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Go Tell Alcibiades: Tragedy, Comedy,and Rhetoric in Plato’s Symposium

Nathan Crick & John Poulakos

Plato’s Symposium is a significant but neglected part of his elaborate and complex

attitude toward rhetoric. Unlike the intellectual discussion of the Gorgias or the

unscripted conversation of the Phaedrus, the Symposium stages a feast celebrating and

driven by the forces of Eros. A luxuriously stylish performance rather than a rational

critique or a bemused apotheosis of rhetoric, the Symposium asks to be read within a

performative tradition that emphasizes the artistic enactment of both argument and

story as well as the incarnation of utterances intoxicated by wine and erotic urge. Only by

fully embracing the festive complexion of the Symposium can one escape the claims of its

words and come close to the spirit that inhabits its tragic vision and comic sophistication.

At stake in this approach is our understanding of ourselves as actors in and spectators of

the drama of life, a drama punctuated by rhetorical ecstasies that underwrite the wish for immortality.

Keywords: Aesthetics; Eros; Performance; Drama; Desire

O Bacchus, make them drunk, drive them mad, this multitude of vagabonds,1

hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving for symbols, perishing for want

of electricity to vitalize this too much pastime; and in the long delay, indemnifying

themselves with the false wine of alcohol, of politics, or of money. Pour for them, O

Bacchus, the wine of wine. Give them, at last, Poetry.2

Parties are the enemies of inhibition and restraint. They are sanctioned pretexts for

allowing what, in more formal scenes, it is deemed unacceptable to say or do. They

are festive occasions for stepping out of the familiar patterns of everyday address and

for suspending the standardized conventions of social intercourse. Parties are also

sites of amusing pleasures, sites in which music gets mixed with chatter and laughter

as friends and strangers slip in and out of light-hearted pleasantries, and as colorful

Nathan Crick is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric at Louisiana State University. John Poulakos is AssociateProfessor of Communication and Rhetoric at the University of Pittsburgh. Correspondence to: Department of

Communication Studies, LSU, 136 Coates Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, USA. Email: [email protected].

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Vol. 94, No. 1, February 2008, pp. 1 22



arrangements of food are piece by piece reduced to ruins. Amidst loose rituals of role-

playing, storytelling, gaming, flirting, teasing, gesturing, and posturing, parties

underwrite playful enjoyments, effortlessly intensified by drinking, and sharply

punctuated by song and dance. Also, parties are hotbeds on which language grows

organically; they are inviting openings for convivial improvisations and spontaneous,unscripted talk. Thrown for the sake of some celebration or simply getting together,

they allow chance encounters and chancy interactions, the kind that are either

recalled as ‘‘out of character’’ the morning after or engraved into newly minted coins

of human relations. In effect, parties are actualized iterations of the Dionysian spirit

in whose name new worlds are created and old ones destroyed.

However, modern students of rhetoric, a group notorious for its will to diversion,

keep missing the splendid party that is Plato’s Symposium.3 Rather than join him

from start to finish in his rhetorical carnival, they normally answer either the call of

the inspirational Phaedrus or that of the agonistic Gorgias. Not surprisingly, they findboth works admirable but ultimately unsatisfactory. The first legitimates rhetoric only

insofar as it accomplishes the impossible, that is, embodies the True, the Good, and

the Beautiful in their perfection; the second trivializes it as a cheap ‘‘knack’’ given to

the flattery and manipulation of the ignorant masses.

The unquestionable merits of the two dialogues aside, each lacks what the other

affords. The rough and tough worldliness, the hotly contested issues, the feisty

antagonists, the biting repartee, the fury and frustration of dialectical interrogation,

and the breakdown of communication in the Gorgias are nowhere to be found in the

Phaedrus . Conversely, the pastoral scenery, Socrates’ ingratiating interlocutor, the

lofty ideals, and the majestic imagery of spiritual elation in the Phaedrus are entirely absent from the Gorgias . Thus readers wishing to discern Plato’s attitude toward

rhetoric typically face a choice between two apparently irreconcilable conceptions *

rhetoric as the expression of civic depravity or rhetoric as the inspired art of pleasing

the gods. If the Gorgias mocks the art of persuasion as practiced in this world, the

Phaedrus spares the art but puts it in the service of an altogether otherworldly goal. If

this is so, the Gorgias and the Phaedrus represent a dilemma, a split attitude whose

terms are reflected in the tenor of two representative interpretations of the

relationship of rhetoric and drama, the one comic, the other tragic.

Tragedy and comedy represent two sides of the singular human ambition tosurpass one’s own boundaries. Far more than majestic disappointment or mocking

derision, each of which leaves an audience cruelly disempowered and emotionally

exhausted, tragedy and comedy function to inspire and unmask, loosening bonds

that constrain and subdue while channeling energies that create and surge. No

wonder, then, that rhetoric was born as an art within a Greek culture nourished on

the fruits of the tragic and comic poets. In The Birth of Tragedy , Nietzsche observes

that the ‘‘contrast between this real truth of nature and the lie of culture’’ gave

impetus to the greatest of Greek arts.4 To seek the former meant one had to surpass

the latter, such that even the likes of Aristophanes and Aeschylus could see in the

other the mirror of himself. Rhetoric is this contrast between limitation andaspiration made practical. Starting with what Farrell calls a ‘‘comic discourse that is

2 N. Crick & J. Poulakos



immersed in the crowd, with persons not much better, and perhaps a bit worse, than

ourselves,’’ rhetoric employs tragedy to lift us toward ‘‘more expansive characters and

actions, bigger issues, greater virtues and vices.’’5 Whereas comedy reveals to us our

pettiness and frailty, tragedy draws us toward the vast and eternal; it uses ‘‘tensions

and reversals’’ to ‘‘enlarge life’s panorama.’’6 Thus rhetoricians often face a choice *

tocritique that which makes us fools or to praise that which heralds our future as sages.

If one is drawn to a tragic view of rhetoric as the art of honoring that which is

‘‘serious, solemn, awe-inspiring,’’ then one needs look no further than Richard

Weaver.7 His masterful reading of the Phaedrus suggests that the project of Platonic

rhetoric is the intellectual and emotional improvement of humanity: ‘‘[R]hetoric at

its truest seeks to perfect men by showing them better versions of themselves, links in

that chain extending up toward the ideal, which only the intellect can apprehend and

only the soul have affection for.’’8 Human improvement, however, always carries the

tragic burden of forsaking the self that one already is, opting instead for a self thatone can only hope to be. If the Phaedrus is tragic, it is so by virtue of its attempt to fix

our attention skyward, asking us to transcend our earth-boundedness by steering our

chariots toward the heavens, the Platonic place of our origin and ultimate return.

Thus, to see Plato’s rhetoric from Weaver’s perspective is to espouse a tragic attitude

toward human nature and persuasion. Indeed, Weaver holds that rhetoric and

tragedy are so closely aligned that ‘‘without rhetoric there seems no possibility of

tragedy, and in turn, without the sense of tragedy, no possibility of taking an elevated

view of life.’’9 In other words, without rhetoric, we are but blind brutes, clutching and

grasping at one another in the pursuit of pleasure and the flight from pain.10

Much of what Weaver says is warranted. However, as Kenneth Burke reminds us,the tragic perspective must be balanced by the ‘‘comic corrective .’’11 Whereas tragedy

portrays the ‘‘cosmic man’’ within a dramatic narrative behind which ‘‘‘the deus ex

machina is always lurking,’’ comedy is ‘‘essentially humane ’’ because it helps to make

‘‘man the student of himself.’’12 Burke’s ‘‘corrective’’ is well taken. The attitude that

Weaver’s reading recommends is so serious that it makes throwing a decent party

impossible. However, it seems that relying on the rhetoric of the ‘‘low and laughable’’

does not make for a good party, either.13 Although not explicitly addressing the

Gorgias , Burke’s insight into the comic frame of rhetoric fits this Platonic work well,

especially in the light of his representation of rhetoric as ‘‘the Scramble, the Wrangleof the Market Place, [and] the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard.’’14

Because the Gorgias highlights the peculiar idiosyncrasies of every character in

relation to the rest, because it attends to so many detailed turns and twists of so many

arguments, and because it derives its meaning from the sum of its parts, it is

decidedly comic. As a party, however, it does not fare much better than the Phaedrus .

