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    Symposium
    Symposium
    Symposium
    Audiobook2 hours

    Symposium

    Written by Plato

    Narrated by David Shaw-Parker and Full Cast

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    In Symposium, a group of Athenian aristocrats attend a party held by Agathon to celebrate his victory in the drama festival of the Dionysia. They talk about love until the drunken Alcibiades bursts in, and decides to talk about Socrates instead. Symposium gives a picture of the sparkling society that was Athens at the height of her empire. This classic discussion on love is presented in its ideal medium: a multi-voice recording.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateAug 1, 2006
    ISBN9789629547431
    Author

    Plato

    Plato, one of the most renowned ancient Greek philosophers, was born in 427 B.C. to an aristocratic and wealthy family, which played a prominent part in Athenian politics. Plato in conjunction his teacher, Socrates, and his pupil, Aristotle helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and culture. While primarily influenced by Socrates, Plato’s work was also affected by the philosophies of Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the Pythagoreans. Under the guidance of Socrates, Plato devoted himself to the pursuit of wisdom and upon Socrates’ death, joined a group of the Socratic disciples gathered at Megara. Later he travelled in Egypt, Magna Graecia, and Sicily. He returned to Athens and founded a school, known as the Academy, which seems to have been his home base for the remainder of his life. While thirty-five dialogues and thirteen letters have traditionally been ascribed to Plato, modern scholarship doubts the authenticity of some of them. His early dialogues are also known as the Socratic dialogues and include Apology, Crito, Euthyphro, and Protagoras. He followed these with his transitional dialogues: Gorgias, Meno , and Euthydemus . The Symposium and the Republic are considered the centerpieces of Plato's middle period and are considered some of his most revered work, and other middle dialogues include Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Theaetetus. Plato’s Laws is the best known dialogues of his late period. Plato died in 347 B.C.

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    Reviews for Symposium

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    • 4/5
      This is a book you can read in one sitting, a short but highly amusing work; I would love to see this enacted into a play. The humor is it's strong point, more so than the philosophy aspect. While the different takes on love (it's about harmony, or it's about becoming whole, or it's the animating force of the universe, and so on) is interesting it seems to get overshadowed by the humor. It's very odd to see this style after reading other things like The Republic and The Meno, and thus I think it's very unique and worth your time.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Beautiful Folio Society edition. More interesting to me as a testament to Greek leisure culture than philosophy, and always with slaves present around the edges.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Delightful and entertaining, a good inspiration for your own party, but also fuck Plato.
    • 5/5
      Hearing about the split of humans into 2
      The drinking
      The ideas of Eros
      Fascinating
    • 5/5
      Insightful, entertaining & perfectly timeless!
      Performed beautifully. Socrates lives on as an exemplary human.
    • 4/5
      Definitely an interesting read to end the year. I look forward to exploring more of Plato's writings
    • 4/5
      I read this in a different edition, Plato the Complete Works ISBN 0872203492. I use LibraryThing to keep track of what I have read, not which books I own. I read the Symposium and listed it here in 2010. I'm a bit ashamed about how little of it I remembered from that reading. Socrates' speech on love was certainly worth the read and the effort. The lengthy elaborations on adult male to adolescent male mentorship frankly gave me the creeps.
    • 5/5
      [T]he object of love is the permanent possession of goodness for oneself.As usual, Plato’s arguments in Symposium are profoundly beautiful, strangely compelling, and often absurd. It’s certainly the most entertaining reading experience of his dialogues: drunk speeches, friendly sniping, mock praise, and a lot of talk about how big of a tease Socrates was. Philosophically, there is much to dig into here, but of particular interest to me is the beautiful idea (however implausible) at 211c that there are hierarchal levels to the ways of love: first, one experiences physical attraction to a specific person; then, an appreciation of physical beauty in general; next, the love of the good things people do; fourth, the beauty of intellectual endeavors; finally, one ascends to the appreciation of true beauty in itself. If only it were so!
