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The Symposium (Penguin Classics)

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"The Symposium" is one of those books that everyone should read. In it, Plato explores, through a series of speeches, the nature and origins of love and passion. However, the Penguin edition fails to clearly distinguish when one speech begins and one ends. It will be confusing for students studying this work to reference a certain speech; however, the "paragraph markers" in the text are helpful. Also, the text incorporates "end notes," but for lay readers of Greek Literature, footnotes may be more useful.

I've read quite a few pieces of ancient Roman & Greek literature and each time I come away greatly surprised at how these 2000 to 3000-year old cultures were so similar to ours in many ways. Well, Plato's somewhat short dialogue "The Symposium" both re-affirms and counters these past impressions.

"The Symposium" investigates the nature of romantic Love. What is it? From where does it arise? What is the aim of Love? What does it accomplish?

On the one hand, this dialogue asks questions that people today still can't really answer. Modern readers should be able to relate very well to these aspects of the dialogue. It should be noted that most of the viewpoints and opinions presented through several speeches in the dialogue make some sort of sense, but only when Love is thought of as a sentient being that can influence a person's thoughts and actions. Most of us today have been schooled in science and don't perceive Love as a separate entity but rather as a mental condition springing from somewhere in the brain. But overall, the speeches are easy to relate to in the sense of scrutinizing the fundamental nature of Love.

However, where "The Symposium" evinces stark differences with modern culture is with respect to homo-eroticism. So many references are made to homosexuality (including one embarassingly revealing anecdote by Alcibiades about his lover Socrates) that if we consider Plato's work to be representative of the time, then we have to believe that many, if not most, highly educated men in ancient Athens were essentially homosexuals whose relations with their wives were limited to providing for them and fathering children by them. The most convincing support for this is in Aristophanes' and Alcibiades' speeches.

The Penguin edition consists of a superb translation by Christopher Gill. The finale to Agathon's eulogy on Love immediately struck me as remarkable and incredibly well worded, so much so that I had to read it again to admire the use of language. And then imagine my astonishment when a couple paragraphs later Socrates says about Agathon's speech: "The rest was not quite so amazing, but who could fail to be struck by the beauty of language and phrasing at the end?" Clearly, Gill nailed the translation of that passage, and I believe in general too.

A must read for fans of classics! It's short too, well under 100 pages.

The kindle version is NOT the Penguin Edition that it claims to be. Rather, you get the IndyPublishers edition translated by Benjamin Jowett. Amazon needs to correct this error. If you care about the translation and publisher, do not buy this.

I'm not a philosophy or ancient history student, I picked up Plato's "Symposium" to challenge myself and see if I could understand it. The "Symposium" is a gathering of Greek thinkers who sit around and give speeches about love.

Phaedrus talks about the greatness of love and how those who have it achieve great things. Pausanias talks of the merits of boy/man love where the boy pleasures the man while the man passes on his wisdom to the boy and that this is the best kind of love, not the lesser lover of procreation between man and woman. Eryximachus talks about how love is the source of all happiness. Aristophanes talks about how once upon a time there was no man or woman but a single human who had both sexes' characteristics. These creatures tried to scale the heavens and so Zeus cut them in half and ever since then man and woman have sought to create that single creature again. Socrates talks about his teacher Diotima and how she taught him that love was the only way human beings could be immortal.

"The Symposium" is a short read not to be rushed as there are some fascinating ideas here. Not new ones though but ones that have influenced western culture and thought for centuries. Aristophanes' and Diotima's especially are ideas I've come across before but didn't know they originated in this text. It's also very pro-pederasty which I thought was amusing and can see why some people might have thought Plato was a closet homosexual. Those Greeks certainly were liberated though.

It's an accesible and interesting little book though this Penguin Great Ideas edition features no notes, contextual history, introduction, glossary, reading list, etc which the Penguin Classics edition does so if you're studying this text I'd get that edition rather than this one.

A great little book. It's a great translation and there's a lot of supplemental material here to help the reader understand the text a bit more, which is always helpful. Although as another reviewer noted, it can be hard to tell just who is speaking at any given moment. But that seems to be a common trend with all translations of Plato. All in all it's a great edition to own and great material to read.

This review is for the Kindle edition of what is supposedly the Christopher Gill translation of Plato's Symposium. However it turns out if you download it that it is the same as the Benjamin Jowett translation which is available for free, whereas here you have to pay upwards of $8 for it. I also checked Penguin Classics web site and they do not indicate that a eBook version of this book is available. So be careful when purchasing the Kindle edition. I had to return my purchase for this Kindle book.