The Gorgias gives us a discursive contest whose ending finds an irate Callicles walking

out and an undaunted Socrates performing a soliloquy before an uninterested

audience. The seemingly tragic ending thus functions not to inspire but to bludgeon;

it is an instrument of contrast that brings into focus the depth of human degeneracy

and wantonness. A solemn gathering, then, is no party at all, but nobody wants aparty that degenerates into a brawl.15

Plato’s Symposium 3



In an effort to balance the attitudes of the Phaedrus and the Gorgias , we are issuing

a call to the feast that is Plato’s Symposium.16 We are directing this call to partisans of

both Weaver’s impossible loyalties and Burke’s barnyard scramble. For as Socrates

himself points out in the waning hours of the Symposium, while the comedian

Aristophanes and the tragedian Agathon are surrendering to slumber: ‘‘[A]uthorsshould be able to write both comedy and tragedy: the skillful tragic dramatist should

also be a comic poet’’ (223d).17 This seemingly innocuous claim, overheard by the

narrator and puzzling to Socrates’ audience, signals that the Symposium is more than

just another rung on the ladder to the forms or their earthly manifestations. As we

show, the closing words of Socrates provide the key not only to understanding the

dramatic form of the entire work but also to recognizing Plato’s view of rhetoric as an

amalgam of comic and tragic elements. Superbly blended, these two elements pervade

the ambiance of the Symposium, yielding the liveliest and most vibrant portrayal of

rhetorical discourse in Plato’s entire corpus. The brilliant samples of epideicticrhetoric demonstrate that this genre of discourse surpasses its political and forensic

counterparts in richness and power. The animated delivery of these rhetorical

performances, taken as a dramatic whole, reveals that the finest rhetoric is a child of

comedy and tragedy, and that the most effective method of persuasion generally

draws on two correspondingly antithetical human tendencies, the one embracing the

actual, the other wooing the ideal.18 The result is a ‘‘third way’’ into rhetoric, a way

that draws insight from the worldliness of the Gorgias and the transcendence of the

Phaedrus .19 Accordingly, to follow this ‘‘third way’’ is to study both humanity and the

gods, acknowledging our mortal flaws at the same time that we make room for what

lies beyond.Approached from this tragicomic orientation, the party that is the Symposium

ceases to function as a pretext for a didactic exercise in philosophy. Instead, it

becomes an occasion for a dramatic display of rhetorical exuberance. Without the

burdens of the ‘‘hegemony of the idea,’’20 the Symposium can be read neither as a

dogmatic vehicle for Plato’s theory of forms nor as a skeptical critique of his

contemporaries,21 but as a work of art aiming to leave readers ‘‘pregnant with

desire.’’22 Just as Eros is described philosophically and portrayed dramatically, so, too,

does the tragicomedy of Plato’s vision of rhetoric emerge through ideational

engagement and rhetorical performance. This vision is grounded in a theory of Eros that encourages our tragic desire for divine beauty and goodness while

simultaneously acknowledging our comic yearning for sensual pleasures. Both of

these tendencies, the one no less than the other, are ingeniously exhibited in the

Symposium. Capitalizing on rhetoric’s capacity to diminish as much as to amplify,

Plato has speakers like Agathon praise high ideals and act foolishly, and others, like

Socrates, behave virtuously yet appear absurd. Each episode in this process of ironic

reversal increases the tensions between pain and pleasure, shame and conceit,

derision and praise, drunkenness and sobriety, gravity and levity. As we show,

however, Plato harnesses the cumulative power of these tensions within a tragicomic

vision23 of rhetoric as the art of using the tragedy of human ideals to expose thecomedy of human conceit and channel erotic passion into virtuous action.24 On its




way to such a goal, this rhetoric wanders between the polis of the perplexed and the

isles of the blessed, drawing materials from both but having a home in neither.

The Nomocratic Tamers of Eros

If parties are fires, wine (oino ) fuels them. When consumed by the guests, it bends

their guarded dispositions and makes them cheerfully consanguine. Left unchecked,

however, the flow of wine can lead to a staggering step and various forms of

ugliness.25 The same holds true for erotic passion. When aroused, it finds outlet in

such infrequent forms as forward comments, affectionate overtures, daring sugges-

tions, or slips of the tongue. This is what Plato must have had in mind when he

observed in the Phaedrus that the erotic passion (Eros ) often assumes the form of a

‘‘release from conventions of conduct’’ (265a). But this passion must be kept under

control; else parties can turn into wanton orgies. Even if properly checked, however,

oino and Eros make a potent mix that unsettles body and soul, enlisting both in the

service of a poetry that handily surpasses discourses ruled by the logic of grammar

and deeds regulated by the authority of custom or law.

Aware of the formidable powers of the oinoerotic mix, the first three speakers of

the Symposium proceed willingly but cautiously. Their wariness first becomes

apparent when they register their resistance to the temptations of intoxication and

bodily desire. Phaedrus, Pausanias, and Eryximachus use their weak constitutions and

hangovers from the previous night as reasons why they should not drink during the

party. In the same spirit, they dismiss the flute girl, fearing that her tunes and

suggestive dance will awaken in them unruly appetites (176a

e). Preferring to limittheir entertainment to verbal intercourse, they emerge as advocates of sobriety and

prudence. As a result, the inspiration that comes with tipsiness and erotic tingles

escapes them. And even though they do partake of the rhetorical drink, they end up

watering it down. Significantly, Plato has them differentiate themselves from the likes

of Aristophanes, Agathon, and Socrates, all of them reputedly unaffected by heavy

drinking (176b), all of them gifted masters of prose without the need for external

stimulants. In so doing, he sets up a dramatic sequence that raises our expectations,

telling us that starting with the fourth speaker (Aristophanes) the speeches will be

more provocative. If there is a message here, the message says: ‘‘The best has yet tocome.’’

Availing himself of the technique of opening a play via the chorus, Plato has

Phaedrus, Pausanias, and Eryximachus speak in a collective voice that represents the

attitudes and aspirations of ordinary Athenian citizens regarding respect for and

advancement in society. Even so, Plato sees to it that the choric voice does not

overshadow individual differences. Thus each speaker stands for a variation on a

shared theme. To begin with, Phaedrus’s speech can be said to contain the seed of the

principle that structures the entire Symposium, the principle that there is ‘‘something

higher than life *something for which one might sacrifice one’s life.’’26 In the early

lines of his speech, this ‘‘something’’ appears to be the ideal of the Good in contrast tothe Shameful. As Phaedrus puts it:




[N]either family, nor privilege, nor wealth, nor anything but Love can light thatbeacon which a man must steer by when he sets out to live the better life. How shallI describe it, as that contempt for the vile, and emulation of the good, withoutwhich neither cities nor citizens are capable of any great or noble work. (178c d)

However, as it turns out, Phaedrus refers not to transcendental ideals as the beaconsof virtue. Rather, the highly concrete, personal, and mutual adoration of lover and

beloved becomes the resource that gives one the courage and the prompt to greatness.

As exemplified in the sacrifice of Achilles in avenging the death of Patroclus, Phaedrus

says that there cannot be

any lover so faint of heart that he could desert his beloved or fail to help him in thehour of peril, for the very presence of Love kindles the same flame of valor in thefaintest heart that burns in those whose courage is innate. (179a)

Phaedrus’s conception of Eros is thus rooted firmly in the Homeric virtue of courage,

which enables and perpetuates heroic acts of bravery. However, these acts are notdone purely in honor of the Good. Although his mythically driven rhetoric hints at

the tragic aspirations to achieve glory and the comic fears of appearing cowardly,

Phaedrus attributes the ultimate cause of these feelings to the singular focus on

pleasing an individual lover or beloved. Without their affection for each other, he

suggests, each one is left with only the barren life of the exile or the slave.

