i’ll be real and say i liked alcibiades’ speech best by far 😭😭 yes, yes, the philosophy of love, but give me how you are all affected by this! give me it in practice! how do we treat each other based on our philosophies!!! ofc this would remain an essential text despite that, but alcibiades was indispensable to it. but anyway sharing knowledge as showing love, loving the people who you know will make you a better person, all very very beautiful ideals that i aspire to.

Aristophanes, king of romance I love u. Everyone else was cool too I guess, but after I read his section I was ready to wrap it up and cry

great book. amazing book. the part about spherical humans, so good!!! very funny to read. socrates arrives fashionably late as always. he had better things to do, like pondering life, as one does. i didn’t read the translation for this book, but translated it myself, and that really helped in the experience of this book. breaking it down, annotating it, learning the history of the author and the time he lived in, all such an amazing journey. cheers to socrates. you will forever be my lover.

This might be my favorite piece of classical literature ever! I loved hearing all of the different views on love and the nature of love. With each new philosophy, I kept getting more and more into the whole conversation. I love the idea of a whole bunch of people just discussing their thoughts on love while getting drunker and drunker, and with the theories getting deeper and deeper.

I had no idea Ancient Greece was so sexist&gay 😮 Yet here goes out boi Plato being secretly feminist. Or not. Can never know if these guys are serious or ironic.

Honestly wasn’t expecting this to be such a good read! It helped me with an essay but reading it didn’t feel like work as it is formatted as a dialogue. Misogynistic tone occasionally, though pretty mild compared to other writings in the era and it’s pretty much just subtext. It’s a discussion about love and it has so many interesting arguments. Highly recommend!

I wrote a paper about this attacking the logic in Socrates' speech and arguing that love could not be communicated about directly. Fun fun fun. I want to read 'Parmenides' next.

I've now read this dialogue several times through in Greek. Dover's notes are helpful. The Cambridge Green & Yellow series is always good. I'm teaching/leading a Symposium seminar in Philly this summer, which should be fun.

For serious readers, this is the best English edition of Plato's Symposium. The translation is brilliant. It is extremely close to the Greek (don't take my word for it, read them side-by-side), but it's still pretty readable in the English. If you care more about the reading being fun/smooth, the Yale and Penguin editions are probably better (see my review of Allen's translation), but this gives English readers the closest experience to reading the original text. Also, the essays are fantastic! Bloom's essays is one of the great essays about Plato ever written, and Benardete's is compelling. There is a ton of scholarship about Symposium, and it's worth diving into it once you've read the dialogue. This dialogue might be the most bizarre and difficult of them all, despite also being the most popular and fun.

"Love does not only occur only in the human soul; it is not simply the attraction we feel toward human beauty: it is a significantly broader phenomenon . It certainly occurs within the animal kingdom, and even in the world of plants. In fact it occurs everywhere in the universe." -Eryximachus Beautiful eulogies.

4.5