Symposium (Oxford World's Classics)
by Plato, Robin Waterfield

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Book Reviews of Symposium (Oxford World's Classics)

Book Review: Love, Grecian Style
Summary: 5 Stars

Phaedrus, speaks first and relates how love is the greatest good, the beautiful, is shameful of ugly things and how only lovers are willing to die for one another.

The second speaker, Pausanias, applies two types of love, one Aphrodite, a common base love working at random with men's feelings, for money, for loving physical bodies, boys, men and women. The other type of love, from a much younger goddess, being a higher type, the heavenly, who only loves other men and boy love, but this is not physical body love but from affection of the mind of virtue and wisdom..

Aristophanes has the hiccups, so it is Eryximachus, a doctor, who speaks third, applying the idea of love as a double love; "for bodily health and disease are by common consent different things and unlike, and what is unlike desires and loves things unlike." p.82 The god of art was said to implant love as a healing art, all such love guided by this god. "It is quite illogical to say that a harmony is at variance with itself or is made up of notes still at variance." "So love as a whole has great and mighty power, or in a word, omnipotence ."

Aristophanes, the comic writer, gives a moving account of Love as a absolute human need, a desire for completion to the point of each person once shaped differently being cut in half, taking our current shape, in need of the other to complete the whole of what we once were. "For first there were three sexes, not two as at present, male and female, but also a third having both together," and they were violent, strong and forceful and would even attack the gods. So Zeus and the other gods held a meeting and decided to cut them in halves and make them weaker. From then on, they were sexually drawn to one another, both heterosexual and homosexual, reasons all due to the way of the cutting of the halves.Lesbianism and boy to man love is freely spoken of and justified according to this story of the gods. His moving speech on the beauty and virtue of love however, is according to Socrates, true only in the sense of romanticism and fictional idolatrous admiration of what love should be. For Socrates found such a romantic explanation of love as untrue to what love really is and what love contains, as it does not contain all the beauty and good.

The fourth speaker, Agathon gives a moving speech on the beauty and virtue of love however, it is according to Socrates, true only in the sense of romanticism and fictional idolatrous admiration of what love should be. "For all the gods are happy . . and love is the happiest of them all being the most beautiful and best . . the youngest of gods." In his speech, love is every good, virtuosos and beautiful thing.

The last speaker, Socrates, found such a romantic explanation of love to be untrue, for what desires good, virtue and wisdom is only something that does not contain such, something lacking, and therefore lacking it desires such things. Love only desires what it lacks. Love is neither beautiful nor ugly. "To have right opinion without being able to give reason is neither to understand nor is it ignorance. Right opinion is no doubt something between knowledge and ignorance."

It is so interesting how common and free sexuality and homosexuality were, how each man present commented on the beauty of the young men in their glory of youth. Alcibiades, jealous of Agathon, also a young beautiful male, makes a moving speech how Socrates refused his love and how other like young men, also were moved with his amazing wisdom and prose.

While women are generally discounted, and the bonding of affection in male love was considered a higher love by Pausanias, Socrates explanation of love, by far the most profound, was one he received from a woman named Diotima. Here, as another reviewer has stated, shows Plato's the egalitarianism and wisdom, like that of the beauty and ultimate goal of Love.

Later a group of men crash the party and the drinking really gets started. Some leave, while Socrates stays all night, never loosing integrity from his drinking and leaves with all his integrity.

Summary of Symposium (Oxford World's Classics)

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