Symposium - AIC

Philip Krinks
the nature, including the power, of the thing under discussion.
V.2 Aristophanes and the power of erōs
Aristophanes gradually reveals what he means by doing justice to the power of erōs. It is not the
doctor or other technician who must find the utility in erōs: it is erōs which:
‘is the most human-loving of gods, being the helper of human beings, and doctor (iatros) of those
things, which if they were cured (iathentōn) it would be the greatest happiness for the human race
(genei)…’ (189c9-d3)
This is double-edged: ultimately, erōs does not cure the illness. It treats our ills, without
necessarily curing them: a note of dismal realism
Eryximachus was right, Aristophanes implies, to focus on nature (physis). But it is human nature
(anthropinēn phusin) which matters.
‘… It is necessary for you to learn (mathein) what human nature (anthropinēn phusin) is and what its
sufferings (pathēmata) have been…’ (189d3-6)
Only if one understands human nature, Aristophanes implies, can one understand the power of erōs
and so defend it. That is another criticism of Eryximachus: the account of nature which focuses on a
cosmic account of erōs (relating to the elements and their combination through Love and Strife) is not,
says Aristophanes, the type of nature on which the defender of erōs needs to focus. Aristophanes’ own
praise of erōs consists in an exposition of human nature: the power of erōs is that it contributes to
defining, in a rather literal way, with the various slicings, the human condition. erōs defines the
human condition in its incompleteness, offering also a remedy for incompleteness, albeit a tragically
partial one.
VI: AGATHON AND INTRINSIC CHARACTERISATION
V.1 Agathon and his predecessors
Agathon’s criticism of his predecessors 15 is apparently devastating:
‘Those who have spoken before me seem not to be offering an encomium to (egkōmiazein) the god,
but congratulating (eudaimonizein) human beings on the benefits of which the god is cause (aitios) for
them.’ (194e5-7)
He has a point. The previous speakers did seem to proceed as if the right way to defend erōs was to
point out the benefits erōs brought to human beings, based on certain characteristics which they said
that erōs had: oldest of gods, twofold, widely present in the cosmos, definitive of the human
condition, respectively.
Agathon’s own focus will be elsewhere:
‘But what the characteristic of (hopoios tis) erōs is (ōn), such that he makes gift of (edōrēsato) these
things, noone has said’ (194e7-195a1)
An initial impression may be that this makes an incorrect criticism about the previous praises. It might
seem to say that the previous speakers failed to say what they thought the characteristics of erōs were.
And that would be incorrect: for they each described one or more characteristics: oldest of gods,
twofold, widely present in all creatures, and so on.
It is a valid criticism if the test for an appropriate characterisation is that it should in itself provide an
adequate explanation of how erōs can give such gifts. That is what Agathon means. A literal
translation of the text would be:
‘of what kind (hopoios tis) himself (autos) being (ōn) he gives these things (tauta edōrēsato), no one
has said (oudeis eirēken)’
15 Bury 1932/1973, ad 194e, rightly points out this is ‘the favourite rhetorical device of criticising the manner or thought of
previous speakers’, but on my reading it is also something more than that
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