The Symposium is one of Plato’s best-known works, written in 385 BCE or later, and appreciated for both its philosophical depth and its literary value. It is a fictional work that depicts a friendly gathering of notable men at the home of tragic poet Agathon in Athens at a symposium, a kind of after-party with drinking and dancing that took place after a banquet. The guests include the philosopher Socrates, the comic playwright Aristophanes, and the general Alcibiades. Eryximachus, a physician, challenges each of them to deliver an extemporaneous speech on the topic of Eros, the God of love and desire.  The narrative is structured as a story within a story within a story, told to a friend by Apollodorus, who was not at the banquet himself, but was told the story by Aristodimas, who was there for the event in 416 BCE. Here Eros is recognized both as erotic love and as a spiritual quality capable of calling forth courage, valor, and great deeds. Unsurprisingly, Socrates declines to praise corporal love and instead relates a tale from a woman called Diotima that tells of the conception of Eros as a child of Porus, god of resourcefulness, and Penia, goddess of poverty, and is thus pitched halfway between wisdom and ignorance as a perennial seeker and lover of knowledge. Like many of Plato’s works, The Symposium is a dialogue but here the form is a series of speeches that reflect different points of view, as opposed to the give-and-take of question and answer. Here the dialectic is found in the differences and contradictions among the speeches.

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