    • 5/5
      A wonderful book...A symposium, I have come to learn, is actually a gathering of guests with the intent on dining and drinking together. This book takes place during that symposium where a few members of higher society gather together and each take turns giving speeches on the subject of love.I am reading the Oxford World's Classics edition of this book and like the introduction to this book proposes I suggest that you sit and read this book in its entirety in one sitting. It's not very long. It's about 70 pages. But in reading it in one sitting you are really able to grasp the speeches and their differences and similarities.You know that story that you have probably heard in a movie or have heard somebody recant to you where humans actually started off as one single sex and how we were split down the middle and now are forever seeking our other half to become whole again? Well that story actually originated from this book. And what makes the story so profound and impactful is that it is told with utter sincerity from the comedian of the group. It is a very beautiful story.The other speeches that we get in this book are extremely insightful and indeed make you look at and even question things regarding love and it's different aspects. You are able to see through these five speeches the immense power that love has over us all and the miraculous wonders that it can achieve. I like what Socrates says toward the end of the symposium, "It's (why) today, and everyday, I do all I can to praise Love's power and courage." This book is an absolute classic of Western literature and I highly recommend it to everyone!
    • 3/5
      And Agathon said, It is probable, Socrates, that I knew nothing of what I had said.
      And yet spoke you beautifully, Agathon, he said.

      Back in the late 1990s a cowpunk band named The Meat Purveyors had a song, Why Does There Have To Be A Morning After? It detailed stumbling around in the cruel light of day, sipping on backwash beer from the night before and attempting to reconstruct what at best remains a blur.

      The event depicted here is a hungover quest for certainty. The old hands in Athens have been tippling. Socrates is invited to the day after buffet. The Symposium attempts to explore the Praise for Love which occupies such a crucial yet chaotic corner of our earthly ways. There is ceremonial hemming-and-hawing about the sublime and then Socrates steps into the fray. All is vanity, Love is a bastard child of Poverty: the attempts at the Ininite and Eternal only reflect poorly on our scrawny and fleeting tenure.
    • 2/5
      Delightful and entertaining, a good inspiration for your own party, but also fuck Plato.
    • 2/5
      (Original Review, 2003-03-02)The problem for me is that philosophy is surely about ideas which are themselves constructed out of language. Dinosaurs, or evidence for them in the fossil record, are not linguistic constructs - but philosophical ideas would seem to be.I don't mean that ideas themselves are entirely linguistic. I can have ideas that involve non-linguistic elements - for example I can mention a landscape that I could never fully describe in all its visual richness - and which there would not be words to sufficiently describe even if I had an eternity to do so (though that is arguable come to think of it, as assemblages of pixels can describe extraordinarily rich visual scenes - sorry bit of a side track).I don't even mean that philosophical concepts have to be made of language. It may well be possible to conceptualise ideas beyond the constraints of language and, as it happens, I think we can do that. The problem is, of course, that once you try to communicate any such ideas to anyone else you have to reduce them down to linguistic constructs (or perhaps logical constructs but I would say that logic and maths are languages too, albeit, like French, not languages that I am at all fluent in).It goes back to things like your "moral facts" which intrigue me but, so far, I am just not convinced of it. Dinosaur fossils sure - facts. You can poke them with a stick, measure them and compare them to other fossils etc. Moral facts, they don't seem to be solid enough to have convinced Plato of the wrongness of slavery.I find this sort of reasoning from "moral facts" problematic. It comes down to how Plato and Aristotle might have defined an "inferior person". For much of human history, and certainly for Plato's contemporaries, "inferior" might simply mean "from a tribe that was defeated in battle". Military success thus defines superiority. What fact could be used to show that this view is false?
    • 5/5
      Foundational to the mythos and language of Islamic mysticism (especially Rumi's Sufism). Philosophy as poetry as dialogue.
    • 3/5
      Some guys get together over a few drinks and discuss the nature of love.