In the next speech, emotional celebration of the Homeric hero yields to rational

praise of Athenian democracy. Whereas Phaedrus had glorified Homer’s strict warrior

code, Pausanias, a modern thinker and student of the sophists, advances the

Protagorean notion of relativity, arguing that any ‘‘action itself, as such, is neithergood nor bad . . . for the outcome of each action depends upon how it is performed’’

(181a). For Pausanias, the judgment of an action’s virtue is based not on absolutes

but on human nomos , which is always subject to change by rational persuasion

(182b). Demonstrating his own rhetorical savvy, Pausanias advances arguments for

altering law and custom so as to accommodate a beloved’s decision to submit to a

lover. What he has in mind is a ‘‘form of voluntary submission that shall be blameless,

a submission which is made for the sake of virtue’’ (184c). Specifically, Pausanias

champions the virtue of wisdom, which mature and educated older men, like himself,

have to offer young boys (184e). In the name of wisdom, Pausanias endorses

persuasion as a virtue, having neither a clear definition of virtue nor wisdom beyond

that of the ever-changing nomos of his city. He goes so far as to allow that a lover

might deceive his beloved just as a sophist might mislead the public. In such a case,

however, Pausanias asserts that even when the beloved has ‘‘been duped by an unholy

blackguard, there would still have been something noble in his [the beloved’s]

mistake,’’ for it shows that he is ‘‘the kind of person who will do anything for anybody

for the sake of progress in the ways of virtue’’ (185b). For Pausanias, then, persuasion

should be judged not by its dispensation of knowledge but by its nominal praise of

virtue, actual or not.

If Phaedrus stands for self-sacrifice and Pausanias self-indulgence, the physicianEryximachus promotes the middle ground of temperance. For him, achieving




temperance is the goal of the physician’s art, an art that seeks ‘‘to reconcile the

jarring elements of the body, and force them, as it were, to fall in love with one

another’’ (186d). This medical conceptualization establishes the importance of

cultivating a techne for producing balance and health by mediating between the

extremes of excess and abstinence. To bolster his point, he cites this Heraclitanaphorism: ‘‘[T]he one in conflict with itself is held together, like the harmony of the

bow and lyre’’ (187a). His interpretation: ‘‘[I]t is absurd to speak of harmony as

being in conflict, or as arising out of elements which are still conflicting’’ (187a).

However, both the aphorism and his interpretation reveal the limitation of

Eryximachus’ view. As Dorter observes, the aphorism as authored by Heraclitus

includes the line ‘‘in backward-stretching harmony,’’ indicating exactly the presence

of the very conflict that Eryximachus denies.27 Whereas Eryximachus asserts that

discord should be resolved into a stress-free harmony, Heraclitus would argue that

it is ‘‘precisely this harmony of tension that gives the bow its power.’’

28

Like hiscompatriots Phaedrus and Pausanias, Eryximachus reveals the limits of his

experience but has neither the strength nor the will to test them. Instead, he

fashions a tool for use within the stable confines of the polis, leaving the lofty

battlements for those visionaries who strain the bows of their imaginations to reach

distant horizons.

Together, the first three speakers in the Symposium make a lame contribution to

the party by displaying rehearsed rhetorical appeals. Genuflecting before the

authority of custom and brimming with ordinary advice, their orations associate

Eros with the quasi-pedestrian wish to become responsible and respected members

of Athenian society. Upstanding citizens, yet bereft of the temperament for Eros andwine, Phaedrus, Pausanias, and Eryximachus gesture toward the laudable yet timid

sensibilities of those who desire virtue but see no virtue in desire.29 In doing so,

they illustrate a nomocratic rhetoric, one that bows to the authority of propriety by

underscoring the kind of soberness that the majority of their fellow citizens would

hypocritically applaud. However, their defense of temperance bespeaks a certain

philosophical and poetic blandness. They avoid the polarities of tragic and comic

enthusiasm, opting, instead, for the kind of flatfooted prose that neither attracts

nor repels. This is the rhetoric of the polis, an instrument of frugality and cautious

virtue, valuable as a tool of conventional wisdom but bereft of audacity, artistry, orambition. Fortunately, the party has just begun warming up. Due to Aristophanes’

case of the hiccups, which had necessitated that Eryximachus speak out of turn,

Aristophanes is now paired with the tragedian Agathon; with their speeches the

rhetorical festivities begin in earnest. The tamed words of the servants of nomos

give way to the powerful discourses of the two masters of poiesis . In their wake we

are introduced to the travesty and the majesty of the human condition.

The Virtuosos of Drama

One need not be an astute rhetorician to realize that the talk circulating in parties isthe talk of exaggeration. Measured and infrequent in ordinary conversation, this kind




of talk flourishes among those who, under the influence of intoxication and erotic

urges, speak the language that overstates, intensifies, magnifies, widens, heightens,

and deepens. Intoxication in the Symposium is not reported until Alcibiades enters

the scene (212d), and again in the closing moments (223c). But what the juice of

Dionysus does not excite in the language of the earlier speakers, the topic of Eros does. Thus, even the sober nomocrats engage in some type of exaggeration. Theirs,

however, is conventional and grammatical, conforming to the forms we recognize as

superlatives.30 Rhetorical exaggeration, by contrast, exceeds superlatives. In the

service of the principles of amplification and diminution, it enlarges or minimizes

things disproportionately; it distorts them for emphasis and effect. Importantly,

exaggeration functions in at least two ways. As Weaver explains, it works ‘‘like a

caricature, whose object is to amuse’’ or like ‘‘prophesy,’’ whose concern is to reveal

the ‘‘potency of things.’’ In the first instance, it is ‘‘purely impressionistic’’; in the

second, it seeks to represent ‘‘the as yet unactualized future.’’

31

As we will see below,Plato employs both functions of exaggeration, having Aristophanes caricature the

erotic adventures of humans and Agathon idealize their erotic tendencies.

Not surprisingly, the buffoonery of the human lot finds expression in Aristo-

phanes’ speech, a ‘‘roaring extravaganza’’ of fantastic and ridiculous images.32 The

spherical shape he assigns to the earliest humans is as farfetched as it is grotesque and

laughable. A two-faced, eight-limbed being walking forward or backward with equal

ease, or running on all eight limbs in a circular motion, conjures up contemporary

cartoon figures colliding with and bouncing off each other in their every move.

Equally ludicrous is the image of Apollo trying to smooth out the wrinkles of human

skin using the tools of a shoe-maker. Most fantastic of all is the image of a quarto-spherical, half-faced, one-legged, hopping humanoid trying to copulate with another

of its kind. Of course, all this can be dismissed as sheer sensationalism *but in and

through his rhetoric of absurd exaggeration Aristophanes seeks to do justice to

Thalia, the muse of comedy (189b), and to enliven the party, which was virtually

flattened by the bland speeches of the three nomocrats.

Aristophanes’ narrative, however, does not end with his phantasmagoric flights of

fancy. His tale takes an interesting twist as people’s odd physiques move to the

background and their folly to the foreground. In this twist, they are depicted as

foolishly arrogant and inordinately conceited; so much so that they conspire tooverthrow the reign of the gods (190C). In comedy, however, half-baked schemes that

mock tragic aspirations always fail in spectacular yet harmless ways. Accordingly, the

spherical humans fail to get up to the heavens; worse, each ends up half the being s/he

started out. Fated since then to a state of halfness, humans still think they are in

charge of their coupling actions, but they are amusingly mistaken; Aristophanes

suggests that much when he declares that it is not their own will but the power of Eros

that brings them together. In effect, Eros is to humans what the mating instinct is to

animals. Like animals, humans cannot help doing what they do when coupling.

Caught up in the pursuit of their other half, they are blind to their cosmic status as

little peons in a grand design. Divided and disoriented, they have trouble attachingthemselves to another half, and when they do form human-to-human attachments,




they cannot say what they want from or find in one another. Hence Hephaistus’s offer

to fuse them together with his welding tools.

Aristophanes’ speech is intentionally half-baked as it does not make humans

concern themselves with anything other than the search for their missing half. His

tantalizing story says nothing about human intercourse with ideas, nothing aboutreason or intelligence, and nothing about discursive interactions. Effectively, the

master of comedy does not discriminate between human and beast, thus leaving out

the question of what makes humans human. He only presents the biological version

of humanity, a version in which mating happens without desire and pain is felt

without understanding. Beyond his joking, however, his rhetoric is not without a

point. Having committed to speak about the power of Eros (189c) and human nature

(189d), he tells the story of the human condition as a condition of incompleteness in

constant search of completion. In his narrative, humans start out imperfect and are

often visited by misfortunes, typically caused by their own imperfections. Theirearnest but naıve attempts to fix the misfortunes bespeak their inordinate faith in

themselves as ingenious and resourceful agents. However, as we have seen, their

methods are ill-conceived and their goals overreaching. In effect, they drown

themselves in details, all along missing the bigger picture of themselves as creatures

that belong to the order of the cosmos as lovers and interlocutors. Consequently, their

misfortunes are usually followed by failure, failure by more misfortunes, and so on.

