Of all the works of Plato the Symposium is the most perfect in form,
and may be truly thought to contain more than any commentator has ever
dreamed of; or, as Goethe said of one of his own writings, more than the
author himself knew. For in philosophy as in prophecy glimpses of the
future may often be conveyed in words which could hardly have been
understood or interpreted at the time when they were uttered (compare
Symp.)--which were wiser than the writer of them meant, and could not
have been expressed by him if he had been interrogated about them.
Yet Plato was not a mystic, nor in any degree affected by the Eastern
influences which afterwards overspread the Alexandrian world. He was
not an enthusiast or a sentimentalist, but one who aspired only to
see reasoned truth, and whose thoughts are clearly explained in his
language. There is no foreign element either of Egypt or of Asia to
be found in his writings. And more than any other Platonic work the
Symposium is Greek both in style and subject, having a beauty 'as of
a statue,' while the companion Dialogue of the Phaedrus is marked by
a sort of Gothic irregularity. More too than in any other of his
Dialogues, Plato is emancipated from former philosophies. The genius of
Greek art seems to triumph over the traditions of Pythagorean, Eleatic,
or Megarian systems, and 'the old quarrel of poetry and philosophy' has
at least a superficial reconcilement. (Rep.)
An unknown person who had heard of the discourses in praise of love
spoken by Socrates and others at the banquet of Agathon is desirous of
having an authentic account of them, which he thinks that he can
obtain from Apollodorus, the same excitable, or rather 'mad' friend of
Socrates, who is afterwards introduced in the Phaedo. He had imagined
that the discourses were recent. There he is mistaken: but they are
still fresh in the memory of his informant, who had just been repeating
them to Glaucon, and is quite prepared to have another rehearsal of them
in a walk from the Piraeus to Athens. Although he had not been present
himself, he had heard them from the best authority. Aristodemus, who
is described as having been in past times a humble but inseparable
attendant of Socrates, had reported them to him (compare Xen. Mem.).