davidst 's review for:

Symposium by Plato
4.0

With this I read the Hackett edition and I was pleased with it. Unlike many of their other Plato editions, this one had a decent amount of footnotes and a great introduction, with an easy to read translation.

I knew beforehand that this book contained dialogues about Euros, but I didn't realize that with many of the dialogues the love is referring to pederasty, I should have guessed from some of the interactions with other Plato dialogues. To someone like myself from a different time and culture this was slightly disturbing at first, but once I got past my own opinions, this was actually a great dialogue. I did wonder how this dialogue was so well copied throughout the Catholic middle ages, one would think that it would get swept under the rug like so many other documents, but perhaps because its Socrates or just because its good, it got a pass. I think its among the best of the Plato dialogues I've read, it seems more lively and entertaining than some of the others.

In this, men at a symposium sit around making speeches in praise of love. I don't remember the first ones very well, but the later ones were pretty good. I liked the popular one by Aristophanes where he tells of a love creation type of myth were people at one time had double the body parts but were separated into two by a god, then they search for their other half. I think my favorite part though happened at the end where Alcibiades comes in drunk and tells stories about Socrates, it gives another dimension to the man and made me appreciate him more (his apology was even more effective when I read it after this).