Humans never learn their lessons, and life’s comedy keeps playing out.

Alongside Aristophanes’ jocular exaggerations Plato juxtaposes a piece of

encomiastic rhetoric with a tragic tone. As if to illustrate in advance the final

dictum of the Symposium, that the same author should write comedies as well astragedies, he has the next speaker install Eros at the farthest possible point, the point

of total and immeasurable perfection. Agathon discusses the beauty, the goodness,

and the technai of Eros . In all three categories, the discussion points to Eros as the

epitome of intellectual fantasy. Simply put, Eros comes off as everything that humans

are not. Not only is he divine, he is the happiest (eudaimonestatos ), youngest

(neotatos ), most beautiful (kallistos ), really the best (aristos ), and the most delicate

(apalotatos ) of all the gods. Not only is he beautiful, he lives only in the softest things

(malakotatois ), partakes of shapeliness (euschemosyne ) and avoids unshapeliness

(aschemosyne ), frequents flowers, and settles in plots of sweet blossoms and scents(195a 196b). He neither commits nor suffers injustice, does not engage in violence,

partakes of temperance (sophrosyne ), controls all lesser pleasures and desires, and

exhibits the highest valor (andreiotatos ) (196d). His craft is the genesis and

composition of all forms of life. Himself a consummate poet, he causes those he

affects to become poets themselves. In a fast finish of breathtaking praise, Agathon

concludes his speech by making Eros the cause of the symposium itself (‘‘[H]e brings

us together in all such friendly gatherings as the present’’ [197d]) and lauding him as

the force behind feasts, dancing, and oblations and as the champion of drinking and

discourse (197e).

In Agathon’s speech humans recede into the distance while Eros comes to theforefront as a cardinal idea *more precisely, the idea that, more than any other,




promises to ennoble all who partake of it. Like his comic counterpart, Agathon

stipulates that humans are by nature incomplete yet capable of achieving higher levels

of completion by seeking to unite, not with another human but with Eros . In effect,

the source and object of desire is Eros , not another person; by implication, the

ultimate erotic pleasure is ideational, not carnal. And herein lies the tragedy:Agathon’s encomium renders Eros irresistibly attractive and infinitely sought after, yet

he places him so high and so far that one can never reach and become consubstantial

with him. As an idea, Eros does not respond to his suitors; he does not reciprocate.

Not to be outdone by Aristophanes, Agathon spares no word in the lexicon of

exaggeration. However, as he indulges in rhetorical overabundance, he sheds no light

on the human affair with Eros . Effectively, he says nothing about the countless

hesitations and insecurities that people feel, and nothing about the clumsiness and

awkwardness that they experience in their erotic give-and-takes. Thus he leaves the

individual flesh-and-blood person wondering: If this is what Eros is, what do I do asI am getting older and my appearance is becoming less and less attractive? What am

I to think when Eros grants me intensity of feeling and dithyrambic enthusiasm but

leaves my beloved reluctant and never at a loss for tactful rejections? How do I

engender intimacy in a world so subdued by despair and alienation? Agathon does

not address these and similar questions, and by not addressing them, he leaves

humans in their frailty to suffer the frustration of the unattainable or the pain of loss.

Together, Aristophanes and Agathon upstage the previous speakers by exploding

Eros into the extremities of the comic and the tragic imaginations respectively. Their

dramatic rhetoric challenges conventions through creative exaggeration, inviting

listeners to wander freely through the realm of the impossible. Incorporatingelements of the erotic and the fantastic, they furnish the audience with surface and in-

depth explanations that might make their experience of love meaningful. Unlike the

nomocrats, who had tried to rein in erotic desire, the two dramatists seek to intensify

it via two encomia that blend levity and gravity respectively. However, their combined

effort creates two separate scenarios whose relationship remains unclear. As we will

see below, the clarification of this relationship is a task that the next speaker, Socrates,

undertakes. The party is far from over.

Enter the Spoiler and the Party-Crasher

There always comes a moment when a party stops being an escape from routinized

lives and takes on a life of its own. In that moment, language, spirits, and doings

coalesce into microcosms of habit and anticipation, memory and desire. This is the

moment when the partygoers begin to play the roles of themselves, self-conscious of

their limitations yet eager for triumph and celebrity. With shades pulled on the

outside world, words and deeds within the party assume a new poignancy in the ebb

and flow of its self-contained growth and decline. A telling gaze across the room, a

face-to-face hint, a seemingly innocent bump on the dance floor, a dropped name in

the midst of a joke, a scowl on the way to the bar, or an awkward pronouncement of feigned indifference *all these become the legends and the riddles that make up a




party’s mythology. No longer the furtive goods of a smuggler, tragedy and comedy

emerge as homemade productions, cut from and pasted to the intimate passions and

insights of the symposiasts.

The Symposium reaches that moment when Socrates rises to speak. Suddenly, the

speakers themselves become characters in a play rather than random mouthpieces forpraise or ridicule. In a self-possessed performative shift, Socrates directs attention not

to Eros but to his fellow partiers, upending their claims to eloquence by revealing

their shallowness. Far from seeing them as enlightened contributors to an erotic

exhibition, he scolds them for having collaborated in a farce meant ‘‘to flatter, rather

than to praise, the god of love’’ (198e). He then uses the droll specter of sophistical

rhetoric to belittle the unearned pomposity of the speakers, exposing the ‘‘beauty and

grandeur’’ of their encomia as little more than ‘‘a pack of lies,’’ an indiscriminate

concoction of high-sounding platitudes intended to impress the uninitiated (198e).

Even Agathon, still aglow from his theatrical victory, is not spared as Socratesassociates him with the comic figure of Gorgias and the fearsome head of Medusa,

that ‘‘Gorgon’s head of Gorgias’ eloquence’’ (198c). Socrates revisits his friends’

antecedent words in order to mock and amend them. Importantly, his interventional

stance culminates in Agathon’s bemused and self-effacing admission: ‘‘I begin to be

afraid, my dear Socrates, that I didn’t know what I was talking about’’ (201c).

Although Agathon’s speech receives the most attention, it is not alone; all five

encomia become material for a Socrates bent on modifying them and incorporating

their comic or tragic elements into his own narrative.33 To carry out this delicate task,

Socrates embraces the festive spirit of the Symposium. Shedding his usual role of the

sarcastic and ironic interrogator, he delivers a narrative that places his younger self inthe role of the fool, bestowing upon Diotima the duty to chastise and correct. An

apparently humbling gesture, this performative strategy actually serves to disguise the

fact that Socrates puts in his own mouth many of the words just spoken at the party.

In so doing, he manages to poke fun at his peers while retaining their goodwill, all the

while methodically extracting from their language the distillate of transcendence in

search of a unified vision. This is no mean challenge. How is one to navigate between

the sober disciples of nomos and the imaginative masters of poiesis ? How can one

reconcile the Eros of the unremarkable citizen, an Eros tied to traditional norms and

serving the education of practical virtue, with the Eros of the dramatic artist, an Eros revolving around the axes of comic humanity and tragic divinity but standing apart

from the imperatives of practical judgment and action? At the end of Agathon’s

declamation, Socrates is faced with two sets of unhappy choices *between

dispassionate practice and impractical passion, and between the comedy of

unthinking instinct and the tragedy of unattainable ideals.

That Socrates opts for a third, mixed, alternative is evident in his revision of the

tragic and comic conceptions of Eros propounded by the virtuosos of drama.

