Armand D’Angour
Plato’s Symposium is the earliest, most brilliant, and probably still the most widely read of all philosophical treatments of love. It poses numerous difficulties for the modern reader, partly thanks to the cultural background against which it is set. Today we tend to think of love as a psychological matter, a question of how individuals negotiate feelings of passion, affection, and intimacy that arise between them, rather than seeing ourselves as, for instance, the abetters or victims of deities responsible for arousing such emotions in us.
In 5th-century BC Athens where this Socratic dialogue takes place, Love was thought of as the domain of the god Eros (subsequently equated to the Roman Cupid) and goddess Aphrodite (the Roman Venus). These divinities were reckoned to be the instigators and creators, for better or worse, of the human experience of love, and on that account were considered to merit praise, hymns, and worship.
Today’s notion of love is often connected with scenarios of romantic and sexual liaisons between men and women, as explored in innumerable books, films, plays and TV sitcoms. The Symposium, however, reads as an all-male affair. It is the report by a man, Apollodorus, of an event he claimed to have heard about, from a man, of the proceedings of a drinking party (the literal meaning of “symposium” is “together-drinking”) in which the only people present were men. And it takes place in the house of the playwright Agathon, who was well known for his relationship with his older male lover Pausanias.
When Agathon won first prize with his tragic drama in 416 BC, Apollodorus explains, he threw a party to celebrate it. The following night the partygoers reconvened at his house, but being the worse for drink from the previous night’s festivities they decided not to indulge further, but to talk instead about the god Eros.
The explicit starting-point of the Symposium is the proposal, made by a young aristocrat named Phaedrus, that Eros (not Aphrodite), the male divinity responsible for love, has been generally neglected by writers and should be accorded due praise. In the speeches that follow, the relationships that are cited to illustrate the workings of love are almost entirely those between male lovers. So an equally great stumbling block for today’s readers to the notion of “praising the god of love” might be that the dialogue appears to be directed exclusively at men and that the relationships discussed are largely homosexual ones. Can such a male-oriented discussion be taken to allow a broader understanding of the meaning of love, one that recognises aspects of relationships between men and women no less than between men?
Are Women Necessary in a Symposium?
A degree of female presence was standard in Athenian symposia. Auletrides, female slaves, were regularly present to perform melodies on the double-pipes (the aulos), and to provide a musical accompaniment for participants who might render familiar or impromptu lyrics for the entertainment of fellow-symposiasts. High-class courtesans, hetairai, might also attend to provide entertainment and other services. In this case, however, we are told that the auletris was told to leave so that the participants could compete in singing the praises of Eros – though not literally by singing. In the six speeches that take place in the first half of the dialogue, culminating with that of Socrates, love relationships seem to take love between men for granted. Is it possible that Platonic love has nothing to say about love between men and women?
The physical absence of women from the symposium reflects the social reality of classical Athens. But as with the auletris who is dismissed at the start, their absence seems to haunt the dialogue. Although women are dismissed or overshadowed, they are never far away. Phaedrus, who sets up the terms of the competition in praise of Eros, argues that love encourages one to go so far as dying for the sake of the person one loves. He gives the mythical example of Patroclus and Achilles in the Iliad, arguing that the latter was the younger lover who went out to battle to fight and die in order to avenge the older man he loved. But Achilles is not the only example Phaedrus cites: in fact, the first character he commends is Alcestis, the heroine of the play of that name (first staged in 438 BC) by Euripides.
The myth of Alcestis tells how King Admetus was granted the ability to avoid death if someone agreed to die in his place. When his time came, his elderly parents refused, but his wife Alcestis volunteered to sacrifice her own life out of love for him. After her death, the hero Heracles visited Admetus’ home; on learning what had happened, he went down to the Underworld and, after wrestling with Death, brought Alcestis back to life and reunited the couple. The gods accorded her special honour, Phaedrus says, not only for being prepared to die for the man she loved but for actually doing so.
The Feminine Principle
The speaker who follows Phaedrus is Pausanias, who gives a long-winded speech about the importance of respect and commitment in homosexual love relationships. As the older lover of Agathon, he is particularly exercised about love between older and younger men. His key insistence is that the older lover should not enter into a relationship purely for sexual purposes – something that, he rather haughtily suggests, is more common in heterosexual affairs – but with a view to faithful commitment and to improving the mind of the person he loves.
His comments reflect how in ancient Athens young men were more likely to offer satisfying intellectual, emotional, and physical companionship to their peers and to older men, because boys were educated from a young age in literature, the arts, and gymnastics, while girls were mostly uneducated. Married off in their teens, women were generally relegated to a life of child-rearing and dull domesticity – apart from those who turned to prostitution, something that Athenian men evidently took advantage of.
It is worth noting, however, that, despite Phaedrus’ instruction to praise Eros, Pausanias’ overtly homoerotic speech invokes the female divine principle of love, Aphrodite. Pausanias suggests that there are in fact two goddesses of that name, ‘Heavenly’ Aphrodite – representative of true and proper love – and ‘Vulgar’ Aphrodite, whose followers are interested only in sexual self-gratification. He makes a plea that lovers should adhere to the first goddess and shun the second.
