Chapter 6
Drinking Games
Symposium 172a-199c
Medicine, therefore, is guided in all matters by the god Eros, as is gym training and farming.
—Eryximachus in Plato, Symposium 186e-187a
Rihanna’s 2023 halftime show set a new record by attracting 121 million viewers.1 Her performance, which doubled as a pregnancy announcement, was relatively low-key compared to shows in previous years. Halftime shows attract a huge following, including people who have little interest in football. (Rihanna brought in 6 million more viewers than the game itself.) While there is no official competition in these annual mini-concerts, comparisons abound as each show attempts somehow to outdo the rest. The scale, spectacle, and athletic context of the halftime show, as well as its combination of musical one-upmanship and often quite athletic choreography, present a point of contact between athletics and art in contemporary popular culture. In this, we get a glimpse of what was a normal occurrence in ancient Greece. Religious festivals often included plays, parades, sacrifices, public feasts, and athletic competitions. Festivals at Athens were lavish enough that ancient politicians complained that the city spent more on its festivals than on its military.2 Tragedies and comedies were judged no less than athletic competitions were, and included elaborate singing and dancing, meant to impress. Comedies were particularly blunt about this. At points, characters break the fourth wall, address the jury directly, and present the playwright’s argument for why his play is best. In short, religious festivals were the halftime shows of antiquity.
One such festival, the Lenaia, in honor of Dionysus, provides the backdrop for Plato’s dialogue Symposium. The poet Agathon has just won first place in the tragedy competition of 416 BCE. Symposium depicts a drinking party attended by Socrates and his friends to celebrate this win. The athletic context is not as obvious as Socratic dialogues set in gyms, yet the work fits into our overall project via three interrelated strands.
First is the setting, which shows the gym’s spirit of competition (agōn) spilling into other aspects of Greek culture. Ancient athletics, philosophy, politics, and theater all participate in a culture of agōn. This plays out in Symposium through the friendly competition of drinking games that provide the dialogue’s literary structure.3
Second is the social function of the ancient symposium. Like the ancient gym, the symposium has no one modern equivalent. The closest we can get is a high tea mixed with a fraternity party mixed with a college seminar. Like a tea party, the symposium was a formal event with various dishes used for various purposes. People reclined on couches, and drank according to elaborate conventions. But they were not drinking tea. We have thousands of drinking cups, storage vats, and bowls in which wine was mixed with water to produce a drink with an alcohol content close to that of modern beer. As the event progressed, participants would get more and more intoxicated. Games included something called a wine toss. Flute girls were present to serve as prostitutes, though they played actual flutes too. Like the gym, the symposium was also a key site for homoerotic mentoring relationships. A lover helped his beloved learn to be a man and everything that entailed. Symposia were an opportunity for young men to network with peers, while gaining experience in various intellectual, artistic, and sexual pursuits.4
The third and final strand is Symposium’s main theme: erotic love (erōs). Plenty of that went on in the gyms of Athens, as we saw in part 1. In Lysis, Socrates goes so far as to give a lesson in flirtation through an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at defining friendship. There are various Greek words for love. Philia, the main subject of Lysis, is comprehensive and can include everything from family and romantic partners to wine and wisdom. Erōs covers sexual desire and other strong attachments. It is also the name of the god Eros (Latin, Cupid), who, depending on which mythology you consult, is either the pudgy infant son of Aphrodite or a primal force of nature.5 One of the most promising ideas in Lysis is that friendship points beyond itself as friends strive to be better people. The same general idea returns in Symposium where it is connected with a spirit of friendly competition through which individuals may improve. Symposium sets this idea within a matrix of religious practices. While Dionysus is mentioned only in passing, he casts a long shadow over the event through both the drinking and the Lenaian festival. Tangled up in all of this are ideas drawn from mystery cults, a religious form that involved complex rituals of purification, initiation, and revelation. Different mystery cults were connected to different divinities, most notably Dionysus and Demeter.6 In Plato’s hands, the mystery cult provides a framework for reconceptualizing erōs as a way of transcending mortal life and striving after the divine.
In the end, these three strands come together. Where the gymnasium offers a venue for friendly rivalry and mutual improvement, Symposium presents erotic relationships as a vehicle for improving one’s character and striving after the divine. To us, workout routines, character formation, and religious experience may have little to do with one another. To Plato, they are merely different facets of a single striving for transcendence. This is the constellation of ideas to be explored through Plato’s Symposium.
