…account of love in hisSymposium.

…much great literature, in theSymposium he depicts literature and philosophy as the offspring of lovers, who gain a more lasting posterity than do parents of mortal children. His own literary and philosophical gifts ensure that something of Plato will live on for as long as readers engage with his…

…Socrates in the middle dialoguesSymposium,Phaedo, andRepublic, the exchange is usually interpreted as a negative assessment by Plato of the adequacy of his earlier presentation. Those who consider the first part of theParmenides in isolation tend to suppose that Plato had heroically come to grips with the…

…the party depicted in theSymposium, each of the guests (including the poets Aristophanes and Agathon) gives an encomium in praise of love. Socrates recalls the teaching of Diotima (a fictional prophetess), according to whom all mortal creatures have an impulse to achieve immortality. This leads to biological offspring with…

…Platonic love, as in theSymposium, is eros, here graphically described. The soul is portrayed as made of a white horse (noble), a black horse (base), and a charioteer; Socrates provides an elaborate description of the soul’s discarnate career as a spectator of the vision of the forms, which it…

…a natural reading of theSymposium, thePhaedo, and theRepublic and moves on to a suggestive logical exercise based on a distinction between two kinds of predication and a model of the forms in terms of genera and species. Designed to lead the reader to a more sophisticated and…

…the occasion for his dialogueSymposium, and the banquet, which is the setting of the dialogue, is placed in Agathon’s house. Aristotle, in thePoetics, ascribes to Agathon a play, possiblyThe Flower, in which the characters, instead of being derived from the stock of Greek mythology, were his own…

…of sexual attraction in Plato’sSymposium. Genesis relates the same theory in the familiar myth that a rib, taken out of Adam, was fashioned into Eve; and precisely because woman was taken out of man, man forsakes his father and mother to cleave unto his wife so that they become…

…Marsilio Ficino’s translation of Plato’sSymposium, which influenced other writers during the Renaissance and afterward.