Purpose and context
The Symposium is Xenophon's account of a dinner party at Athens at which Socrates and his companions, after the entertainment, each declare what they are most proud of and defend the claim. The platform reads it as the lightest and most genial of Xenophon's Socratic works — a vivid social scene rather than a sustained argument — and as a deliberate companion to, and implicit rival of, Plato's dialogue of the same name and setting. Xenophon claims, in his opening, to report what he himself witnessed, though the dramatic date makes that doubtful; the platform reads the claim as a convention of the genre.
Argument and character
The platform reads the Symposium's substance in its portrait of Socrates among friends: playful, self-deprecating, drawing serious moral points out of a relaxed and convivial occasion. The culminating speech — Socrates on love, distinguishing the love of the soul from the love of the body and praising the higher kind — runs parallel to the great speeches of Plato's Symposium but in Xenophon's plainer, more practical key. The platform reads the work as evidence for the Socratic practical philosophy that distinguishes Xenophon's portrait: even at a party, his Socrates is concerned with character, self-command and the right ordering of the affections.
Influence and reception
The platform reads the Symposium's reception as inseparable from the comparison with Plato's: it has usually been read as the lesser of the two literary masterpieces, and as a precious second source for the social world of Socrates and his circle. Its informality and humour, long underrated, have drawn renewed attention for what they reveal of Socratic sociability and of Xenophon's own lighter touch.
Modern significance
For the Xenophon cluster the Symposium matters as a second window on Socrates among his friends, complementing the more earnest Memorabilia, and as part of the platform's case that Xenophon's Socrates is a genuine and historically valuable witness rather than a pale copy of Plato's. The two Symposia together are a model of how the same scene, in two hands, yields two portraits — the question the platform pursues in Socrates in Plato vs Xenophon.