What stands out to me about this book is how relatable many of the ideas are. I work at a university and although I have never and will never have sex with my students, I do understand how wonderful a mentoring relationship with a younger person can be. There is a kind of romance in showing a student around an intellectual domain in the same way there's a romance in showing someone around a foreign city you're familiar with. You get to see it through their eyes and when they share your delight it feels like quite a deep meeting of hearts. Of course it's a good thing that this is now mediated by professionalism and structures that enable students to get access to this world without making themselves vulnerable to harm, and it's not longer only available from teaching staff - often students share the journey together.

There are many other relatable elements - like the fact that when we experience something of beauty we can't help but think it means something or represents some fundamental good and even just the sense that there must be a rule out there that can tell us how to live. There's relatable elements even in the details, like the stuff at the beginning about how they are absolutely, definitely not going to get drunk tonight because they've been drinking too much lately; they will only drink as much as they feel like. Of course randos turn up and everyone gets pissed and either falls asleep or spends the night talking nonsense.

I read the Cambridge Howatson translation and I found it very enjoyable to read. I read the introduction after the text and found it clarified some of the ideas. There's a bit of the usual nonsense about Gods and so on, but I found that easy to get through. I've always assumed that all ancient philosophy is mostly wrong, but as this was my first time reading an original (translated) work, I was pleased to find that despite being mostly wrong, there was much of value. I felt a real sense of connection to the people who, in one sense or another, are among my intellectual forebears. ( )

Phaedrus:Eros is the oldest and most glorious god,bestows happiness and beneficence upon mankind.

Pausanias:It is noble to love someone for virtue's sake,it is inspired by "supernal" Aphrodite.

Erixymachus:Distinguish between two kinds of love,Love is the greatest power when its operation is abstinent and impartial.

Aristophanes:Humans need to find the other half that Zeus has taken from them.

Agathon:Once Eros was born, all goods came to gods and men alike through love of beauty

Socrates&Diotima:As a lover of the wise, love is somewhere between the wise and the ignorant;love is the hope of immortality;love longs to procreate;the beauty of the soul is superior to that of the body;other things come from beauty,but beauty itself is eternal.

I rarely bother logging Socratic dialogues on here but Alcibiades whinging at the very end gave me very vicious flashbacks of drunken women outside of kebab shops slagging their boyfriends off at 4 in the morning to anybody unfortunate enough to be standing in their way. Where’s the street-conscious, ‘urban’ theatre production reinterpretation of this work? There’s an audience of pompous arseholes out there that would lap it up. Oh yeah and the notion of trade within the mercantile order of the méson which you can find in Lyotard’s evil little book makes a hell of a lot more sense now, with women being impregnated on a functional basis so as to keep a fresh stock of beautiful young boys for the lovers to prey upon in open circulation. Cos fucking attractive women for pleasure? Gross. Vulgar. Back to Pandemos with you. ( )

146-1

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. ( )