In one of Plato’s most brilliant works, we are invited to an exclusive party for the best and brightest of Athenian society. We meet an award-winning tragedian, an award-winning comedian, the golden boy of Athens: Alcibiades, at his most vulnerable, and several leading citizens. We are regaled with speeches in praise of the god of Love, revealing Greek erotic practices and vices, as well as a sneak peek into the love life of Alcibiades.
During the speech contest, Socrates introduces a tantalizing new philosophical theory, which he attributes to a prophetess from Mantinea. We learn of a kind of Beauty that is the ultimate object of love, Beauty that is manifested in all attractive objects and persons, but which exists beyond the realm of changeable beings in a world of changeless perfection. It is itself a transcendent being. The soul of the lover is drawn toward this being, the communion with which would allow the lover to bring forth works of true virtue and goodness.
The encomium of Love that becomes the aim of the drinking party is interrupted by the bad boy, Alcibiades, come to honor the good man, Agathon, Mr. Good, as his name advertises. But the bad boy is ambushed by the ugly man, with whom he happens to be obsessed. Alcibiades launches into an encomium of Socrates, the ugly man whose ungainly form hides a beautiful soul, and whose actions embody a virtuous character. In the end Socrates ends up willy-nilly as the master of the feast, crowned by his most reluctant disciple in a moment of drunken clarity. In vino veritas.
Plato has intrigued us, invited us, entertained us with mythology, rhetoric, and repartee, inspired and uplifted us, and provided a vindication of the one person who did not quite belong at the festival.
So what?
We the audience, two millennia later, as well as perhaps those of the fourth century BC, barely notice that Plato has introduced a powerful new theory of reality, a world of perfect, changeless entities offering ideal objects that exist only imperfectly in our world of change. This theory, we learn, does not originate with Socrates, but with a seer having spiritual gifts. It will, however, become the ensign for a new philosophical theory that will dominate Plato’s future writings. The Meno introduced immortality of soul, reincarnation, and recollection as a religious doctrine. The Symposium introduces the Forms, the eternal ideals that are the objects of knowledge and the patterns of order in the world. They are introduced in passing, but they will be the foundations of a new edifice of reality and knowledge.
There is another trick Plato has played on us. As revelers crash the party and the festivities descend into chaos, Plato brings Alcibiades back from the dead for one important encounter. He becomes the voice of all those followers of Socrates who did not measure up, including the man who almost single-handedly overthrew the Athenian state, by sharing its vulnerabilities with the Spartan leaders. Alcibiades was Socrates’ ultimate failure and he was a standing refutation of claims that Socrates was a philosophical wonder-worker. By their fruits ye shall know them. Polycrates the Sophist had made the point in his published speech, The Accusation of Socrates.[8]
By bringing Alcibiades on stage, in his cups, Plato makes Alcibiades’ midnight confession erases the prejudice against him and his connection with Socrates. Lo and behold, Socrates was the only good influence on the bad boy, and it was Socrates’ methods and example that made him face his own moral failures and caused him to strive to repair his deficits, at least for as long as he was in the presence of his mentor and hero. So powerful is Plato’s climax to the evening, that we, the audience, accept the prodigal back into the fold of Socrates’ success stories.
Meanwhile, Polycrates’ Accusation has disappeared from ancient libraries and been consigned to the dustbin of history. It has been forgotten, except by a few stuffy scholars who concern themselves with dead languages. Alcibiades’ confession is an appendix to Plato’s defense of Socrates in the Gorgias, as was the interview with Anytus in the Meno. Plato has not forgotten the enemies of Socrates and his movement, but he has done his best to make sure that we, the audience, do not take them seriously. And he has erased their memory so completely that even many Plato scholars ignore them.[9]
[8] Xenophon Memorabilia 1.2.12. For a rather lame defense of Socrates, see Xenophon ibid. 13-28.
[9] E.g. Irwin 1979.