    • 3/5
      The introduction in this one goes completely off the rails when it starts getting into homoromantic relationships, which is simultaneously hilarious and offputting. Fully a third of the introduction is dedicated to explaining that Plato didn't *really* mean that men loved each other like that, and if he did that doesn't mean it really happened like that, and if it did that doesn't mean that the Greeks were not good, manly men. (Never mind that Plato makes a point of arguing with Aeschylus over whether Achilles was a top or a bottom.)A treatise on the nature and purposes of love; not my favorite subject, to be sure, but still interesting enough. I like the structure of several people talking around the point and one tying it all together; this seems like the most useful way to address such a massive and amorphous subject. I do quite like the conceit of Love as the messenger and mediator between gods and mortals. If you believe the prudish introduction, the rest of it is mostly leading toward the Platonic ideal of beauty, with a perverted comic bit tacked on the end, but I'm inclined not to believe the introduction, and to consider the comic bit something of an illustration of Socrates's earlier points, which is rather neatly done.
    • 4/5
      It is not easy to review Plato when I have no claim whatsoever to being schooled in philosophy, so I will speak in generalities and leave the analysis to others. First let me once again sing the praises of Robin Waterfield whose guidance through Plato's Republic and Gorgias I would term essential. While other editions of these three dialogues were at hand, Waterfield's stands head and shoulders above the others, for he has a gift for making the dialogues and the characters in them come alive so that the whole experience is more like reading a novel than a work of philosophy. According to Benjamin Jowett, "Of all the works of Plato the Symposium is the most perfect in form, and may be truly thought to contain more than any commentator has ever dreamed of; or . . . more than the author himself knew." This may seem a bit overblown, but there is certainly more than meets the eye of the uninitiated reader if Waterfield's introduction and notes are any indication. Symposium is quite literally a third-hand account of a banquet that was given by the tragedian Agathon to celebrate the festival prize won by his play the night before. (All of Agathon's work has been lost.) There were many people attending this party, seven of whom delivered after-dinner speeches on the subject of "Love." Love in this dialogue is both treated philosophically and personified as a god. Three of the speakers are well known to us: Socrates of course, comic playwright Aristophanes and the political leader Alcibiades. The host Agathon also spoke, along with Phaedrus, Pausanias and Euryximachus. Probably more apparent in Greek than in English translation, these speeches were noteworthy because each reflected a different literary or rhetorical style and each approached the subject of Love from a different angle.After all the speeches were given honoring Love in one way or another, and in which Love was recognized as being both attractive and good, the real philosophizing began. Love and philosophy became more or less identified with each other. And jumping straight to the bottom line, after posing the question, "What do humans gain from Love?" the conclusion was that the object of Love is the permanent possession of goodness for oneself.In the course of all this speechifying and philosophizing, both directly and through Waterfield's contributions one learns a great deal about each of the participants and their relationships with each other and to Athenian society. All in all it is quite an interesting look at the ancient Greek mind at work.
    • 5/5
      A lively, clear and readable translation with notes and an introduction that are more than just by the numbers. Gill's particularly good at explaining the linguistic and broader cultural differences that can impair your understanding. There are also good references for readers who want to explore the deeper philosophical implications of the dialogue. I wholeheartedly recommend this edition for the lay reader, who, like me, is on their first or second reading.
    • 4/5
      This one is soooo much fun.
    • 4/5
      So Plato, the pillar of philosophy in Western Civilization, is an enthusiastic pederast, a lover of boys. Nothing subtle here.
    • 4/5
      The arguments are interesting and important; the drama is hilarious.
    • 3/5
      Plato’s Symposium is essentially a love story. The general outline is that a group of Greek thinkers are gathered together to a symposium by the poet Agathon to celebrate his recent victory in a dramatic competition. Phaedrus (an aristocrat), Pausanius (some sort of lawyer), Eryximachus (a doctor), Aristophanes (a comedian), Agathon, Socrates, and Alcibiades (a statesman) then take turns discussing the nature and types of love. They each offer valid perspectives on the topic while trying to surpass each other in the quality of their rhetoric (and trying to ward off a hangover from the previous night’s drinking). Socrates gets the upper hand quickly by undermining—piece-by-piece—each of their arguments about the nature of Love.Along with each of the speeches we get small insights into how gatherings were conducted in ancient Greece, and how different members of the social fabric interacted (it’s also nice to see that the methods for curing hiccups hasn’t changed in the last 3,000 years). Plato, being a student of Socrates, gives him a better part in the exchange than the others there, but I’m not sure I would want to attend a gathering with the man. The way he employs his Socratic dialogue easily paints him as being “that guy.” Nobody wants to be “that guy.” As far as the writing, Benjamin Jowett’s (1817-1893) translation of Plato’s treatise was published in the late 19th century and still holds up rather well. It’s only flowery in the intro (which takes up a third of this book), but then settles down when you get to the good stuff. All in all, not bad but not riveting either.