The female principle also appears, in a different fashion, in the following speech by the physician Eryximachus. Love, he explains, is the force that harmonises opposites – in the human body, in music, in nature, and in the cosmos as a whole. The idea that ‘opposites’ include opposite sexes is at least implicit. The notion of the opposite sexes recurs in the most entertaining speech of the symposiasts, that given by the comic playwright Aristophanes, who spins a wild fantasy to explain what love means.
Original human beings, Aristophanes says, were duplicates of ourselves, with two faces looking out in opposite directions, four arms, four legs, and so on. They were so powerful and self-satisfied that they threatened the gods, so Zeus cut them in half and turned them into the human beings we know today. Each of the original cut halves went around desperately seeking their other half in order to regain their “completeness” – and that, says Aristophanes, is what Love continues to make human beings do. Since Aristophanes’ original humans comprised either two male halves, two female halves, or a male-female double – thus explaining different sexual orientations – the love that seeks the “missing half” might be imagined as heterosexual no less than homosexual.
“The Truth about Love”
When it’s Socrates’ turn to speak, rather than offering his own views directly, he claims to recount the “truth about love” as he knows it. It’s surprising that Socrates, the philosopher famous for saying that “all he knows is that he doesn’t know”, claims to know the truth in this case. But he knows it only because, he says, he was taught it by a “clever non-Athenian woman”. The name he gives her is Diotima, and she is the most significant female presence in the Symposium. Her status as non-Athenian and an unusually gifted woman places her outside the masculine Athenian citizen sphere, and Plato has Socrates present her as his authoritative teacher of love’s “mysteries”.
Through Diotima’s voice, we learn of love’s ascent from the appreciation of physical beauty to a more transcendent truth: this is the “ladder of love” that forms the dialogue’s central doctrine. On the way up, we’re told, the souls of lovers are “pregnant” and desirous to procreate – to give birth in some cases, to actual children, but in others, to such things as virtue, wisdom, art and poetry. The fictional “Diotima” masks a real woman well known to Socrates, who is reported to have conducted discussions about love in the presence of Athenian men including Socrates: Aspasia of Miletus.
Aspasia was the intellectual wife and companion of Athens’s leading citizen Pericles. She was notorious for her cleverness, eloquence, and political influence, for which she was widely lampooned by comic playwrights such as Eupolis, Cratinus, and Aristophanes. In Plato’s dialogue Menexenus, however, Socrates claims that Aspasia was his and Pericles’ teacher of rhetoric. By acknowledging Diotima here as Socrates’ teacher of matters erotic, Plato has a woman represent a level of intellectual power and insight that the symposiasts themselves do not have, and one who speaks expressly in terms of birthgiving and procreation. He thus makes a woman central to the dialogue’s philosophical project, and one who, speaking expressly in female terms, offers a vision of love that transcends the limitations of Athenian society and its masculine public sphere.
In the dialogue’s dramatic climax (the longest section of the tale) the playboy-politician Alcibiades bursts into the party drunk and disheveled. Rather than offering a theoretical account of love, he gives heartfelt personal testimony about his intimate relationship with Socrates. He amusingly relates how he, then the most beautiful young man in Athens, had on one occasion desired to have physical sex with the older, less attractive, but serenely wise philosopher. He had been casually rebuffed because Socrates’ only goal, of which Pausanias would clearly have approved, was to improve the young man’s soul: the absence of sex is what gives rise to the popular notion of a ‘Platonic’ relationship. Alcibiades’ attempts represent the base of Diotima’s ladder of love, and his acknowledged failure to ascend to philosophical love demonstrates the gap between Athenian male political ambitions and the true lover’s wisdom.
While working within the constraints of Athenian literary and social conventions, we can thus see how Plato has intentionally created space for female intellectual authority in amatory matters and for love between men and women. The theory about ascending from physical to philosophical love can be read partly as a call to transcend the gendered limitations of conventional Athenian thought, even if in practice ‘higher’ kinds of love were likely to be enjoyed in male-only relationships. In the Symposium, then, women may be physically absent from the party, but the dialogue’s philosophical insights about the nature of love are potentially no less applicable to women than to men. That makes it a work that can still be read, thought about, appreciated, and learned from in a world with very different social structures and aspirations from those that prevailed in Plato’s time.
Armand D’Angour is Professor of Classics at the University of Oxford. He has written previously for Antigone on the music of Sophocles’ Ode to Man here, on the Song of Seikilos inscription here, and on Sappho and Catullus here.
Further Reading
A. D’Angour, Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher (Bloomsbury, London, 2019).
A. D’Angour, How to Talk about Love: An Ancient Guide for Modern Lovers (Princeton UP, Princeton, NJ, 2025).
R. Hunter, Plato’s Symposium (Oxford UP, 2004).
F.C.C. Sheffield, Plato’s Symposium: The Ethics of Desire (Oxford UP, 2009).