Customer Reviews

Symposium and Phaedrus

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Symposium, Plato's most dramatic dialogue, skilfully interweaves six voices together in a discussion of love. More than any other dialogue, this work creates effective characters and provides insight into the Athenian culture's view of love while blending humor into the text. Phaedrus, a later dialogue, is less dramatic in nature but continues the inquiry into the nature of love. Juxtaposing the two in the same text gives the reader a sense of how Plato's style evolved over time

The Symposium was a great book but it was a little hard to understand. I like the way opinions were expressed of the topic of "love!" It makes a person think about "love" in general. What it really is and what it really means. There are many opinions of "love" and not one person has the same idea of love in the book. There are creative ideas expressed in the book about what a person thinks "love" is. It is hard to agree with just one person in the book because all their ideas are great and they all make sense in one way or another. A person may agree or disagree with a speaker in the book because they may not agree with the speaker or they may like the idea of a speaker and agree with him. A person may also agree or disagree with some parts of the idea from a speaker because they may think that the idea starts off great but does not end. A reader may compare and contrast ideas of all the speakers and they may come up with another idea of what "love" is or how it is felt. The Symposium was great to read and it makes you think about what everyone else in the world thinks about "love!"

The book is not meant to be like Plato's major philosophical works. It is about the nature of love, discussed with a frankness about homosexuality not seen until thousands of years later. For anyone interested in what the Greeks thought of love, it's all there. I found them interesting, also revealing the nature of Plato's writing that is more artistic than technical. Socrate's talk of love being a divine madness or the myth of man and woman once being one are beautiful. The Greeks had a tendency to discuss everything in rational terms or in relation to their mythology, so that some of their ideas seem nonsensical or naive, but that is just from the perspective of someone living centuries later.