Agathon’s After-Party: Symposium 172a-178a
Symposium is set the night after Agathon’s initial victory party. Agathon and his friends overdid it the first time, and they have now gathered for something tamer, the ancient equivalent of postgame beer and wings with friends. After an opening scene involving invitations lost in the mail and Socrates actually taking a bath, Socrates and the work’s narrator, Aristodemus, show up at Agathon’s house (172a-178a). Eryximachus, a physician and one of the guests, sends away the flute girl, opting instead for some male-only time (176e). Taking the lead as master of ceremonies, he suggests that they each give a speech in praise of erōs. As often happens in Greek religion, it is hard to draw a clear line between the god and the psychological phenomenon. Agathon and his guests praise the god by weaving between mythology and their various experiences of desire. Since Plato’s Greek does not follow English conventions of capitalization, I will speak simply of erōs and leave readers to ponder whether passages refer to the god, the emotion, or both.
The praise of erōs is particularly well suited to the guest list: Pausanias and Agathon are a couple, as are Socrates and Alcibiades, who crashes the party toward the end. Through their different speeches, we glimpse homoerotic relationships from the perspectives of both the lover and the beloved.7 As with Lysis and Charmides, the particulars of these relationships may strike current readers as somewhat foreign. Today people talk about heteronormativity: the assumption that heterosexual perspectives are the correct default for thinking about the world. Plato’s Symposium presents what we might call homonormativity, making love between a man and a woman seem decidedly second-best. In my experience, gay students tend to read this as a kind of homecoming. Straight students tend to find it uncomfortable, hilarious, or some combination. Whatever the reader’s orientation, the big ideas presented in the work have stood the test of time, as they get at basic questions about what it means to be human and the role that erotic love plays in our lives.
In Praise of Love: Symposium 178a-199c
The bulk of Symposium is taken up with a series of six speeches in praise of erōs and a seventh in praise of Socrates. The key to interpreting the work’s main argument is to see how these speeches fit together in a coherent progression. Before turning to these holistic questions, let us briefly set out the main lines of the first five speeches.
Phaedrus
The first speaker is Phaedrus (178a-180c). He appears in another Platonic dialogue, bearing his name, which shows him and Socrates on a stroll outside the city discussing the nature of erōs. In Symposium, Phaedrus makes erōs as noble as possible, citing Hesiod and Parmenides to describe erōs as an ancient god and cosmic force (178b-c). From there, he quickly turns to erōs’s educational role. A young man looks up to his lover and cares what his lover thinks. This leads the young man to feel shame (aischynē) and pride (philotimē; 178d) in the right things. Phaedrus even suggests that an army made up entirely of male-male couples would be the best possible.8
Looking to mythology to drive home the honor/shame aspect of erōs, Phaedrus starts by citing Alcestis, a woman who was willing to die for her husband, Admetis.9 Next is the musician Orpheus, who went to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, albeit unsuccessfully. Phaedrus’s grand finale is Achilles, star of Homer’s Iliad, who went into battle to avenge the death of his lover, Patroclus.10 What interests Phaedrus is that Achilles does this in the face of a prophecy. As the son of an immortal sea nymph and a mortal man, Achilles faces the choice between a short, glorious life or a long life of obscurity. In choosing to go back to battle, Phaedrus argues, Achilles decides to die for Patroclus. This is remarkable, first, since Patroclus is already dead and, second, because Achilles was the beloved not the lover. On this detail, Phaedrus corrects the tragic poet Aeschylus, who thought that Achilles was the lover (180a). If we are honest, homoerotic relationships do not figure in Homer’s heroic worldview. The most obvious reason we cannot find clear details in Iliad as to who was lover and who was beloved is that they were actually just friends. Athenians of Plato’s time, by contrast, saw this as an obviously romantic relationship.
