INTRODUCTION

(Isocrates scoffs at the eulogists of “bees and salt and such-like trumpery,” and his language is echoed in the allusion—put in the mouth of Eryximachus quoting Phaedrus—to a “book by a wise man in which there were many praises of salt for its utility” (177 B). This eulogist of salt is commonly supposed to be Polycrates, since encomia on similar paltry subjects—mice, pots, pebbles—are ascribed to him. Dümmler, however, takes the reference to be to Antisthenes (Protreptikos), on the strength of the statement in Pollux VI. 16. 98: “A bombylios is a narrow-necked drinking vessel that makes a buzzing sound when one drinks, as Antisthenes says in his Protreptikos.” And for salt as eulogized in the same work, he quotes also Republic 372 B ff. (“they will have salt as a relish”). It may be added that a further allusion to the bombylios, as a narrow-necked drinking vessel, may be discovered in the mention of the “great drinking vessel” in Symposium 213 E. Since Antisthenes seems to have devoted a good deal of attention to the subject of drunkenness, one is inclined to suppose that his views are alluded to in Symposium (176, 213–14); and another allusion to him may be found in the mention of the “honest sophists” who eulogized Heracles (177 B), since Heracles was, notoriously, the patron saint of the Cynics. However much they might differ on other points, Plato and Isocrates were agreed in so far as both found the Cynic leader an objectionable person.

(f) A significant indication is given us at the conclusion of the Prologue that the account of the speeches which follows is not an exhaustive account, but only a selection. And it is a selection that has been sifted twice. For Apollodorus states (178 A) that neither did Aristodemus remember all the views put forward by every speaker, nor did he (Apollodorus) remember all that Aristodemus had related. This statement is further confirmed by the later statement (180 c) that Aristodemus passed over the discourses of several speakers who followed next after Phaedrus. We are to infer, therefore, that there was a good deal of speechifying at the banquet which was not worth remembering. But why Plato is at pains to emphasize this point is