INTRODUCTION.

Socrates at one time seemed about to fall in love with him, and he thought that he would thereby gain a wonderful opportunity of receiving lessons of wisdom. He narrates the failure of his design. He has suffered agonies from him and is at his wit’s end. He then proceeds to mention some other particulars of the life of Socrates: how they were at Potidaea A city in Chalcidice where Socrates served as a soldier together, where Socrates showed his superior powers of enduring cold and fatigue; how on one occasion he had stood for an entire day and night absorbed in reflection amid the wonder of the spectators; how on another occasion he had saved Alcibiades’ life; how at the battle of Delium A battle during the Peloponnesian War, after the defeat, he might be seen stalking about like a pelican, rolling his eyes as Aristophanes had described him in the Clouds A comedy by Aristophanes satirizing Socrates. He is the most wonderful of human beings, and absolutely unlike anyone but a satyr A woodland deity, part man and part goat. He is like the satyr in his language too, for he uses the commonest words as the outward mask of the divinest truths.

When Alcibiades has finished speaking, a dispute begins between him, Agathon, and Socrates. Socrates piques Alcibiades by a pretended affection for Agathon. Presently another band of revelers appears, who introduce disorder into the feast; the sober part of the company, Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others, withdraw; and Aristodemus, the follower of Socrates, sleeps during the whole of a long winter’s night. When he wakes at cockcrow, the revelers are nearly all asleep. Only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon hold out; they are drinking out of a large goblet, which they pass round, and Socrates is explaining to the two others, who are half asleep, that the genius of tragedy is the same as that of comedy, and that the writer of tragedy ought to be a writer of comedy also. First Aristophanes drops, and then, as the day is dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to rest, takes a bath and goes to his daily avocations until the evening. Aristodemus follows.

If it be true that there are more things in the Symposium of Plato than any commentator has dreamed of, it is also true that many things have been imagined which are not really to be found there. Some writings hardly admit of a more distinct interpretation than a musical composition; every reader may form his own accompaniment of thought or feeling to the strain which he hears. The Symposium of Plato is a work of this character, and can with difficulty be rendered in any words but the writer’s own. There are so many half-lights and cross-lights, so much of the color of mythology...