Agathon had argued that ‘‘Love was the beloved rather than the lover’’ and hence is

utterly ‘‘beautiful, perfect, delicate, and prosperous’’ (204c). However, as Socrates

points out, such a conception equates Eros to an object of desire rather than to desireitself, which springs not from possession but from lack and want of something




desirable (200b). Still, Socrates senses that to label Eros ‘‘lacking’’ is to deprive him of

his tragic grandeur and consign him to the realm of the comic, a realm in which the

severed creatures of Aristophanes are groping after their displaced bodymates. Having

thus humanized the tragic, Socrates must now deify the comic. Through Diotima’s

voice he redirects Aristophanes’ insight this way: ‘‘[I]t has been suggested . . .

thatlovers are people who are looking for their other halves, but as I see it . . . Love never

longs for either the half or the whole of anything except the good’’ (205e). In

Socrates’ hands, Eros becomes neither a perfected ideal nor a biological imperative,

but the native desire in all mortals to possess the Good forever, a desire stemming

from the intercourse between human limitation and divine boundlessness. In his

personified form, Eros is thus not a god but rather a daimon existing ‘‘halfway

between god and man’’ (202e) and vacillating between growth and decay, excess and

deficiency, truth and sophistry. As the son of Resource and Need:

[I]t has been his fate to always be needy; nor is he delicate and lovely as most of usbelieve, but harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless, sleeping on the naked earth, in

doorways, or in the very streets beneath the stars of heaven, and always partaking of his mother’s poverty. But, secondly, he brings his father’s resourcefulness to hisdesigns upon the beautiful and the good, for he is gallant, impetuous, andenergetic, a mighty hunter, and a master of device and artifice *at once desirousand full of wisdom, a lifelong seeker after truth, an adept in sorcery, enchantment,and seduction. He is neither mortal nor immortal, for in the space of a day he willbe now, when all goes well with him, alive and blooming, and now dying, to beborn again by virtue of his father’s nature, while what he gains will always ebb away as fast. So love is never altogether in or out of need, and stands, moreover, midway between ignorance and wisdom. (203c

204a)

Abandoning for a while the unproductive and torpid tactic of binary polarizing,

Socrates describes Eros as a daimon that celebrates tragic victories and suffers comic

failures on its way to the Good. With this portrait in place, Socrates then suggests that

mortal souls are not so different from the daimon that is Eros . Neither the blind slaves

of instinct nor the stupid servants of the gods, humans are always growing or

declining in body and soul: ‘‘We find none of his [man’s] manners or habits, his

opinions, desires, pleasures, pains or fears, ever abiding the same in his particular self;

some things grow in him, while others perish.’’34 This ongoing flux applies even to

knowledge, which ebbs and flows like the tides (208a). As a consequence, humans,

like Eros , must struggle to inhabit the middle ground of ‘‘right opinion,’’ which sits

midway between eternal wisdom and blind ignorance (202a). Thus, like Eros , who

shuttles between Resource and Need, humans are constantly alternating between

plenty and poverty, satisfaction and desire, knowledge and ignorance, and virtue and

vice.

However, the course of the highs and lows of experience does not follow a

predetermined path, of the kind that a Heraclitean Logos would lay out. Accordingly,

Eros is not impotent in the face of physis ; he himself is a lord of nomos , a master of

techne , legislating relations and using devices of his own making to accomplish hisends. This facet of Eros , and by extension of the human condition, reflects the view of




the nomocrats, and it is their choric voice we hear when Socrates asks Diotima:

‘‘[W]hat good can Love be to humanity?’’ (204c). Not surprisingly, the answer can be

traced back to the three sober speakers of the Symposium. Echoing Phaedrus, Socrates

shows that Eros is the primary cause of actions of valor *he even uses Phaedrus’s

example of Achilles’ sacrifice to support his claim. For Socrates, however, erotic desirerises not from affection for a single individual, but from ‘‘the endless fame, the

incomparable glory’’ that comes to one in ‘‘love with the eternal’’ (208d). Eros

inspires actions of great virtue out of the desire to achieve immortality and ‘‘win

eternal mention in the deathless roll of fame’’ (208c). This revision of Phaedrus

reveals the consistent strategy Socrates uses to channel comic energies to tragic ends.

Phaedrus’s comic adoration of a single lover is here redirected toward an even

grander ambition for eternal renown *a divine hope, to be sure, but nonetheless

spawned from a comic urge.

The same strategy is employed with Pausanias and Eryximachus. Like Pausanias,Socrates recognizes the pedagogical function of Eros when it brings together a young

man teeming with ambition with a ‘‘soul which is at once beautiful, distinguished,

and agreeable’’ who can ‘‘undertake the other’s education’’ (209b c). However,

Socrates sees such interaction as only the first step toward wisdom. For him the goal

is to be ‘‘saved from a slavish and illiberal devotion to the individual loveliness of a

single boy, a single man, or a single institution,’’ so that a lover of wisdom might

‘‘know the beauty of every kind of knowledge’’ (210d). Again, Socrates does not

condemn devotion as such, only that ‘‘slavish and illiberal’’ devotion that limits

capacity for intellectual growth. By progressively transferring our devotions from

lower objects to higher ideals, we harness the power of the comic to achieve greaterwisdom and virtue. Finally, Socrates draws from and modifies the productive spirit of

Eryximachus’s praise of Eros as a source of techne . For Socrates, just as a doctor uses

Love to produce health, a poet uses Love to ‘‘give life to noble discourse’’ (210b). Like

the desire for healthy procreation, the longing that Eros creates is not only ‘‘for the

beautiful itself, but for the conception and generation that the beautiful effects’’

(206e). For Eryximachus these effects are a balanced body and soul; for Socrates, they

are Beautiful words and deeds that embody the spirit of the Good. Consistent with

his earlier approach, Socrates takes what is practical and worldly and points it toward

the transcendent and the divine.Lastly, Socrates incorporates a modification of Eryximachus’s conception of techne ,

which has important consequences for rhetoric. Eryximachus had claimed that the

proper method of techne is to produce temperance by resolving discordant tendencies

into a perfect monotone. Applied to rhetoric, this would mean a discourse with no

highs and lows, but only cliches and commonplaces. Socrates rejects such a tone-deaf

attitude toward techne when he portrays Eros as a daimon who strives for a dynamic

harmony by combining the varying octaves of tragedy and comedy, including the

sophistic mastery of device and artifice with the philosopher’s love of wisdom and

truth (203d). A rhetoric based on such a techne offers a third alternative to the bland

style of the nomocrats and the exaggerated tenor of the virtuosos of drama. Drawingfrom both but preferring neither, Socrates subscribes to the kind of rhetoric that can




take an audience to the extremes of ridicule and euphoria while simultaneously

harnessing their energies to produce works of beauty and virtue. Nietzsche writes that

such an art

does not lie outside of the world as a fantastic impossibility spawned by a poet’sbrain: it desires to be just the opposite, the unvarnished expression of the truth, andmust precisely for that reason discard the mendacious finery of that alleged reality of the man of culture.35

Tragicomic rhetoric destroys the familiar and banal to display the strange and

extraordinary, creating within its audience feelings of fear, yearning, shock, and

security, which culminate in the productive transformation of experience within the

lived world.

However, perhaps intoxicated by his own narrative, Socrates risks abandoning this

rhetorical form by losing his own head and following Agathon into the clouds. While

embracing the method of rhetoric by using the tools of persuasion (just as Pausaniashad done) to ‘‘bring others to the same creed, and to convince them that, if we are to

make this gift our own, Love will help our mortal nature more than all the world’’

(212b), he simultaneously loses rhetoric’s concern with productive action. Closing with

the ‘‘final revelation’’ that Beauty exists ‘‘by itself in an eternal oneness’’ (211a b),36

employing the philosopher’s discourse of tragic idealization, he calls on his friends

to transcend the limitations of societal protocols and be ‘‘quickened with the true,

and not seeming, virtue’’ (212a). Like a shepherd calling his flock, Socrates asks them

to throw down their earthly goods, to abandon all that is trivial and mundane to

seek with him the glory of the gods on the mountaintops. The rhetorical party,Socrates seems to be announcing, is over; it is time to start the pilgrimage to

philosophy.

However the energy of a party, once unleashed, is hard to arrest. Even Socrates’

denouement cannot contain its force, for suddenly there comes ‘‘a knocking at the

outer door, followed by the notes of a flute and the sound of festive brawling in the

street’’ (212c). The nearly completed cycle of the party comes to an abrupt stop;

Alcibiades has arrived. Drunk, adorned with ribbons and ivy, and demanding the

attentions of Agathon, he bursts into the room and upsets the direction of the party

by reintroducing music and drink, much to the displeasure of Eryximachus (214b).