    • 5/5
      When I was a young man, I and my friends certainly had some strange conversations, possibly aided by some substances of questionable legality in certain countries, but we never quite managed to attain the heights of strangeness reached at this banquet/drinking party(*) held in 416 BCE when Socrates was approximately 53 years old, once again the principal figure in this "dialogue" written by Plato between 12 and 15 years after Socrates' death by poisoning in 399 BCE. Plato was 11 years old when the banquet took place, so, as in Crito and Phaedo , all the speeches are Plato's invention, though he may well have listened to stories about the banquet from participants. The general topic of the speeches: love in all of its forms.Each of the participants in the banquet is, in turn, to deliver a speech about Love. And deliver they do...Eryximachus, first up to bat, laments that so little poetry has been dedicated to the topic of Love. Phaedrus, in honorable Greek tradition, reaches into the past and recalls what Hesiod and Parmenides, among others, had to say. Love is the eldest and most beneficent of the gods. Then he launches into an explanation why the love between men fosters and supports honor and virtuous behavior. (A common theme at this banquet, which makes me wonder why the Christians permitted this text to survive. Thank goodness the Christian crusade against "sodomy" is ebbing into impotence.) Phaedrus unfavorably contrasts Orpheus' love for his wife with Achilles' love for Patroclus (and can't resist asserting that Achilles was the bottom, not Patroclus, because he was the fairer, beardless and younger; he doesn't use "bottom", but in the Greco-Roman world, those are the attributes of the "passive" partner in a homosexual relationship - I've heard some conversations like this at drunken parties, but Achilles usually wasn't the subject of the gossip). Pausanias then holds forth on the distinction between noble Love, expressed for youths who are "beginning to grow their beards", and common Love, whose object is women and boys. (At this point I'd be wondering if somebody had slipped something into the wine. But I'd be listening closely.) He gives a lengthy and closely reasoned moral argument in favor of this. I wonder how it would go over in the House of Representatives? Eryximachus, in a return engagement, is a physician and reinterprets Pausanias' moral distinctions in terms of the concepts of "healthy" and "diseased". In a process of what appears to be free association (was Plato smirking while he was writing this?), the good doctor throws in music, agriculture, astronomy, divination (OK, pass the blunt over here again), ... . Finally, he turns the floor over to the playwright Aristophanes, who clearly had brought his private stash to the party. For he commences to explain that originally mankind had three sexes. Moreover, primeval man was round, had four hands and feet, two faces on one head, etc. etc. In his LSD dream, this primeval man was so powerful that Zeus was envious and smote primeval man in twain. With some cosmetic work by Apollo, which is described in fascinating detail, and after a few false starts, voilà , mankind as we know it. Which explains, of course, why we are always looking for our other half. Instead of being helped away to a sanatorium, Aristophanes goes on to explain how the original three sexes of primeval man fit into the picture. Enjoy! I know I did.After this gobsmackingly strange speech (which would have had me trying to figure out where he hid his stash), the boys engage in some good natured banter, and then Agathon takes the floor. He makes a bad start, and then it goes downhill from there. Let's just say that Love had better not drop the soap in the shower when Agathon is around. (I know Plato was laughing up his sleeve on this one.)Now it is The Man's turn - Socrates steps to the plate. He goes into his usual "Ah, shucks" routine and then starts asking Agathon questions. Please see my review of Plato's Phaedo to see how that goes. After Agathon agrees with everything Socrates says, Socrates launches into a long story, the upshot of which is: the only true love is Love of the Absolute! (This sounds more like Plato than Socrates, but no surprise there.)Upon which Alcibiades comes staggering into the room. After a brief argument with Socrates about which of the two has the greater hots for the other, Alcibiades stumbles up to the plate. He sings the praises of Socrates' virtue, nobility, fortitude and pedagogy. This speech, if authentic, is one of the most detailed glimpses into Socrates' life we have and is fascinating. As literature, Plato really surpassed himself in this dialogue - even the weakest speeches (from the point of view of content and wit) were most savorously eloquent. And all were entertaining, each in a very distinct way. While I personally find Plato's physics, metaphysics and epistemology to be absurd and his politics to be frightening, the man could turn a phrase and draw a convincing characterization through speech. While I am completely unconvinced by claims that the Symposium can be viewed as a novel, one can, nonetheless, read it with great pleasure as a purely literary product.By the way, is any of that wine left?(Re-read in Benjamin Jowett's translation.)(*) A possibly amusing sidenote: The participants take a vote and decide "that drinking is to be voluntary, and that there is to be no compulsion" (they decided this only because so many of them were hung over from the previous evening!). One pauses at the idea that some of the brightest lights of Western culture comported themselves in their middle age like frat boys on a Saturday night... One of Socrates' many reported virtues was he could drink everybody else under the table and walk away into the dawn perfectly sober.
