Rethinking the History of the Literary Symposium

Abstract

Some Initial ConsiderationsThat Plato's Symposium is to us the symposium obscures the fact that it is a very eccentric symposium, whether it is viewed in contrast to those literary symposia that follow it and take it as a model, or in contrast to those contemporary sympotic realities which form the historical background against which we may evaluate the text as a document of social history.Once this is stated, it is perhaps not so surprising; those other few Platonic dialogues which take their names not after characters within them offer strikingly anomalous examples of the things they affect to discuss: Surely the Apology is a strange apology, and the Republic a strange republic.'Plutarch, who in his Table Talk shows his theoretical understanding of the genre (his practice in the Banquet of the Seven Wise Men is quite different), must constantly make excuses for Plato's divergence in his Symposium from sympotic and symposiac norms.^Butwhat is at issue here is more than whether there are to be flute-girls, symposiarchs and rules for seating: Rather, what most accounts for the difference between the Symposium and a symposion is the presence of Socrates.For Socrates is practically by definition an unsympotic character.If the norm for a symposion is egalitarianism, then Plato's hybristic Socrates is out of place;"^if a symposion is a social microcosm, then Socrates can no more be constrained by its boundaries than he can be by those of Athens.And it is surely the case that the topic of the Symposium is not Love, but the nature of Socrates himself.A Socratic literary symposium is, if not exactly a contradiction in terms, at least a kind of oxymoron; and those who follow in Plato's footsteps must come to terms with a model whose central character violates the norms of the symposion.What Alcibiades does to the end of Agathon's symposion later authors do to Plato's Symposium as a whole: They remove the straitjacket that was imposed in the name of philosophy, and allow dissentient voices to be heard.As this kind of multiplicity becomes the symposiac ideal, the person of Socrates undergoes some remarkable changes.The problem for the author is how to have a philosophical view endorsed without dragging the ^Sophist and Statesman, as continuations of Theaetetus, are dialogues that seek to define their key terms as character types {Philosopher was not written); Laws (and its Addendum) may be allowed to be unironic.This matter will be discussed more fuUy below.^In a sense, this complete egalitarianism is social anarchy, or panarchy; the sympotic society is controlled by everyone and no one.It is now questioned whether equality was a sympotic reality in the Roman world of the patron-client relationship; and there are now suspicions that even in Greek sympotic gatherings some people were allowed a privileged position.J. D'Arms, "The Roman Convivium and the Idea of Equality," in Murray (above, note 1 ) 308-20, argues that Roman sympotic reality may be much illumined by jettisoning the idea of equality, but also allows that literary symposia may operate along egalitarian lines.The genre, then, obeys literary conventions at some remove from social reality: There are rules of equality, and the violations of these rules are important.* Athenaeus depicts his least likeable character, Ulpian, thus (385a): "nit-picky Ulpian, who reclined by himself, eating little and scrutinizing the speakers."The aloof attitude, in itself ^'^M urray (above, note 9) 268-^59.'^T he madness of wine is seen as an inevitable popular component of symposia in Laws 1- 2 and in need of tight control; see below, 219-20 and n. 22.As Plutarch says {Table Talk I. 2), the symposium is a democratic institution.So too does Lycon function at the end of Xenophon's Symposium, Athens giving Socrates the back-handed compliment that he is beautiful and good, the perfect gentleman (Symp.9. 1).*^S ee Jeanneret (above, note 5) 151, on Lucian's Lapiths.