Brimming with the disruptive and unconstrained passion of Eros , Alcibiades does

away with the decorum in place as nothing but an arbitrary obstacle meant to

constrain the actions of the petty and the magnanimous alike. If Pausanias reveres

nomos and Socrates transcends it, Alcibiades tramples it, casting aside all hurdles that

stand between him and the objects of his desire. Indeed, his behavior is so manic that

it causes the usually unflappable Socrates to cower behind Agathon like a frightened

child and the usually staid Eryximachus to accuse him of acting like a thirsty savage

(213d, 214b) * yet Alcibiades persists unabated, and when he delivers his encomium

of Socrates, the party reaches its climax.

Still a young man, Alcibiades enters the Symposium personifying the fusion of intense passion and brute power, a man with the possibility for both tragic greatness




and comic ruin. For all his might, Alcibiades stands precariously on the razor’s edge;

the slightest misstep will send him tumbling into an abyss. Aware of the

precariousness of his situation but too ambitious to admit limits, Alcibiades

represents both a demigod and a dupe, a character of such conflicting tendencies

that he acts as the living embodiment of Eros *

rising at the very moment of his collapse and falling at the very moment of his triumph. His presence thus revives

the specter of judgment, reminding his audience that while we may eat, drink, and

dance in the moonlight, at dawn we must carry ourselves into the world to live or die,

to triumph or retreat, to honor or betray.

To say that the climax of the party occurs with Alcibiades is to say that his arrival

announces that Eros will no longer be merely discussed but actually acted out.

Whereas Socrates had made the party-goers actors on a stage, Alcibiades makes them

jurors in a courtroom, thereby making the Symposium itself a ‘‘comic tragedy of

choice and practical wisdom.’’

37

Not content to eulogize an absent god, he prosecutesthe fully present Socrates on ‘‘the charge of arrogance’’ before a ‘‘jury’’ of his friends

(219d). However, as with all dramatic flare-ups between friends and lovers in the

midnight hours of a party, just who is on trial, and for what, is hard to discern.

Indeed, the comic and tragic elements of shame and admiration, derision and praise,

foolishness and nobility are so intertwined in Alcibiades’ drunken rhetoric that one

cannot tell who he truly despises *Socrates or himself. Even so, one thing is certain:

Alcibiades stands torn between his own humiliation and his admiration for Socrates’

manliness and self-control (219d). This tension produces in him equal parts of

attraction and repulsion. Thus the question he poses to his jury is whether he himself

is better or worse off for having experienced the torment he has.The answer is not at all clear, but during the span of his speech Alcibiades addresses

a far more significant issue: the nature of tragicomic rhetoric and its effects on a

person susceptible to emotional extremes. One might say, then, that the trial in the

Symposium is not so much about Socrates as about his rhetoric. That Socrates is a

skilled tragicomic rhetorician Alcibiades establishes early on, as he praises Socrates

for surpassing ‘‘Pericles and all the other great orators’’ with his ability to rivet and

bewitch his hearers with ‘‘but a few simple words’’ (215e). The secret to his power lies

in his tragicomic character, a character that, like a Silenus statue, appears foolish on

the outside and yet contains the figures of little gods within it (215b). So, too, withhis rhetoric *although his words are laughable on the outside, on the inside they ‘‘are

so godlike, so rich in images of virtue’’ that they ‘‘help the seeker on his way to the

goal of true nobility’’ (222a). With Socrates, what appears comic only masks a tragic

sensibility. Next to him, typical orators, with their overwrought figures and tropes,

seem nothing more than children reciting schoolyard poetry. As Alcibiades puts it:

‘‘[W]hen we listen to anyone else talking, however eloquent he is, we don’t really care

a damn what he says’’ (215d).

However, being bewitched by Socrates’ rhetoric comes at a price. If Socrates puts

on a comic mask to hide a tragic soul, his rhetoric tears off the masks of his audience

to lay bare their comic pretensions. By revealing the poverty of convention in contrastto the nobility of the Good, he pulls away the comfortable cloak of nomos , which




makes one feel naked and ashamed. For a proud figure like Alcibiades, this effect is

devastating. As he says, the words of Socrates ‘‘turned my whole soul upside down

and left me feeling as if I were the lowest of the low’’ (215e). This feeling of comic

baseness accompanies an equivalent feeling of tragic desire and passion, throwing

Alcibiades into a ‘‘sacred rage’’ that causes his heart to jump into his mouth and tearsto start in his eyes (215e).38 Alcibiades consequently yearns for the life of virtue even

as he actively seeks the applause of the masses (216b). Trapped as he is between

shame and aspiration, and yet unable to change his habits, Alcibiades doesn’t know

whether to honor Socrates or wish him dead (216c).

The rantings of a drunken party-crasher are easy to dismiss as childish and

immature, but, as Alcibiades says, there is ‘‘something in the proverb, ‘Drunkards and

children tell the truth’ *drunkards anyway’’ (217e). And so it is here. Despite his

rambling complaints, he makes the most damning indictment of Socrates *that his

particular rhetoric is ultimately a tease. The problem is that, like the satyr Marsyas,Socrates bewitches in the spirit of impudence rather than direction, and instead of

leading students toward the light he ‘‘spends his whole life playing his little game of

irony, and laughing up his sleeve at all the world’’ (216e). For all his talk of

instruction and inspiration, Socrates abandons his pupils after setting them on a path

they cannot follow alone. Alcibiades knows this better than anyone, for his attempt at

seduction, as clumsy at it might have been, was done in the interest of making the

best of himself and in the belief that Socrates was the best one to help him on his

journey (218d). However, Socrates had responded not as the noble lover he makes

himself out to be, but as a jealous and arrogant egoist, telling the eager Alcibiades that

he is merely ‘‘trying to exchange the semblance of beauty for the real thing’’ (218e).Socrates thus abandons Alcibiades at the very moment he needs guidance.

A party is a place for provocations, not resolutions; final judgment on Socrates and

his rhetoric will have to wait. Hardly a minute after Alcibiades concludes his

prosecution, a crowd of revelers streams through the open door of the party, causing

decency and order to flee out of the window (223b). In the end, Alcibiades himself

moves on to another party, leaving Socrates with Agathon and Aristophanes. As the

cocks announce the break of dawn (223c), the three of them are passing around a

bowl of wine, in effect making their drunken bodies match their intoxicated souls so

as to push past the limits of their respective arts in search of the glory that tragicomicrhetoric promises.

Thus Spoke the Flute Girl

Eventually a party comes to a stop, yet it does not always end. If it does not recede

into the far corners of forgetfulness, it continues as a set of stories told and retold.

The Symposium is such a story, transported out of the event by Aristodemus to

Apollodorus, who in turn recounts it to Glaucon. A story, however, cannot exhaust a

party, cover all that a party was, or encompass all its enactments and performances in

their tragic intensity and comic intricacy. Neither can it touch on all the sentimentsthat went unspoken, all the things that almost happened. Even so, a story like the




Symposium can serve as an occasion for other stories, stories that offer themselves as

performances of the drama that, until now, has had neither a stage nor an audience.39

Below is such a story, as told by the dismissed flute girl:

Let us stay awake to see the dawn. It has been days since we have seen each other,and I cannot sleep despite the hour. Oh, that I could step back in time! You may have heard of last night’s celebration at the house of Agathon. The ‘‘who is who’’ of Athenian society was there *sophists, poets, actors, doctors, orators, generals,trainers, athletes, merchants, judges, mantics, philosophers, soothsayers, you nameit, all there to share in Agathon’s victory. When I arrived, they had already begun tolay waste the wine. Indeed, they were all drinking from skins, cups, amphorae,spoons, pots, barrels, anything resembling a container. But the Dionysian spirit hadnot yet taken them. Then I started playing. If only you could have seen me! I playedmy lungs out, fanning with my flute the flames all around me! I riled them up allright. Soon their inhibitions had gone to Hades. Less than two hours into the affair,five men were dipping Aristophanes into a tub full of wine, baptizing him anew ashe was screaming: ‘‘I am the frog!’’ Pausanias confused a servant for his beloved andspent all night explaining to him the elegance of the Pythagorean Theorem.Phaedrus became possessed with the spirit of Achilles and started challenging thestrongest generals to wrestle. Eryximachus, diagnosing an excess of modesty in thedress of the party-goers, was walking about naked preaching ‘‘temperance.’’ AndAgathon, you’ve never seen him so overcome with passion. Wordless, he was goingthrough the crowd of revelers as if looking for his soul mate. Then this youth, hisname I forget, was carrying a goat on his back calling himself the anti-satyr. I amtelling you, it was a veritable pandemonium. When Agathon asked me the nextmorning to return for more of the same, of course I agreed.

