Symposium - AIC

Harold Tarrant
Obviously the pervasive presence of either myth or a poetic style is important in accounting for these
negative scores, and accordingly the speech of Aristophanes is the highest-scoring part of the
Symposium, followed by Agathon and Eyximachus, with Phaedrus coming next. Recall that all these
speeches are encomia of a kind, though the Diotima contribution is a highly unusual and somewhat
conversational kind (199a6-b7).
What do these results mean for an ancient reader? As encomia of a quasi-divine being that is
manifested in human action, they a partly protreptic function, designed to encourage supposedly
ethical behaviour. The anonymous Prolegomena takes a blended style, neither wholly weighty not
wholly lean, as a characteristic of moral discussions (17.15-18), and the speeches of Phaedrus and
Pausanias would perhaps have struck the listener as ‘blended’, and hence as having something serious
to offer if the elevated style did not seem contrived, as that of Phaedrus would perhaps have done.
Pausanias’ speech was certainly agreed by the Platonist Taurus and Aulus Gellius (NA 17.20.6) to
require one to penetrate beyond the dressing of rhetoric to the weighty and majestic depths of Plato’s
subject matter. Rather weightier (to judge from PC1) was the tone of Eryximachus, marginally less
weighty than Aristophanes’ foundation-myth of human erotic behaviour and Agathon’s technically
contrived poetic encomium. Through the admixture of features of the ἁδρὸς-style Plato ensures that
his audience sits up in expectation of hearing something with substantial content, and the tendency is
for this admixture to increase, from Phaedrus (who by his resemblance to ‘Lysias’ must have been
seen to display features of the opposite style as well) and Pausanias, to Eryximachus, Aristophanes,
and Agathon—who is quickly exposed as a fraud by Socrates. The specious beauty of Agathon’s
effort is in effect replaced by the deeper beauty associated with Diotima, who will make use of the
ἁδρὸς-style in certain passages, most notably the myth of Poros and Penia and the Ladder of Love
passage, but remains in conversational-mode elsewhere.
In the following chart, which was not atypical, we found that the Poros and Penia passage
most resembled the latter part of the Palinode, 4 and the Ladder of Love the earlier part. The special
diction of the Diotima passage is thus like nothing more than that of the inspired poet, whether
mythical or not so mythical. The remainder of it most resembled the introductory narratives of the
Euthydemus and the Symposium itself (Chart 3):
Table 3: Diotima’s speech split
The versatility of Diotima’s diction was thus both striking and confusing, and stands in contrast to the
more homogeneous contributions of other speakers. The listeners are left perplexed (212c4-6), no
doubt unwilling to share Socrates’ readiness to believe this strange lady, and happy to be diverted by
4 Rather than the threefold division used earlier in this paper, earlier work had simply split the Palinode into two files, with a
break after the first 2000 words (250a6).
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