Pausanias
Pausanias offers the second speech (180c-185c). In the spirit of friendly competition, the first thing he does is correct Phaedrus for not distinguishing between the two forms of erōs. This reflects the twofold nature of erōs’s companion, Aphrodite. The older, heavenly Aphrodite is the “motherless daughter of Ouranos” (180d). While that sounds lofty, Pausanias is playing with some fairly graphic imagery. According to Hesiod, Ouranos (literally, Sky or Heaven) imprisoned his children, the Titans, in the underworld. His son Kronos, Zeus’s father, therefore, used a sickle to castrate his father, and threw his genitals into the sea. All that “heavenly” semen did not go to waste, and Aphrodite was born out of the resulting foam (her name sounds vaguely like “from the foam” in Greek). Such thinking inspired Botticelli’s famous painting Birth of Venus. While we might sense some tipsy logic coming into play here, the point is serious: heavenly Aphrodite is the best sort. By contrast, there is the younger deity, common Aphrodite, who is the daughter of Zeus and Dione. When discussing erōs, we must likewise be careful to distinguish between the heavenly and common versions (180d-e).
Pausanias deals with common erōs first (180e-181c). He argues that actions are not in themselves good or bad but become so depending on how they are performed. In the case of common erōs, the problem is that people are too undiscerning. Someone under the sway of common erōs is just after sex, and does not care whether he gets it from a woman or a young man. And he does not particularly care how young that man is (181d). This is because he is more in love with the body than the soul. Heavenly erōs, by contrast, is a companion to the motherless Aphrodite. Thanks to this all-male pedigree, this love is purely between men (181c-e). This is a love more for the soul than the body. For this reason, heavenly lovers are not attracted to young boys, but to those whose minds have sufficiently developed.
Pausanias finishes by explaining different customs (nomoi; 128a) surrounding homoerotic relationships. In a very Greek moment, he speaks out against the Persian empire, which has outlawed them entirely. Like the love of wisdom (philosophia) and love of the gym (philogymnastia), erōs between male citizens strengthens social bonds and overthrows tyranny (182b-c). Pausanias proceeds to explain that the Athenian practice of having young men chaperoned by a paidagōgos might seem to condemn homoerotic relationships, but is in fact a way of separating common and heavenly lovers (182d-184e). By encouraging potential lovers to do anything for the object of their affections and encouraging potential beloveds to play hard to get, Athenian custom sets up a contest (agōn) to test what sort of relationship it would be (184a).11 Pausanias ends with the educational role of homoerotic relationships, arguing that, no matter the outcome, it is always honorable to give oneself to a lover for the sake of pursuing virtue (184c-185c).
Eryximachus
The comic poet Aristophanes should come next, but he has the hiccups. The group’s doctor, Eryximachus, steps up, offers various hiccup remedies (185d-e), and proceeds to give his own speech in praise of erōs (185e-189a).12 While he may come across as a bit of a nerd (214b), his contribution is profound.
Mirroring Pausanias’s critique of Phaedrus, Eryximachus critiques Pausanias for insufficiently developing the distinction between heavenly and common love. All the sciences, it turns out, study the effect of erōs on different aspects of life. Eryximachus begins with medicine (186b-e), which is the “science of the effects of love on the filling and emptying of the body” (186c-d). He has in mind Hippocratic practice, which sought to balance the body’s humors through diet, exercise, and drugs.13 The goal, according to Eryximachus, is to restore love between opposed bodily elements: hot and cold, bitter and sweet, wet and dry. The doctor’s role is to distinguish between good/heavenly/healthy erōs that brings balance and bad/common/diseased erōs that destroys balance.
Eryximachus applies the same thinking to athletic training (gymnastikē), farming, astronomy, music, and religion (187a-188d). Just as doctors and trainers adapt regimens for the changing seasons of the year, farmers must keep crops in balance as seasons change because of the influence of heavenly bodies studied in astronomy. Music ends up being a process of reconciling long and short syllables, high and low pitches, and the effect they have on listeners. Religion through sacrifice and divination helps restore balance between gods and humans. Erotic relationships between human individuals are thus just one part of a much bigger picture. When erōs is “pursued with discipline and justice toward the good” (188d), the results are happiness, civic harmony, and prosperity.14
Aristophanes
In his opening critique, Aristophanes claims that people have greatly undervalued the god erōs, and that Pausanias and Eryximachus have gone about praising erōs in the wrong way. Pausanias focused on the nature of the god, while Eryximachus focused on ideas from the sciences. Aristophanes examines human nature. He is the only one present who does not immediately look down on love between men and women. In fact, his speech (189d-194e) explains the origin of different sexual orientations. In a comic spin on Hesiod, Aristophanes presents a myth in which the original humans each had four arms and four legs arranged in some kind of wheel that made them very fast. Zeus worried that they would seize Olympus from the gods, so he cut them in half, creating the bipedal humans we know today. The process, among other things, explains the origin of the six-pack stomach (190e-191a).15 These new humans, however, wasted away in longing for their “other halves.” Zeus eventually took pity, and came up with a solution, relocating human genitals to allow individuals to come together in sexual union. In this way, erōs “seeks to heal the wound of human nature” (191d).16
What does this have to do with sexual orientation? It turns out that the original humans had three genders: male, female, and androgynous. The last of these, when split, turned into pairs of heterosexual men and women. There are many adulterers in this group (191d-e). The original men, by contrast, gave way to pairs of homosexual men. These are “the best of boys” when they are young, because they are most masculine: they delight in manly things and in embracing men (191e-192b). Homosexual women do not get much mention (191e). Bisexual people get no mention at all.
