Symposium - AIC

No Invitation Required? A Theme in Plato’s Symposium
Giovanni R.F. Ferrari
Uninvited arrivals are a salient theme of Plato’s Symposium. Why is this?
The theme is broached when Socrates, coaxing Aristodemus to accompany him, uninvited, to
Agathon's, twists a proverb to make it say that the good go uninvited to the feasts of the good (174b).
Three distinct acts of uninvited arrival are involved here: most obviously, good going uninvited to
good; implicitly, superior going uninvited to inferior, since this seems to be the version of the proverb
that Socrates is treating as his original; lastly, inferior going uninvited to superior, which is how
Socrates claims Homer portrayed Menelaus's visit to Agamemnon in the Iliad. Each of the three has
its significance for the dialogue.
Aristodemus worries that his situation would fit, not the first case, good going uninvited to
good, but the third: inferior going uninvited to superior. For protection, he seeks an invitation from
Socrates. This, however, is a revealing error. For to go uninvited as inferior to superior, in Plato, is
emblematic of one's philosophic independence. It is to follow where nothing and no one actively
beckons or responds; where what draws you on is your own desire for the wisdom that would yield
complete, godlike satisfaction, if you could attain it. It is this connection with desire that makes the
theme a natural one to appear when the talk in Plato's dialogues turns to love, since love may well
pursue its object without regard for invitation, and may continue the pursuit — indeed, may pursue
more ardently — if unrequited.
Not coincidentally, therefore, the theme reappears in Plato's other dialogue on love, the
Phaedrus, where it receives a full-dress mythical presentation as the relationship in which
philosophers should properly stand to the divine. The Olympian gods in Socrates' great speech on
love in the Phaedrus are said to wander the pathways of the heavens, enjoying blessed visions and
"doing each his own" (prattôn hekastos autôn to hautou, 247a), while any human soul who is able and
willing may follow them (hepetai de ho aei ethelôn te kai dynamenos), ascending after much struggle
to glimpse the place where the gods are to feast and dine on the vision of true being (pros daita kai epi
thoinên); for the gods begrudge nothing (phthonos gar exô theiou khorou histatai). The gods, then,
issue no invitations. Nor, however, do they pose obstacles. It is up to humans to follow, in
sympathetic imitation, if they wish to enjoy a similar blessedness. They must go uninvited to the feast
of their superiors.
The Symposium too does not lack for a mythical presentation of this theme. Whereas the
divine feast of the Phaedrus, however, is high-flown in every sense of the word, that in the
Symposium is narrated in the lower, comedic register of Aesopic fable, as is appropriate to the less
serious, "sympotic" tone of the dialogue as whole. In the symbolic story of Eros' origins, told by
Diotima to Socrates (203b-204a), it is Eros' mother, Poverty, who goes uninvited to beg at the doors
where the gods are holding a celebratory feast for Aphrodite's birth. As Poverty incarnate, she is
herself poor and, one assumes, hungry, while the gods' feast is sumptuous (hoion dê euôkhias ousês,
203b). It is her own nature, then, that draws her on. And there she seizes on a second opportunity,
again without invitation: finding the god Resource (Poros) prostrate in a drunken stupor in the garden
nearby, and conscious of her own lack of resources (dia tên hautês aporian, 203b), she takes
advantage of his temporary defenselessness and conceives a child from this most well-off of fathers.
The child Eros, however, turns out to resemble its mother more than its father. Eros'
resemblance to Poverty, expressed allegorically in terms of the external features of his life, is wellnigh
perfect. Like his mother, he is poor and homeless and lives a hardscrabble life out of doors.
Hence his life is excluded from resembling that of his divine father, who, unlike his mother, is a fullypaid
up member of the happy company of feasting gods. And here it is important to see that Poros'
name, in the context of this fable, means Resource in the sense of "Resources" rather than
"Resourcefulness." When Plato writes that "in conformity with his father [or perhaps, "in the
direction of his father"], he is a schemer after the beautiful and the good" (kata de au ton patera
epiboulos esti tois kalois kai tois agathois, 203d), and when he follows this with a long list of
attributes making Eros out to be a cunning and resource-ful provider of those resource-s, it is the
resources that he inherits from his father, not the resourcefulness. The resources or goods that Eros
seeks (but only occasionally and temporarily achieves) are those times in his life when he prospers
and enjoys success (tote men ... thallei ... tote de apothnêiskei, 203e). 1 Resource himself, however,
1 So too, when terms etymologically related to Poros are used in this passage, they refer to achieved goods rather than to the
process of achieving them. This is certainly the case at 203e, just cited in the text, where Eros is described as capable in one