But tonight things were different. On seeing Socrates at the gathering, I sensed achange in the atmosphere. Everybody knows that once in a great while his daemontakes hold of him and he indulges in the Dionysian spirit. But those moments arerare and glimpsed only through cracks in a door. Apollo is his main muse, drawinghim with his sweet lyre to the regions of staid perfection. And that’s where hewanted to take the party. Upon my arrival, then, I heard the guests say: ‘‘Easy on thewine tonight. Let’s not get plastered the way we did last night. Each should drink asmuch as he desires but should drink for the sake of pleasure, not oblivion.’’ They also said: ‘‘No flute girl. Let her play to herself or to the women-folk.’’

When Eryximachus took it upon himself to ask me to leave, Agathon kindly explained that great topics like Eros should be addressed without music.Immediately I thought to myself: ‘‘I get it. Tonight is reserved for logos , no roomfor flutes and dance.’’ Right away I went looking for the other women. Upon

joining them, I stood atop a crate of fruit and said:‘‘Come, gather around. Let us have a parallel symposium. Light some candles,

bring the wine. My name is Aulophone and I shall provide the music, but notbefore I say a few words. Music should not be absent from rhetorical exhibitions orphilosophical conversations. Harmony and rhythm teach eloquence to the body and the soul. Music combines high aspiration and deep feeling, sweet melody andgraceful motion; it discloses the beauty of the well-played note, the justice of thedoor left open, and the truth of the upheld gaze. More powerful and mysteriousthan the word, it arouses Eros , who lives within all people *be they masters orslaves, men or women, oligarchs or democrats.




‘‘You know of what I speak! When you walk through the agora, the great oratorsdo not always address you with their speeches. When you chance upon aphilosophical discussion, the topics do not always concern you. But music isvastly different! It always invites you, it speaks to you, it moves you. It regulates

your step and your breathing. It can make even the stones and the trees and thewind part of a symphony! In music, rhetoric and philosophy bow to the authority of beauty. Philosophy may pick Eros out of a crowd, rhetoric may call his name, butonly music arouses him from slumber and summons him to presence in the pulseand movement of our bodily rhythms. I say Eros is neither god nor daemon butsimply desire; and whoever desires becomes godlike. Every time I blow into thisreed, I play with one goal in mind: to enchant my listeners, to arouse Eros in them,to deify them. When I perform, every breath I take is not for the preservation of my life but for the sake of my art. If you let go of your impatience and listen to my music attentively, dear listeners, you can turn yourselves from mortals intomasterpieces.’’

Notes

[1] The authors wish to express their gratitude to three such vagabonds, Patricia Sullivan,

Harvey Yunis, and Topher Kurfess, for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this

essay.

[2] Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Vol. IX, 1843 1847 , ed. Ralph H. Orth and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1971), 441.

[3] One likely reason for the relative lack of rhetorical scholarship on the Symposium is its

epideictic nature, which encourages a ‘‘poetic’’ reading of the dialogue. As Jeffrey Walker

shows, however, this misses the historical fact that the ‘‘art that emerges as techne rhe torike is

largely grounded in, or centered on, the realm of epideictic.’’ Hence, it is entirely fitting that

Plato’s most rhetorical dialogue involves an epideictic display. See Jeffrey Walker, Rhetoric

and Poetics in Antiquity (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 18.

[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy , trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books,

1967), 61.

[5] Thomas Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture (New London, CT: Yale University Press, 1993),

133, 113.

[6] Farrell, Norms of Rhetorical Culture , 113.

[7] Diskin Clay, ‘‘The Tragic and Comic Poet of the Symposium,’’ Arion : A Journal of the

Humanities and the Classics (1975): 250.

[8] Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1985), 25.[9] Weaver, Ethics of Rhetoric 23.

[10] Edith Hamilton claims that the possibility for tragedy makes us uniquely human:

The surface of life is comedy’s concern; tragedy is indifferent to it . . . the dignity

and the significance of human life *of these . . . tragedy will never let go.

Without them there is no tragedy. To answer the question what makes a tragedy,

is to answer the question wherein lies the essential significance of life, what the

dignity of humanity depends upon in the last analysis. Here the tragedians speak

to us with no uncertain voice. The great tragedies themselves offer the solution to

the problem they propound. It is by our power to suffer, above all, that we are of

more value than the sparrows.

See Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993), 141.




[11] Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History (Los Altos, CA: Hermes, 1959), 166.

[12] Burke, Attitudes Toward History , 42, 171 (emphasis in the original).

[13] Clay, ‘‘Tragic and Comic Poet,’’ 250.

[14] Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), 25.

[15] This is not to say that Burke proposes such a thing. Indeed, Burke recommends a balance of

the tragic and comic perspectives. As he writes:

Viewing the matter in terms of ecological balance, one might say of the comic

frame: It also makes us sensitive to the point at which one of these ingredients

[transcendental or material] becomes hypertrophied with the corresponding

atrophy of the other. A well-balanced ecology requires the symbiosis of the two.

See Burke, Attitudes Toward History , 167.

[16] For one of the authors, inspiration to send this invitation has come from John Dewey, who

wrote:

Nothing could be more helpful to present philosophizing than a ‘‘Back to Plato’’

movement; but it would have to be back to the dramatic, restless, cooperatively inquiring Plato of the Dialogues , trying one mode of attack after another to see

what it might yield; back to the Plato whose highest flight of metaphysics always

terminated with a social and practical turn, and not to the artificial Plato

constructed by unimaginative commentators who treat him as the original

university professor.

See John Dewey, ‘‘From Absolutism to Experimentalism,’’ in John Dewey: The Later Works ,

vol. 5, ed. JoAnn Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986; original

work published 1930), 155.

[17] References to the Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1935) will

be made in the text. Any use of another translation will be made in footnotes.[18] Our approach to reading the Symposium parallels that suggested by Gerald Press. For him:

[W]hat the dialogues create in us is the experience of this as philosophy, and of

Plato’s vision: of human life as lived in a reality through which we catch

enrapturing glimpses of the ideal; but frustratingly, the ideal remains beyond our

grasp just because we live in time and space. Precisely because of their

disconcerting combinations of the eternal and the ephemeral, the ideal and the

real, the dialogues actually embody (what some of them try to articulate) how the

eternal and ideal is glimpsed but never really grasped in the ephemeral real world

in which alone we philosophize.

See Gerald A. Press, ‘‘Plato’s Dialogues as Enactment,’’ in The Third Way: New Directions in

Platonic Studies , ed. Francisco J. Gonzalez (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995),

148.

[19] We take the phrase ‘‘third way’’ from Francisco Gonzalez, editor of a collection of essays that

seeks a new approach to reading Plato’s work. According to Gonzalez, interpreters of Plato

who follow the ‘‘third way’’ tend to

characterize the dialogues as ‘‘inspiring’’ us, as providing us with a ‘‘vision’’ of the

world, as ‘‘exhorting’’ us to action, as expanding our imaginations, as ‘‘orienting’’

us in our own inquiry, as communicating a form of reflexive, practical, and

nonpropositional knowledge, or as inviting us to a conversation in which we

must actively participate in order to arrive at the truth.




See Francisco J. Gonzalez, ‘‘Introduction: A Short History of Platonic Interpretation and the

‘Third Way’,’’ in Third Way , 2.

[20] Anthony P. Petruzzi, ‘‘Rereading Plato’s Rhetoric,’’ Rhetoric Review 15 (1996): 10.

[21] According to Gary Scott and William Welton, a proper reading

requires grasping that Plato deliberately juxtaposes the dogmatic and skepticalelements in the dialogues, and that it is necessary to read each in relation to the

other in order to grasp a dialogue’s full meaning. . . . This may suggest that the

Forms hold the greatest significance for Plato as objects of human striving; they

may be most significant for philosophy precisely as something that is lacked.

