described, this wonderful, overflowing, bountiful state, where lovers are already in possession of all sorts of wonderful good things. In fact, what happens, according to Socrates in the experience of desire is that we're confronted with all sorts of things that we lack and yet we're very resourceful in our pursuit and our movement towards those things

and we become like gods. And so we can see then how Eros is a fitting comedy for both fitting subject rather, for both tragedy and comedy. Richard Under, the drive is about love, but there are other major themes going on, one of which is the nature of knowledge. Now, it's a bit late in the day to say, can we deal with that? But at least let's refer to it.

Well, I think what we could say briefly is that all of these speeches, although they're either supposed to be in praise of love or in praise of Socrates, can also be seen as different ways of representing knowledge or truth or ideas. So that, for example, in Ericsimachus' speech, we have a medical, account, if you like a scientific account. Aristophanes' speech is clearly at some level a mythic account of love. And we know that in the late 5th century Athens, there was an intellectual ferment

in Athens in which different kinds of explanations for the world and what went on in the world were competed with each other. And the symposium, the speeches in the symposium in a sense can be seen as a kind of microcosmic snapshot of different different ways of approaching similar kinds of subjects. Now, this is also, I think, connected with the whole structure of the work, which is when they begin, they set out to say, well, each of us will deliver an encomium of arrows.

And Socrates, as we mentioned earlier, Socrates says, well, this is, you know, when he comes to speak, he said, well, this is very odd. I thought, you know, what you did when you delivered an incoomium would speak the truth. But clearly that's not what it's about. So one of the principal themes of the work is rhetoric and the relationship between what you say and the truth content of what you say. And when a politician makes a speech, what kind of truth do we expect from a politician? And this whole nest of issues runs through the whole work so that, for example, Alcibiades says, well, if you listen to Socrates, you'd think this man was a fool.

All he talks about cobblers and blacksmiths and, you know. But if you actually open up his words, if you look at inside what he's saying, you'll find just as, you know, you'll find images of gods, just as if, you know, Socrates is fat. But if you actually open him up like a Russian doll, inside, you'll find images of gods. Fine, Angie, can you just give us a brief rush through the next two and a half thousand years of the influence at this hand? I'm sure you can do it. Okay. Hugely influential are in Neoplatonism, people like Plotinus writing on beauty, very, very influenced by the symposium in early Christianity. The notion of the ladder of love ascending towards the form of beauty was taken up by a lot of the early Christian writers.

In the Renaissance, Ficino, who really reintroduces Plato to the West by translating the Platonic dialogues. into Latin and writes a very, very influential commentary on the symposium, though in fact it's on love generally, not just Plato's symposium. The de Amore really sets the agenda for the next 150 years, an enormously influential work. Freud loved the symposium, studied it. Freud says in both his three essays and in group psychology that he thinks his notion of an expanded sexuality and an expanded libido comes directly from platonic eros. And Freud says, I think actually incorrectly, but this is what Freud thinks, that his notion of sublimation is very close to the notion of rechanneling

that Frisbee was describing up the ladder. In fact, there are important differences, but Plato definitely influenced Freud. Wow, well, there we are. Thank you very much indeed, the three of you. What a two of the force. Well, thank you very much, Angie Hobbes. Thank you, Frisbury Sheffield. Thank you, Richard Hunter. Knowing our time next week, instead it's Jim O'Neill.

He'll be presenting Mint, the next economic giants. We'll be back on January 16th and talking about the Battle of Tour. Thanks for listening. There are many more Radio 4 arts and discussion programmes to download for free. Find these on the website at BBC.co.ukuk slash Radio 4.