Writing About Love

At the end of the Symposium, Alcibiades has gone off, presumably with the throng of Bacchic revelers, who burst into his life as representatives of his overpowering love for the approval and flattery of the crowd. Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon are left behind discussing tragedy and comedy: “the main point was that Socrates was trying to prove to them that the same man knows (epistasthai) how to write both comedy and tragedy, that someone who is by craft (technê) a tragic poet is a comic poet too”.

The key words here, as we learn in the Ion, are epistasthai and technê. Ordinary poets cannot write both comedy and tragedy, because they do not write out of knowledge and craft (technê) but out of divine inspiration. If they did write out of craft and knowledge, if they were craftsmen poets, they would be able to write both comedy and tragedy, because opposites are always studied by the same craft. Thus the comedic craft and the tragic craft would have to be one and the same; just as one and the same craft, medicine, deals with both sickness and health.

Socrates tells us what a craftsman poet would be able to write, he does not tell us what he would write. Other Platonic spokesmen are somewhat more forthcoming. “We ourselves are poets,” the Athenian Stranger tells us in the Laws, “who have to the best of our ability created a tragedy that is the finest and the best; at any rate, our entire constitution is constructed as an imitation of the finest and best way of life — the very thing which we claim is the truest tragedy”. Earlier in the same discussion, the Stranger is equally explicit that this same constitution, though not a comedy, does nonetheless embody comedic knowledge:

“Someone who is going to gain practical wisdom can't learn serious matters without learning ridiculous ones, or anything else, for that matter, without its opposite. But if we intend to acquire virtue, even on a small scale, we can't be serious and comic too, and this is precisely why we must learn to recognize what is ridiculous, to avoid being trapped by our ignorance of it into doing or saying something ridiculous, when we don't have to”.

Finally, Alcibiades arrives with significantly enough a flute-girl. And though she does not play, her arrival inaugurates the further decline of the symposium into something even more like the kind of symposium reviled in the Protagoras as “a symposium of common, vulgar fellows… who, unable to entertain one another with their own conversation, put up the price of flute-girls, and pay large sums to hear the sound of the flute instead of their own talk”. This is the element of satyr-play in the Symposium satyr imagery is frequent in Alcibiades' speech.

The idea is the one mentioned earlier. Some love stories the good ones are tragedies (in the special sense of the term introduced in the Laws), they involve the kind of love found in the best kind of life, a life that comes as close as possible to the divine one in which we achieve happiness by having good things be ours forever. Other love stories are comedies: they involve a lesser kind of love. Others still are satyr plays: genital farces. But the true story of love, the story that is Plato's Symposium itself, is the story of all these stories. In the Symposium, it takes the form appropriate to its genre and audience. But in the Phaedrus, we learn of the longer more technical road it might take in the future, when armed with a scientific psychology and rhetoric it becomes a matter for experts.

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.