Loving Socrates

At the beginning of the Symposium, an unidentified man wants to hear what was said about love by Socrates and the others at Agathon's house. He has heard a garbled account. Now he wants Apollodorus to tell him what was really said. But Apollodorus wasn't there either. He got his account of the proceedings second-hand from Aristodemus. All these men who ought to be chasing boys are presented as so besotted with Socrates and his conversations that one of them Apollodorus makes it his business to know exactly what Socrates does and says each day , while another Aristodemus is so far gone in his passion for Socrates that he walks barefoot like his beloved.

One reason for this complex set-up is to let us see the inverting impact of Socrates and Athenian paiderastic norms. Another is more subtle. Alcibiades' love for Socrates focuses on the beautiful figures of virtue which he thinks he sees lying beneath those “words as coarse as the hides worn by the most vulgar satyrs,” which are the analog for him of Socrates' ugly, satyr-like body. Aristodemus' love for Socrates, by contrast, seems to focus on his coarse exterior, so that Aristodemus himself is a sort of inverted Alcibiades, whose very name associates him with Pausanias' body-centered goddess of love, Pandêmos. Loving Socrates, we may infer, is a complex business, since just what someone loves in loving him is tied to that person's peculiar desires, and the limits they impose on how like Socrates he can become.

Despite his reservations, Aristodemus agrees to accompany Socrates but with an important proviso: “See what defense you're going to make (apologêsê) for bringing me along, because I won't admit I came uninvited, I'll say you brought me!”. It is this proviso that initiates the next mystifying episode. It begins when Socrates replies by under-quoting Homer: “We'll take counsel about what to say ‘when two go together along the way”. What he leaves out is what happens when two do go together, namely, “one of them knows before the other”. The elision of this phrase is matched by an elision of Plato's own. For what happened on the road to Agathon's is that “Socrates began to think about something, lost himself in thought, and kept lagging behind”.

Later in the Symposium, the match is reestablished by the close parallels between the preamble to Socrates' speech in praise of Erôs and that to his speech before the jury. There he is “amazed (ethaumasa)” by what his accusers say; here Agathon's speech is “amazing (thaumasta)”. There he isn't a clever (deinos) speaker, unless cleverness consists in speaking the truth. Here he isn't clever in the art of love unless encomia to Erôs involve telling the truth about it. There “what the jurors will hear will be spoken extemporaneously (epituchousin) in whatever words come to mind”; here the symposiasts will “hear the truth spoken about Erôs in such words and arrangements as occur to me extemporaneously (tuchê epelthousa)”.

The result of Socrates' losing his way in thought and ending up stymied in Agathon's neighbor's porch is that Aristodemus, like a proper Socratic paraclete, arrives at Agathon's quite a bit before Socrates. When Socrates finally does arrive in propria person, Agathon says: “Socrates, come lie down next to me. Who knows, if I touch you, I may catch a bit of the wisdom that came to you under my neighbor's porch”.

Socrates replies with an obviously sexual simile, which acknowledges, so as later once again to invert, paiderastic norms: “If only wisdom were like water which always flows from a full cup into an empty one when we connect them with a piece of yarn. If wisdom were that way too, I value the place beside you very much indeed; for I think I will be filled from you with wisdom of great beauty”. What actually happens, however, is the very reverse. Socrates responds to Agathon's fancy speech about love with an elenchus, so that his emptiness, his lack of knowledge, flows into Agathon, destroying the wisdom of great beauty that had won his tragedy a first prize the day before.