会饮篇

The party is halfway through when the door bursts open. A young aristocrat, roaring drunk, crowned with ivy and violets, staggers in propped up by a flute-girl. By the rules of the evening he's supposed to deliver his own speech in praise of Love. Instead he tells a different story — he confesses, in front of everyone, that he once pressed himself into another man's arms and was pushed away without so much as a flicker of expression. That man is reclining on a couch just across from him right now: barefoot, balding, snub-nosed, bug-eyed, and after a whole night of drinking, still not drunk. This isn't the ending of some bedroom farce. It's the most famous drinking party Plato ever wrote.

The drunk who just crashed the party is Alcibiades. The ugly philosopher he's just confessed his feelings to is Socrates. The room belongs to Agathon, a young poet the Athenians are celebrating for just having won first prize for tragedy at the Dionysia. The party itself comes down to us secondhand: a fanatical devotee of Socrates named Apollodorus tells the whole story to a friend he runs into on the road, and Apollodorus got it from Aristodemus, who tagged along to the party that night. Two hands passed it along before it ever reached us.

The Symposium is a dialogue Plato wrote sometime around the middle of the fourth century BCE, and it's the earliest and most complete text in Western philosophy to work through an abstract idea entirely inside the form of a drinking party. Like most of Plato's dialogues, Socrates is the central figure, but the writing plays more like an ensemble piece: seven Athenian men — a poet, a doctor, a comic playwright, a philosopher among them — sit in a circle and take turns delivering speeches in praise of Eros, the god of love. Plato uses this relay of speeches to peel the question of love open from one professional angle after another.

Seven men sit around the room, each from a different corner of Athenian life, but all recognizable names in the city's intellectual circles. Phaedrus, a young aristocrat, is the one who proposes tonight's theme. Pausanias, Agathon's lover, opens by splitting love into two kinds, common and divine. Eryximachus, a doctor, explains love as a force of harmony running through medicine, music, and the cosmos itself. Aristophanes you probably already know, the comic playwright behind The Acharnians. Agathon is tonight's host, fresh off his prize-winning play. And Socrates is the barefoot, snub-nosed philosopher who talks like he's cross-examining a witness, and who speaks last. Late in the night an eighth man shows up: Alcibiades, a young general and politician, drunk and crashing the party.

The world of the story runs on a single rule. Right at the start, Eryximachus the doctor sends the flute-girl away and proposes that instead of a drinking contest, each man take a turn delivering a speech in praise of Love. So this isn't some Roman-style bacchanal. It's an orderly, bookish sort of party, where taking your turn to speak is the actual business of the evening, and getting sloppy drunk is the real faux pas.

Phaedrus speaks first. He's the youngest at the table and his argument is the most straightforward: love makes people brave, willing to die for the one they love. He points to Achilles, who died for Patroclus, as his example. The speech is short and runs on conviction more than argument.

Pausanias goes next, and splits love straight down the middle. One kind belongs to Common Aphrodite: it's about looks and bodies, and it moves on once it's had its fill. The other belongs to Heavenly Aphrodite: it cares about soul and character, and it can keep a man faithful for life. He doesn't deny the first kind exists — he just ranks the second one higher. This is the first cut that gives love any real depth.

Eryximachus the doctor pushes love further out still. He starts from the medical balance of hot and cold, wet and dry, then works his way out to harmony in music and the turning of the seasons, until love becomes a tension running through the entire cosmos. This is the part modern readers are most likely to skim past, but it sets up Socrates's speech later: love has to be stretched this wide before the philosopher can pull it back in.

It's the comic poet Aristophanes's turn next, though he's briefly unable to speak because he's got the hiccups, and it takes him a while to recover. When he finally does start talking, he delivers one of the most famous myths in all of Western literature.

In ancient times, he says, human beings were round, with four arms, four legs, and two faces, and they grew so arrogant that they offended the gods, so Zeus split them all in half. Ever since, each half has wandered the earth searching for its other half, and when it finds it, the two cling together and refuse to let go, forgetting to eat, forgetting to live, content to starve to death in each other's arms. This is where the phrase soulmate comes from, in its earliest form. Worth remembering: the man delivering this speech is a comic writer, and he tells it half in jest. It's one speech at a drinking party, not a philosophical ruling handed down by Plato.

Agathon, the host, is the last to give a formal speech. Young and full of himself, he heaps praise on Eros without restraint: the youngest, most beautiful, most virtuous of all the gods. It's a common enough move at a party like this, but Socrates can't let it go. Rather than refuting him outright the way he does elsewhere, he starts asking questions, one after another: you say Eros is beautiful, is he the source of beauty, or does he love beauty because he lacks it? You say he's virtuous, virtuous toward what, exactly?