See Gary Alan Scott and William A Welton, ‘‘Eros as Messenger in Diotima’s Teaching,’’ in

Who Speaks for Plato? Studies in Platonic Anonymity , ed. Gerald A Press (Lanham, MD:

Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 159.

[22] Scott and Welton, ‘‘Eros as Messenger,’’ 158.

[23] Richard Patterson offers a comprehensive account of how Plato interpreted the arts of

comedy and tragedy. Drawing largely from passages from Laws (817b) and the Philebus

(49b

c), Patterson shows first how the ‘‘truest and best tragedy . . .

is the dramatization of

the noblest and best sort of life.’’ He then demonstrates that Plato had two meanings for

comedy:

On the one hand, there is comedy in the sense of phaulos (low meaning unworthy

or inferior) which relates to Platonic characters like Polus or Erthyphro who revel

in self-ignorance, believing themselves to be noble and strong when in fact they

are shameful and weak. On the other hand, there is comedy in the sense of geloios

(low meaning laughable) which relates to characters like Socrates, who is actually

noble and yet appears laughable to the masses because they do not recognize or

cannot understand his wisdom.

The Symposium, as we shall show, incorporates both senses of comedy. See Richard

Patterson, ‘‘The Platonic Art of Comedy and Tragedy,’’ Philosophy and Literature 6 (1982):

78 9.

[24] Emerson, a student of Plato, wrote essays on the Comic, the Tragic, and Eloquence and his

observations illuminate their connections. For Emerson, the essence of the Comic is

‘‘the contrast in the intellect between the idea and the false performance.’’ Thus, comedy ‘‘is

in the intellect’s perception of discrepancy. And whilst the presence of the ideal discovers the

difference, the comedy is enhanced whenever that ideal is embodied visibly in a man.’’ See

Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘‘The Comic,’’ in The Portable Emerson , ed. Mark Van Doren (New

York: The Viking Press, 1946; original work published 1876), 207. The embodied ideal of

virtue and goodness thus represents the tragic, by which ‘‘the torments of life become tuneful

tragedy, solemn and soft with music, and garnished with rich dark pictures.’’ See RalphWaldo Emerson, ‘‘The Tragic,’’ in Portable Emerson , 224. For Emerson, then, the growth of

the individual is from comic incompleteness to tragic wholeness, facilitated in part through

the work of the orator, who

sees through all masks to the eternal scale of truth, in such sort that he can hold

up before the eyes of men the fact of to-day steadily to that standard, thereby

making the great great, and the small small, which is the true way to astonish and

reform mankind.

See Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘‘Eloquence,’’ in Society and Solitude (Boston, MA: Houghton,

Mifflin, and Co., 1904; original work published 1870), 97.

[25] William James describes in vintage eloquence the mystical power of drunkenness when

consumed in the spirit of transcendence:




The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to

stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the

cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discrimi-

nates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the

great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill

periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with

truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the

unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is

part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of

something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so

many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading

a poisoning.

See William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Modern Library, 1902),

377 8.

[26] Kenneth Dorter, ‘‘The Significance of the Speeches in Plato’s Symposium,’’ Philosophy and

Rhetoric 2 (1969): 231.[27] Dorter, ‘‘Significance of the Speeches,’’ 226.

[28] Dorter, ‘‘Significance of the Speeches,’’ 227.

[29] A passage by Peter Schjeldahl reminds us that the nomocratic sensibility is universally, and

frustratingly, pervasive:

Many of us talk too little about our delights and accord other people’s delights

too little courtesy. This is especially so in these days of moralistic attack on things

that make life tolerable for many. . . . Beauty, too, is an intoxicant. So, too, is

moralism, if moralizers would only admit it. Baudelaire said it best: ‘‘Always be

drunk. Get drunk constantly *on wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you prefer.’’

Today many people drunk on virtue harass people who prefer wine or poetry.You can’t argue with the harassers, of course. You can’t argue with drunks.

See Peter Schjeldahl, ‘‘Notes on Beauty,’’ in Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics ,

ed. Bill Beckley (New York: Allworth Press, 1998), 55 6.

[30] For instance, Phaedrus calls Eros the ‘‘most glorious of the gods’’ (180b), Pausanias terms a

slavish devotion to a beloved as ‘‘a slavery which no slave would endure’’ (183a), while

Eryximachus warns against the ‘‘mischief and destruction’’ (188b) that occurs when one

submits to intemperate love and ignores that ‘‘mightiest power of all,’’ temperate love (188d).

In his essay on ‘‘The Superlative,’’ Emerson argues that this type of language is usually used

by those who wish to impress by making mundane ideas or things seem extraordinary. Thus,

for Emerson:

[It] is wearisome, this straining talk, these experiences all exquisite, intense and

tremendous. . . . One wishes these terms gazetted and forbidden. Every favorite is

not a cherub, nor every cat a griffin, nor each unpleasing person a dark,

diabolical intriguer; nor agonies, excruciations nor ecstasies our daily bread.

In other words, to make everything into a monster or an angel blinds us to the true monsters

and angels among us. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘‘The Superlative,’’ in Lectures and

Biographical Sketches (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., 1904; original work

published 1884), 164 5.

[31] Weaver, Ethics of Rhetoric , 19 20.

[32] Werner Jaeger, Paideia: the Ideals of Greek Culture , vol. 2 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1943), 185.




[33] This is easy to miss once Socrates launches into his speech recounting his encounter with

Diotima. Caused in part by our habits of reading Plato to discern his ‘‘doctrine’’ while

ignoring his art, we too easily dismiss the dramatic context of Socrates’ speech and focus only

on how it might reveal Plato’s disembodied ‘‘theories.’’ Cornford, for instance, suggests that

the speakers preceding Socrates are simply present to prepare the reader of his dialogue for

the ‘‘disclosure of the other world *

the eternal realm of the Ideas.’’ However, Socrates is notspeaking to a universal audience detached from the constraints and exigencies of a rhetorical

situation; rather, Socrates addresses a group of friends and lovers during a moment when the

atmosphere is thick with rhetorical answers to the question of Eros . See F. M. Cornford, ‘‘The

Doctrine of Eros in Plato’s Symposium,’’ in Plato: A Collection of Critical Essays II: Ethics,

Politics, and Philosophy of Art and Religion , ed. Gregory Vlastos (Garden City, NY: Anchor

Books, 1971), 126.

[34] Plato, Symposium, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, in Plato: Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias (Cambridge,

MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1925), 207e.

[35] Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy , 61.

[36] Luce Irigaray, ‘‘Sorcerer Love: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium, Diotima’s Speech,’’ trans.

Eleanor H. Kuykendall, Hypatia 3 (1989): 40.[37] Martha Nussbaum, ‘‘The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium,’’ Philosophy

and Literature 3 (1979): 167. Nussbaum’s essay is also an important resource for those

wishing to read the Symposium as a commentary on the historical Alcibiades.

[38] Charles H. Kahn observes that Socrates employs rhetorical strategy in Plato’s Gorgias when

read as a drama involving personalities rather than propositions. He writes:

[What] we have in the text is the impact on the interlocutors, Socrates’

manipulation of their sense of shame to force them to confront the incoherence

of their own position, and thus to make a first step towards that recognition of

their ignorance which is the beginning of wisdom.

However, in the Gorgias the effect on the audience is shame without recognition. For thisreason the Gorgias ends on a comic note rather than with a tragic spirit. See Charles H. Kahn,

‘‘Drama and Dialectic in Plato’s Gorgias ,’’ Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 1 (1983): 116.

[39] It is a well-known historical fact that the stories of women in classical Greece have long been

concealed. Plato’s Symposium is a rare act of unconcealment by giving voice and authority to

Diotima, a significant dramatic choice regardless of the status of her historical existence. Her

presence in the rhetorical tradition leads C. Jan Swearingen to write: ‘‘Let us summon many

Diotimas . . . to chasten the cults of heroic violence, to sustain and reclaim the common life

within which any meaning and identity is formed, embodied by the discourses that have

been emboldened by love.’’ We might add, embodied also by the music that has been

emboldened by drunkenness. See C. Jan Swearingen, ‘‘A Lover’s Discourse: Diotima, Logos,

and Desire,’’ in Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition , ed. Andrea A.Lunsford (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 49.


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