Aristophanes ends by extending his myth. When someone finds his or her other half, the two want to live their lives together, though they cannot say what it is they want from the other (192c). Aristophanes suggests that what they would really like is to be “welded together” by Hephaestus (192d). In this way, the two could melt together, becoming one person. In sum, erōs “is the name for our pursuit of wholeness” (192d-193a).
Agathon
It is now down to Agathon and Socrates. None of Agathon’s tragedies survives complete today. Symposium describes him as a talented, aristocratic young man and the most handsome in the room. Little wonder that Socrates ends up on his couch.17 When it comes time for Agathon to speak, Socrates butts in, attempting to engage him in a cross-examination. Phaedrus sees that this will derail the task at hand and promptly shuts it down (194).
Agathon brings the pattern of opening critiques to a new level, claiming that all the speakers so far have congratulated human beings on receiving gifts from erōs, rather than saying what exactly erōs is. Having started with this philosophical insight, the rest of Agathon’s speech in praise of erōs proceeds like a child’s Valentine’s Day card, extolling erōs’s surpassing beauty. (As Socrates will soon point out, Agathon describes the experience of the beloved in a homosexual couple: to be the sweetheart, fawned over and given presents.) Agathon corrects Pausanias: erōs is not ancient; he is the youngest of the gods, because he flees old age, and spends his time around beautiful, young people (195a-c). Nothing harsh or bad, such as castrating one’s father, ever happens when erōs is present. He is delicate, and touches only pretty, delicate things. He is like a flower (195d-196b). Taking a more philosophical stance, Agathon argues that love is the root of the virtues of justice, moderation, bravery, and wisdom (196b-197c). Tipsy logic continues as erōs is said to have “the biggest share of moderation.” In mythology, Ares, the god of war, fell in love with Aphrodite, thus proving that erōs is brave. Agathon’s point about justice seems to be that if everyone just spent their time giving each other presents, everyone would get along. As for wisdom, Agathon falls back on the convention that erōs inspires people to become poets (Agathon’s and Aristophanes’s own profession), animal breeders, craftsmen, prophets, and diplomats.18
Taking Stock: The First Five Speeches
We have reached the halfway point in the dialogue, and we have seen speakers proceed with friendly competition: correcting others, expanding ideas, and dipping into tipsy logic, saying things that sound ridiculous but are still, perhaps, profoundly true. Until fairly recently, scholars tended to dismiss these opening speeches, Eryximachus’s and Agathon’s in particular, as not contributing anything useful to Symposium’s philosophical inquiry into erōs. More recent work has turned to the question of how these speeches fit together.19 I suggest that by setting these ideas against the background of the gym and taking seriously the banter through which each speaker critiques those who went before, we can find a structure running through these five speeches that continues into the work’s second half. The result is a reading of the work that highlights the centrality of Eryximachus’s and Agathon’s contributions to the whole.20
In one sense, characters’ opening critiques claim that previous speakers did not get the question right. Thus, each speech goes beyond the last by exposing the question behind the question. Phaedrus starts by claiming that erotic relationships will keep lovers from doing anything shameful. But this begs the question, What makes an action shameful? Pausanias answers: loving bodies more than souls. But this raises a further question: Why is it shameful to love bodies more than souls? Given that Eryximachus lays out a cosmos in purely physical terms, his speech may seem a poor place to look for body/soul comparisons. Recall, however, that he criticizes Pausanias for not taking the heavenly/common distinction far enough. Eryximachus proceeds to find instances of healthy and diseased love in everything from gym work to farming to astronomy. All of these are ruled over by medicine, which Eryximachus defines as the science (technē) of balancing erōs’s effects of filling and emptying to create heavenly love. While Eryximachus does not make it explicit, science belongs to souls not to bodies.21 We should therefore ascribe more worth to souls that act by using science than to bodies that are acted upon by those souls. But this raises the further question, Why does balance/proportion make something healthy and heavenly? Aristophanes responds by focusing on human nature, and spells out erōs as the search for wholeness, which brings long-lost other halves back together. This insight relies on the idea shared by ancient medicine and aesthetics that balance and harmony are a means to wholeness. The Greek for “whole” (holos) means both “whole” and “sound,” as in the Latin motto for ASICS shoes: anima sana in corpore sano (a sound mind in a sound body).22 In anything with parts, whether a human body, a musical instrument, or a piece of architecture, wholeness is brought about through balance of those parts.23 This raises yet another question: Why is wholeness worth seeking?