A few rounds of this and Agathon's ornate rhetoric is stripped bare. Socrates lays out his own definition: love is not a god, it is desire for what one lacks. Wanting something is proof you don't have it. Love itself is not beautiful, and it's precisely because it isn't that it chases beauty. With that single move, the claim running through all five speeches before his, that love itself is something beautiful, collapses.

Here Socrates does something strange: he stops speaking for himself and starts quoting someone else. Years earlier, he says, a priestess from Mantinea named Diotima taught him everything he knows about love. She never appears at this party. Everything she says reaches us only through Socrates's mouth.

Diotima's claim is that love is not a god at all, but a great spirit, born of Poverty and Plenty, standing between mortal and immortal. She hands Socrates a famous ladder: start by loving one beautiful body; then notice that all beautiful bodies share something in common, and lift your love off that one person onto beauty in bodies generally; lift it again, onto beauty of soul; again, onto beauty in laws, in institutions, in knowledge; and finally lift it onto something called beauty itself — eternal, neither growing nor diminishing, existing entirely on its own terms. This is the real origin of what gets called Platonic love. It is not a program of denial: the ladder starts from bodily beauty and climbs upward from there. It never kicks the body away.

The first time I read Diotima's speech, I stopped short. This is where the phrase Platonic love actually comes from, and it isn't the chaste, body-denying thing decades of loose usage have turned it into: it's a ladder climbing toward the abstract. The text even makes physical attraction the ladder's first rung, a step you cannot skip.

The moment Socrates finishes, the door bursts open. Alcibiades can barely stand, propped up by the flute-girl. The room pushes him to give the next speech, and by the rules of the evening he's supposed to praise Love. He refuses. Instead, he stands up and praises Socrates himself, in front of everyone.

He says he and Socrates fought side by side at Potidaea, and that in the retreat, Socrates stayed calmer than any of the generals. He says he assumed Socrates's indifference to his looks was just a tactic to reel him in, so he made his own move and climbed into Socrates's arms, and Socrates shoved him off like flicking away a snake, then chatted with him the next morning as if nothing had happened. This isn't a romantic comedy. It's a rejected man, loosened by wine, canonizing the person who rejected him in front of the entire room. What Alcibiades actually wants to say, underneath all of it, is that Socrates's self-control is terrifying.

Once Alcibiades finishes, the party comes apart. The guests drop off one by one, passing out cold on their couches. Socrates has barely touched his wine, and stays wide awake. He keeps Agathon and a half-conscious Aristophanes talking, arguing over whether tragedy or comedy ranks higher, and the three of them talk straight through until dawn. Then he gets up, walks over to the Lyceum next door, takes a bath, and starts his day as if nothing had happened at all.

That's how the party ends: everyone else drunk to unconsciousness, and only the philosopher still on his feet, walking out alone into the cold morning air to wash up. It's the most tactile scene Plato ever built for Socrates: he isn't teaching you anything here, he's just handing you an image and trusting you to remember it.

The Symposium's real strength is its structure. Seven wildly different speeches take the floor in turn: a young man's moral exhortation, a doctor's cosmology, a comic writer's myth, and finally a philosopher's method of relentless questioning. Each answer to what love is grows straight out of the speaker's own profession, and each gets revised or knocked down by the one that follows. Diotima's ladder is held back for the sixth speech, not the first, and it only lands with the weight it does because the five speakers before it have already chewed beauty and goodness down to the bone. By the time it arrives, it feels less like one more opinion than the only place left to go.

The other thing the book pulls off is the reversal in how Socrates comes across between its two halves. In the first half he's the interrogator, dismantling everyone else's argument. In the second, Alcibiades's drunken speech remakes him into something else entirely: a man ugly on the outside, godlike within, possessed of a self-control that borders on frightening. Layered together, the two portraits give a fuller picture than either could alone, which is exactly why Alcibiades's speech is the most moving piece of writing in the whole dialogue.

The map ends here, but the most valuable thing in the text was never the plot. It's the writing itself. Take Diotima's ladder, climbing from infatuation with one physical body all the way up to beauty itself as an eternal, independent, self-standing thing: the original's cool, deliberate voice, pulling you up rung by rung, is exactly what any retelling flattens out. Or take Alcibiades's public confession, that tangle of drunkenness, jealousy, worship, and shame, which only the original prose can actually hold together. And then there is the quiet question of what Socrates is thinking as he gets up and walks out that morning, a still image Plato leaves you with and never explains.