Symposium - AIC

Stylistic Difference in the Speeches of the Symposium
Harold Tarrant (collaborating with Marguerite Johnson)
It is now widely acknowledged that literary form is a crucial ingredient of the Platonic dialogue, and
one that affects how the reader should be interpreting the work. Hand in hand with form goes the
correspondingly important ingredient of diction. While Plato does not usually introduce obvious and
significant changes in diction, he is certainly capable of changing it in accordance with specific
requirements, as Tarrant, Benitez, and Roberts demonstrate in relation to the Timaeus-Critias and the
language of myth (Ancient Philosophy, 31, 2011, 95-120). Their methods, borrowed in part from the
University of Newcastle’s Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing, focus on the mix of
recurrent vocabulary and in particular on the words that tend to be used in any similar text regardless
of the subject matter, generally 80 to 100 words in the commonest 200 in any set of texts.
When Plato offers a variety of speeches within a work, especially speeches delivered by
different characters or deriving (as in the Phaedrus) from different sources of inspiration, he
demonstrates himself well able to switch between types of diction, probably involving what should be
thought of linguistically as changes of ‘register’. Of course, the Greeks had no word equivalent to this
term, though the metrical changes that occur in tragedy and comedy guarantee their sensitivity to
different types of speech, types that will be employed by an individual only where the situation
warrants. Furthermore, the development of rhetorical theory resulted in a technical vocabulary for
types of rhetorical speech that applied to one situation rather than another. Accordingly Plato too is
prepared on occasion to use the terminology of, for instance, epideixis and protreptic, and must have
had a grasp of their usual stylistic requirements.
The Symposium, with its rich cast and with speeches that are usually considered to contrast
with one another, is a natural place to expect to see Plato distinguishing between different types of
speech—not simply between short question-and-answer exchanges and long set speeches, and not
simply between the types of characters being sketched, but between different types of diction that the
Greek reader of c. 380 BCE would be instinctively have been aware. There are two poets, but are they
actually speaking with a recognisably poetic diction? There is a medical man, but is his language
noticeably scientific? And what of the language of the literary enthusiastic ‘Phaedrus’, or of
‘Pausanias’ who is often thought to have sophistic connections? As for the language of Alcibiades, it
does not seem to reflect his drunkenness, but is it or is it not distinctive? Finally there is the language
associated with Diotima. Does she speak like a woman, and if so does she speak particularly like a
prophetess? And is ALL this language especially suited to sympotic contexts, informal occasions
designed to serve the reunion of friends and to smooth out any recent wounds?
This paper began with an observation that resulted in a joint Johnson-and-Tarrant article,
which is (hopefully) soon to appear. 1 The commentary of Olympiodorus had branded the central
section of the Alcibiades I ‘protreptic’, and a test of various chosen materials was run to ascertain
whether there was indeed a recognisable ‘protreptic register’ in Plato. They included the two works in
which the notion of protreptic discourse appeared, the Euthydemus (with its protreptic interludes
considered in isolation) and the Clitophon, where ‘Clitophon’ complains that Socrates’ discourse
serves only a protreptic purpose. Chart 1 offers diagrammatically the resultant cluster analysis:
1 ‘Fairytales and Make-believe, or Spinning Stories about Poros and Penia in Plato's Symposium: A Literary and
Computational Analysis’, Phoenix forthcoming.