We all like to chat about romance around a dinner table but what is romance and love all about? Well, Symposium is one of the most serious discussions about this issue datable to the 5th century BCE. At that time, Greeks at dinner parties used to sprawl themselves on couches with food and wine and a little music, be ministered by slaves and while eating or after have a spirited conversation/discussion. Well this "soire" takes place with Socrates, and its details are related second hand by the author Plato.

As translations go, this particular issue is one of the best on the market and the author had discussed it's details with a Kabbalist teacher of mine Glynn Davies. A translation is dependent to a greater or lesser extent on the author's appreciation and interpretation of the sorts of contents involved - and this translation is pretty current. There is a good introduction about the characters, especially Alcibiades and Xenophon who were real people from the time.

I think this book is a wonderful evocation of deep thinking from the Greek world starting with sensual love and then going on to describe a sort of spiritual love that subverts our expectations of what we would understand by Love personified as a deity. Socrates is in the beginning seen to enter into a meditational reverie which probably indicates that some such sages did meditate as in Indian traditions in order to obtain wisdom. Later, Socrates recounts the wisdom transmitted by an Oracle called Diotima (almost as if to say, "this is not what I think (though it is actually) but it was conveyed to me as follows by this trustworthy source".

Some of your friends should appreciate the wisdom of this book. Above all, it is The Symposium, the important conversation among friends at dinner talking about something of the sublime in a way that echoes but also seriously deepens the level of our own more mundane discussions on romance and true love that crop up regularly if you're at that sort of age.

All philosophy, yesterday's and today's, is a battle between the two ancient Greeks, Plato and his student Aristotle. Thus, people who wants to understand the world, needs to know what each of these sages is saying, what the different premises of the two men are, and what are the ramifications of what they are saying.

This is no exaggeration. Take religion as an example. Plato's approach to life affected the way the general population understand religion, while Aristotle offered the intellectuals a realistic rational view of religion. What is the difference between them?

Plato had an otherworldly non-naturalistic idea of the world. How can people define anything, how can they relate to it? There is, Plato answered, an ideal that exists outside this world. Plato never said where this ideal is located - in the mind or in heaven or floating around in the upper atmosphere. An object, he claimed, is defined by how much it is like the ideal. Thus, for example, there is an ideal table and the table on earth can be called a table if and only if it is like the ideal table.

Take love as an example. Plato's Symposium describes a drinking party where Socrates and his acquaintances try to define love. Plato is a masterful writer, and the dialogue is filled with very entertaining dissimilar ideas. However, Socrates, Plato's hero and teacher, states that true love is love that is like the ideal of love.

This is clever, but it is not informative. It seems like a joke. But it isn't a joke. People lived according to Plato's worldview and abandoned thinking during the medieval dark ages until the renaissance when individuals, at least the more educated, began to rethink and reaccept the ideas of Aristotle. Of course, even during the dark ages there were some scholars who lived as Aristotle taught, but only a handful of people.

Plato's notion of the otherworldly unnatural ideal affected many religions. People, said the clerics, must organize their lives according to ideals that are in heaven. People, they said must not think about religion on their own. Why should they think? There is only one way to think and act, and it is the ideal that is in heaven.

Aristotle had a radically different rational and natural view. He encouraged people to think. They must examine nature, experiment with it and discover the truth. A good table has nothing to do with heaven; it is an object that serves people best to eat on, work on, put objects on, etc. Love is not what matches a heavenly ideal; it is a human relationship built on respect and trust, on ability to work with another for mutual benefits.

So, too, with religion. One can if one wants believe in a divine revelation. However the revelation continues and grows as humans grow. The revelation occurs here on earth; it is not an ideal in heaven. Teachings are revealed in the events of history and in scientific experiments and advances.

Thus, Plato's views are significant, for they are the past and they are the present that should be avoided. People need to enter the world bravely, open-mindedly, think, act and grow.

Originally my order was slow in shipping, but this seller gave me a partial refund quickly. Seems like slow shipping is a rare case with this seller. I will definitely buy from this seller again because of their honesty and fairness.

If there are few things that almost all species seems to discuss, it's love. that desire, the longing to connect with another human being in this chaotic world. although there have been many plights about the desire for love, lack of love, or the quest to get love, it all seems to tie back to one of the most popular (and i will guess earliest?) works on love published, Plato's symposium.
The plot, like all Greek works, is pretty simple. A couple of men get together, get drunk, and talk about praising Eeros, the god of erotic love. Some of the speeches (I can't really remember them) are in praise of a god, and other speak of how to respect Eros properly, whom to love, and how poeple came to love others. Some were dry, some were entertaining, but all were informative and made me think of love in a new light.
There's not much action in this play, but I think that is a trait of all Greek plays. Plato is more concerned about the philosophy and dialouge than the action behind it. Symposium i think inspired many of the dramas and romantic comedie currently out there. I just wish films about love were as smart and as intelligent as this one.