Historical context
The Symposium depicts a drinking party at Athens at which a company of distinguished men — the comic poet Aristophanes, the tragedian Agathon, Socrates, and others — take turns making speeches in praise of Erōs, love. The platform reads it as one of the supreme achievements of Plato's art: a work of dazzling literary and dramatic range that is also a profound philosophical treatment of love, beauty and desire. It is the deliberate counterpart to Xenophon's Symposium, which depicts the same kind of occasion in a plainer key.
Central argument
The platform reads the dialogue as building through its speeches toward Socrates' account, which he attributes to the priestess Diotima. Love, on this account, is desire for the perpetual possession of the good and the beautiful, and it expresses the mortal creature's longing for immortality. The philosophical lover ascends a "ladder": from the love of one beautiful body, to the love of all physical beauty, to the beauty of souls, of laws and institutions, of knowledge, and finally to the vision of Beauty itself — the eternal, changeless Form of which all beautiful things partake. The platform reads this ascent under education and the soul: love, rightly directed, is the force that draws the soul upward toward the Forms, the engine of the philosophic life.
Philosophical and dramatic significance
The platform reads the Symposium as uniting Plato's metaphysics, his ethics and his unmatched dramatic gift. Diotima's ladder is one of the most influential accounts of love and beauty ever written, and the source of the idea of "Platonic love" — love that transcends the physical toward the spiritual. The dialogue closes with the famous, unsettling speech of the drunken Alcibiades, who praises Socrates himself: a portrait of the philosopher as the truly beautiful soul behind an ugly exterior, whom Alcibiades loves and cannot corrupt — the human embodiment of the ascent the dialogue describes.
Reception and influence
The platform reads the Symposium as one of the most read and most influential of all Plato's works, shaping the Western understanding of love and beauty from the Neoplatonists through the Renaissance — where Ficino's commentary made "Platonic love" a central idea of the age — to the modern day. Its fusion of philosophy and literature has made it a model of the philosophical dialogue as an art form. The platform reads it as essential to understanding why Plato still matters, and reads the two Symposia together in Socrates in Plato vs Xenophon.