eros: ----- erotic love, sexual desire, strong attraction
agape: ----- affectionate love, in Bible, God's love
philia: ----- friendship, friendly love
The Order of Speeches in the Symposium
External Dialogue 1721-173e Apollodorus tells an unnamed interlocutor he can recount the story
told to him by Aristodemus about going to the symposium at Agathon's with Socrates
on the occasion of Agathon's being crowned the victorious tragic poet
1. Phaedrus 178a-180c: Love inspires virtue.
2. Pausanias 180c-185c: Homosexual love, with roles distinct and defined.
{Interruption: Aristophanes gets the hiccups.}
3. Eryximachus 185e-188e: Love is a force in the cosmos (à la Empedocles).
4. Aristophanes 189a-193d: Love is the desire to have wholeness restored.
5. Agathon 194e-197e: Love is the source of all good things.
6. Socrates 201d-212c: (From Diotima): Love is the desire to procreate in
beauty.
The birth of Eros from Penia (Poverty) and Poros (Resource) 203b-204b
The soul's ascent to beauty
one beautiful body
the beauty of all bodies
the beauty of souls
the beauty of laws, activities, and customs
the beauty of knowledge, ideas, and theories
Beauty in itself (211a-d)
7. Alcibiades 215a-222d: Socrates himself personifies Love.
Conclusion: Socrates drinks everyone under the table, and they are debating
whether the same person could compose both comedies and tragedies.
Also Relevant on Platonic Love: Phaedrus, especially Socrates' second speech, 243e-257b
Love is the "divine madness"
Recommended Readings
on Gender Issues in Plato and the Ancient Greeks
Bat-Ami Bar On, Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings of Plato and Aristotle
(S.U.N.Y. Press, 1994)
Anne-Marie Bowery, "Diotima tells Socrates a Story: A Narrative Analysis of
Plato's Symposium, in Ward, 175-94.
Page duBois, "The Platonic Appropriation of Reproduction," in Tuana, 139-56.
Page duBois, Sappho is Burning (Chicago, 1996)
William S. Cobb, Plato's Erotic Dialogues (The Symposium and The Phaedrus),
translated with commentary (SUNY Press, 1993).
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, The History of Sexuality, Volume Two
(Vintage: 1986)
David Halperin, "Why Is Diotima a Woman?", in One Hundred Years of
Homosexuality, and Other Essays on Greek Love (Routledge, 1990).
Luce Irigaray, "Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato, Symposium, Diotima's Speech,"
in An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Cornell, 1993), pp. 20-33. Also in Tuana, 181-95.
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethicis in Greek
Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge, 1986)
-----"This Story Isn't True": Poetry, Goodness, and understanding in Plato's
Phaedrus, in J.M.E. Moravcsik and P. Temko, eds., Plato on Beauty, Totowa,
1982, 79-124.
-----Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford, 1990).
Gregory Vlastos, "The Individual as Object of Love in Plato," in Platonic Studies
(Princeton, 1973/1981), pp. 3-34.<
Andrea Nye, "Irigaray and Diotima at Plato's Symposium, in Tuana, 197-
Christine Pierce, "Eros and Epistemology," in Bar On, 25-39
Nancy Tuana, Feminist Interpretations of Plato (Penn State Press, 1994)
Julie Ward, Feminism and Ancient Philosophy (Routledge, 1996)