Taking a different approach, Agathon criticizes his companions for describing what love does for humans, not what love is. By laying out an account of erōs in terms of beauty, Agathon provides a context for the ideas raised by the previous four speakers. If the result of the previous speakers’ critiques was to move to ever more basic questions, Agathon now suggests a basic answer that can be used to connect all of this. Why is wholeness worth seeking (as Aristophanes argued)? Because it is beautiful. Beautiful wholeness is brought about by the harmonious, balanced gatherings of gods and humans (as Eryximachus argued). Under the sway of such harmony, nothing is done by force. This lack of force accords with “the laws (nomoi) which are king of the city” (196c; compare Pausanias). In such a state, all virtues flow naturally, giving people the correct attitudes toward honor and shame (as Phaedrus argued). Read this way, neither Eryximachus nor Agathon provides a merely comic interlude. Eryximachus brings key concepts from medicine to the table, while Agathon ties a neat philosophical bow on everything that went before. Likewise, the tipsy banter with which speakers roast each other is not mere window dressing: it lays bare the basic structure of the dialogue’s first half.
If my reading is correct, then Symposium’s first half pursues a strategy that Plato refers to in other dialogues as a method of hypothesis.24 The method starts by offering a hypothesis awaiting confirmation. The next step is to offer a more basic hypothesis, which would explain the truth of the first: one that answers the question behind the question. Investigators continue this process until they cannot go any further. Ideally, this will culminate in a nonhypothetical first principle (archē), though it is possible to stop short of that. The method concludes through a two-step confirmation as original hypotheses are shown to follow from the later ones, and as the nonhypothetical first principle is rigorously tested. If the process is completed, Plato counts the result as knowledge. If the process is cut short before confirming a nonhypothetical principle, then any conclusions produced up to that point are deemed provisional.
By following this method, inquirers dig into ever more basic questions. Basic here means both more simple and more fundamental. This progression is important for two seemingly opposite reasons. First, people rarely start out asking basic questions. The method of hypothesis thus helps readers get to the level at which philosophical theorizing typically operates. Second, by following the method, people can connect philosophical questions with things they actually care about. If this process is skipped, philosophical questions can sound strange or pointless. These movements (finding the basic questions behind everyday concerns and connecting basic questions to everyday concerns) are effectively two sides of a single coin. Among other things, they serve as a teaching strategy, providing a method for getting people to think about ideas, both familiar and novel, from a series of different perspectives.
Plato’s process for confirming a first principle is notoriously hard to pin down. At the very least, it involves checking an idea for internal consistency through a process reminiscent of Socratic elenchos. At other times, it asks how well a hypothesis rings true to lived experience or makes good sense of human psychology.25 The four speeches leading up to Agathon’s speech capture various experiences and ways of conceptualizing erōs: honor and shame (Phaedrus), heavenly vs. common (Pausanias), cosmic processes (Eryximachus), and longing for wholeness (Aristophanes). In setting out a hypothesis connecting erōs and beauty, Agathon in effect says: Each of you has a piece of the picture. Here is the whole. Everything your theory can do, mine can do better.26 Socrates congratulates Agathon on his method of praising love, but he points out contradictions within Agathon’s hypothesis, and offers a rival theory that resolves them. Put another way, Socrates criticizes Agathon for not yet arriving at a basic question: there are yet more questions behind the hypothetical answer Agathon gives. To evaluate the force of this critique and the strength of the alternative hypothesis Socrates presents, we must take one more digression into Symposium’s cultural context in the next chapter.