    • 4/5
      Starts out slow, with mostly irrelevant speeches on the nature of Love. The first half or so is remarkable just for the interesting description it gives of Ancient Greek homosexual practices. It gets much more interesting once Socrates takes the floor, immediately ripping the false rhetoric of the hypocritical sophists in favor of Truth. His theory of love is interesting but is not at all what we think of as romantic love. . . it is more like love of truth/beauty/god and culminates in a mystical nirvana-like experience for the true lovers. The most interesting part of the dialogue comes at the very end, when the drunken Alcibiades crashes the party and gives a speech on Socrates, which is far more revealing of Socrates the Man than any other Platonic dialogue I've ever read. Regardless of what you think of this dialogue overall, I think it´s worth the read just for the last few pages of historical description. And regardless of how you feel about Plato perverting Socrates' teachings for his own political purposes, the Symposium proves that he truly admired his mentor as possibly the greatest man who had ever lived.
    • 4/5
      I was unprepared for how funny this book is. A group of friends extremely hung over from the previous night's partying decide that tonight, instead of going all out to get drunk again, they would send away the flute girl, drink in moderation and each would make a speech on the topic of love. Socrates makes the most profound speech but no sooner has be finished when the party is crashed by another band of drunken revellers and the extremely inebriated Alcibiades joins the party. Requested to add his speech on love, he claims unfairness on account of his state and instead of making a speech in praise of love, he speaks in praise of Socrates.
    • 2/5
      Rating: 2* of five, all for Aristophanes's way trippy remix of GenesisWhile perusing a review of [Death in Venice] (dreadful tale, yet another fag-must-die-rather-than-love piece of normative propaganda) written by my GoodReads good friend Stephen, he expressed a desire to read The Symposium before he eventually re-reads this crapulous homophobic maundering deathless work of art. As I have read The Symposium with less than stellar results, I warned him off. Well, see below for what happened next.Stephen wrote: "Damn...can you do a quick cliff notes summary or maybe a video lecture? I would much rather take advantage of your previous suffering than have to duplicate it."THE SYMPOSIUMSo this boring poet dude wins some big-ass prize and has a few buds over for a binge. They're all lying around together on couches, which is as promising a start to a story as I can think of, when the boys decide to stay sober (boo!) and debate the Nature of Luuuv.Phaedrus (subject of a previous Socratic dialogue by Plato) gives a nice little speech, dry as a popcorn fart, about how Love is the oldest of the gods and Achilles was younger than Patroclus, and Alcestis died of love for her husband, and some other stuff I don't remember because I was drifting off, so got up to see if I would stay awake better on the patio. It was a little nippy that day.So next up is the lawyer. I know, right? Ask a lawyer to talk about love! Like asking a priest to talk about honor, or a politician to talk about common decency! So he pontificates about pederasty for a while, which made me uncomfortable, so I got up to get some coffee. I may have stopped by the brandy bottle on the way back out, I can't recall.So after the lawyer tells when *exactly* it's okay to pork a teenager, the doctor chimes in that luuuuuv is the drug, it's everything, man, the whole uuuuuuuniiiiiveeeeeeeeeerse is luuuuv. Who knew they had hippies in those days? I needed more brandy, I mean coffee!, and the text of my ancient Penguin paperback was getting smaller and smaller for some reason, so I went to look for the brandy get the magnifying glass so I could see the footnotes.Then comes Aristophanes. Now seriously, this is a good bit. Aristophanes, in Plato's world, tells us why we feel whole, complete, when we're with our true love: Once upon a time, we were all two-bodied and two-souled beings, all male, all female, or