Plato’s Symposium: Ancient Wisdom on Love, Desire, and the Good Life

For nearly 2,400 years, Plato’s Symposium has invited thoughtful reflection on love and relationships, and how they are connected to the meaning of one’s life. Few — if any— philosophical works have had a broader cultural impact, with ideas that have influenced everything from modern psychology to Christian theology, to say nothing of art and literature. The social customs of ancient Athens are obviously a lot different than today, but the dialogue’s central questions remain. How can love shape the kind of people we are?

You’re not going to find a lot of simple answers in Symposium, though you’ll learn that simply asking the questions is the journey. It’s one of the most famous works in the history of literature for a good reason.

Symposium was likely written around 385-370 BCE, a good few hundred years before Jesus Christ was born. It’s a series of speeches that began as a party where the elite Athenian men gathered to drink wine and wax philosophic on love.

The poet Agathon hosts this party at his own home to celebrate a victory at a drama competition and invites a bunch of his pals and encouraged them all to drink enough so that they may feel compelled to speak more frankly. 



Phaedrus is the first to speak, and he points out that Eros (the god of love), is the oldest of all the gods and as such, his age makes love provides the most powerful benefits. The rewards of love are the greatest because Eros has been around longer than any of the gods.

Pausanias’s take on love is a little more problematic. He tries to distinguish “vulgar” love and “heavenly” love, but the former is pederastic and the more we say about that, the more uncomfortable we may be. He’s the lawyer of the group, so perhaps he is expert at performing the mental gymnastics needed to endorse such a thing.

Eryximachus talks next, and he talks about how love is an impact on everything everywhere in the whole universe — and that includes human nature, nature nature, and divine nature.

Then there was Aristophanes, who should have gone in Eryximachus’s place but ended up with a debilitating case of the drunken hiccups. He postulates that there are three sexes that com from the Sun, Earth, and Moon: male and female and hermaphrodite, respectively. He says we used to have double bodies that we were split from, and we spent our lives looking for our other half. However, many scholars have pointed out that Aristophanes was prone to sarcasm, and his entry in Symposium may be him having some fun.

Then the host Agathon speaks, and he says that love is the source of wisdom and courage and justice, and all the other human virtues.

The famous Socrates follows, and says that love is the desire for the goodness and beauty we do not yet have, and that love is more than emotional passion and physical attraction. He reframes love as a catalyst for growth, and not something that satisfies our desires. Love challenges us to be more fully human.

And that’s before Alcibiades shows up to the party already smashed and wearing a flower crown and being followed by a flutist. Clearly lubricated by the alcohol and in touch with his feelings, Alcibiades goes on and on about how he wanted to sleep with Socrates and how frustrated he was to have been physically rejected by Socrates.

It’s a wild shindig, and to call Symposium a big drunken homoerotic party may be intentionally provocative, but not exactly entirely inaccurate. In fact, it comes off as a modern bachelor party attended by bros who have a great deal of affection for each other. It may be an oversimplification to say that this is a work about love and friendship, but that’s probably why it has endured for so long.

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Cover Image Credit: Background image is by Pietro Testa circa 1648 and is part of the public domain per Wikimedia Commons. The original cover image of Plato is a copy of the portrait made by Silanoin ca. 370 BC for the Academia in Athens, and the photo was taken by Marie-Lan Nguyen. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic per Wikimedia Commons.

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