Symposium | Page 8

stalking about like a pelican, rolling his eyes as Aristophanes
had described him in the Clouds. He is the most wonderful of human
beings, and absolutely unlike anyone but a satyr. Like the satyr in his
language too; for he uses the commonest words as the outward mask of
the divinest truths.
When Alcibiades has done speaking, a dispute begins between him and
Agathon and Socrates. Socrates piques Alcibiades by a pretended
affection for Agathon. Presently a band of revellers appears, who
introduce disorder into the feast; the sober part of the company,
Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others, withdraw; and Aristodemus, the
follower of Socrates, sleeps during the whole of a long winter's night.
When he wakes at cockcrow the revellers are nearly all asleep. Only
Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon hold out; they are drinking from a
large goblet, which they pass round, and Socrates is explaining to the
two others, who are half-asleep, that the genius of tragedy is the same
as that of comedy, and that the writer of tragedy ought to be a writer of
comedy also. And first Aristophanes drops, and then, as the day is
dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to rest, takes a bath and
goes to his daily avocations until the evening. Aristodemus follows.
...
If it be true that there are more things in the Symposium of Plato than
any commentator has dreamed of, it is also true that many things have

been imagined which are not really to be found there. Some writings
hardly admit of a more distinct interpretation than a musical
composition; and every reader may form his own accompaniment of
thought or feeling to the strain which he hears. The Symposium of
Plato is a work of this character, and can with difficulty be rendered in
any words but the writer's own. There are so many half-lights and
cross-lights, so much of the colour of mythology, and of the manner of
sophistry adhering--rhetoric and poetry, the playful and the serious, are
so subtly intermingled in it, and vestiges of old philosophy so curiously
blend with germs of future knowledge, that agreement among
interpreters is not to be expected. The expression 'poema magis
putandum quam comicorum poetarum,' which has been applied to all
the writings of Plato, is especially applicable to the Symposium.
The power of love is represented in the Symposium as running through
all nature and all being: at one end descending to animals and plants,
and attaining to the highest vision of truth at the other. In an age when
man was seeking for an expression of the world around him, the
conception of love greatly affected him. One of the first distinctions of
language and of mythology was that of gender; and at a later period the
ancient physicist, anticipating modern science, saw, or thought that he
saw, a sex in plants; there were elective affinities among the elements,
marriages of earth and heaven. (Aesch. Frag. Dan.) Love became a
mythic personage whom philosophy, borrowing from poetry, converted
into an efficient cause of creation. The traces of the existence of love,
as of number and figure, were everywhere discerned; and in the
Pythagorean list of opposites male and female were ranged side by side
with odd and even, finite and infinite.
But Plato seems also to be aware that there is a mystery of love in man
as well as in nature, extending beyond the mere immediate relation of
the sexes. He is conscious that the highest and noblest things in the
world are not easily severed from the sensual desires, or may even be
regarded as a spiritualized form of them. We may observe that Socrates
himself is not represented as originally unimpassioned, but as one who
has overcome his passions; the secret of his power over others partly
lies in his passionate but self-controlled nature. In the Phaedrus and
Symposium love is not merely the feeling usually so called, but the
mystical contemplation of the beautiful and the good. The same passion

which may wallow in the mire is capable of rising to the loftiest
heights--of penetrating the inmost secret of philosophy. The highest
love is the love not of a person, but of the highest and purest
abstraction. This abstraction is the far-off heaven on which the eye of
the mind is fixed in fond amazement. The unity of truth, the
consistency of the warring elements of the world, the enthusiasm for
knowledge when first beaming upon mankind, the relativity of ideas to
the human mind, and of the human mind to ideas, the faith in the
invisible, the adoration of the eternal nature, are all included,
consciously or unconsciously, in Plato's doctrine of love.
The successive speeches in praise of love are characteristic of the
speakers, and contribute in various degrees to the