hermaphroditic. When these conjoined twins fell into disfavor, Zeus cleaved them apart, and for all eternity to come, those souls will wander the earth seeking the other half torn from us.Now being Aristophanes, Plato plays it for laughs, but this is really the heart of the piece. Plato quite clearly thought this one through, in terms of what makes us humans want and need love. It's a bizarre version of Genesis, don'cha think?So there I was glazed over with brandy-fog admiration for the imagination of this ancient Greek boybanger, and I was about to give up and pass out take my contemplations indoors when the wind, riffling the pages a bit, caused me to light on an interesting line. I continued with the host's speech.Now really...is there anything on this wide green earth more boring than listening to a poet bloviate? Especially about luuuuv? Blah blah noble blah blah youthful yakkity blah brave *snore*Then it's Socrates's turn, and I was hoping Plato gave him some good zingers to make up for the tedium of the preceding sixteen years of my life. I mean, the previous speech. It was a little bit hard to hold the magnifying glass, for some reason, and it kept getting in the way of the brandy bottle. I mean, coffee thermos! COFFEE THERMOS.I'm not all the way sure what Plato had Socrates say, but it wasn't riveting lemme tell ya what. I woke up, I mean came to, ummm that is I resumed full attention when the major studmuffin and hawttie Alcibiades comes in, late and drunk (!), and proceeds to pour out his unrequited lust for (older, uglier) Socrates. He really gets into the nitty-gritty here, talking about worming his way into the old dude's bed and *still* Socrastupid won't play hide the salami.Various noises of incredulity and derision were heard to come from my mouth, I feel sure, though I was a little muzzy by that time, and it is about this point that the brandy bottle COFFEE THERMOS slid to the ground and needed picking up. As I leaned to do so, I remember thinking how lovely and soft the bricks looked.When I woke up under the glass table top, the goddamned magnifying glass had set what remains of the hair on top of my head on fire.The moral of the story is, reading The Symposium should never be undertaken while outdoors.
    • 4/5
      A thought-provoking and intense yet short read, The Symposium was still far from what I had first anticipated. I had expected the philosophical nature of the piece, however, placing that upon the intricacies of love and homosexuality was shocking and delightful. I wouldn't expect less from Plato, one of the greatest human minds, and am always fascinated by his work. The Symposium is no exception.
    • 5/5
      this may be where the term 'Platonic relationship' came from being that Socrate's and his old rich attractive Greek buddies love to sit around and talk but not fuck because they know beauty is not especially the opposite of being ugly but it seeks something that the other doesn't have. or is that love? oh love, the talk-about or symposium as it was once called, really shows that love is in the eye of the beholder but Socrates is a man to be loved. I like the hom0-yet-no-homo vibe of it all because I too enjoy the company of men yet strictly in a conversational way although I can apperciate their beauty too. This is as important to the feminine movement as 'The City of Ladies is' for the...what should we call it...androgynous movement? grand!it made me feel like i've never been born and I was having a re-birth while reading it.I'm now androgy thanks to Plato and crew!!!
    • 4/5
      This is the first book I've read by Plato, and I really enjoyed it. I had to read it for my English class, and I was really surprised at how funny it was. It also gave great insight on the meaning of love and its merits.
    • 4/5
      Symposium treats us to various philosophies of Love, which are put forward after a dinner party. The final and authoritative speach on the subject is given by Socrates. Plato manages to fit a bit of humor and discreet mockery in too, which makes it all the more entertaining. Translation by Hamilton.
    • 3/5
      Entertaining and thought-provoking, although it did get a little confusing toward the end.