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2. The Symposium.
“Imagine that Hephaestus came with his tools and stood over them as they were
lying together, and asked, ‘What is it you humans want from each other?’ And
when they were unable to reply, suppose he asked them instead, ‘Do you want to
be so thoroughly together that you’re never at any time apart? If that’s what
you want, I’d be glad to weld you together, to fuse you into a single person,
instead of being two separate people, so that during your lifetime as a single
person the two of you share a single life; and then, when you die, you die as
a single person, not as two separate people, and you share a single death
there in Hades. Think about it: is this your heart’s desire?’”
Plato’s Symposium is a curious text: a
philosophical treatise on love, a play about a dinner party in classical
Athens where the guests are all flirty and catty, and a story-within-a-story
that goes at least five layers deep. Suzanne and Chris consider what it means
to get intellectually pregnant, to philosophically crash a party, and to find
your missing half.
Show Notes.
The Symposium by Plato, Robin Waterfield’s
translation. [Bookshop.]
Our friends at Dear Reader discussed some
adaptations of ancient Greek material: Check it
out!
Aristophanes’ myth of the origin of love inspired a striking song in Hedwig
and the Angry Inch.
When Alcibiades stumbles into the party, drunk and beautiful with flowers in
his hair, he probably looks a little like Dionysius, the god of
wine.
No Silenus states with effigies inside have survived, but Susan Woodford has
argued that medieval “Vierges
ouvrantes” statues were similar.
We do have
depictions
of Silenus as the (significantly older) tutor of Dionysus, however.
Next episode: The
Metamorphoses
by Ovid. (Use whatever translation you can find.)
View all episodes
By Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Chris Piuma
4.8
3030 ratings
“Imagine that Hephaestus came with his tools and stood over them as they were
lying together, and asked, ‘What is it you humans want from each other?’ And
when they were unable to reply, suppose he asked them instead, ‘Do you want to
be so thoroughly together that you’re never at any time apart? If that’s what
you want, I’d be glad to weld you together, to fuse you into a single person,
instead of being two separate people, so that during your lifetime as a single
person the two of you share a single life; and then, when you die, you die as
a single person, not as two separate people, and you share a single death
there in Hades. Think about it: is this your heart’s desire?’”
Plato’s Symposium is a curious text: a
philosophical treatise on love, a play about a dinner party in classical
Athens where the guests are all flirty and catty, and a story-within-a-story
that goes at least five layers deep. Suzanne and Chris consider what it means
to get intellectually pregnant, to philosophically crash a party, and to find
your missing half.
Show Notes.
The Symposium by Plato, Robin Waterfield’s
translation. [Bookshop.]
Our friends at Dear Reader discussed some
adaptations of ancient Greek material: Check it
out!
Aristophanes’ myth of the origin of love inspired a striking song in Hedwig
and the Angry Inch.
When Alcibiades stumbles into the party, drunk and beautiful with flowers in
his hair, he probably looks a little like Dionysius, the god of
wine.
No Silenus states with effigies inside have survived, but Susan Woodford has
argued that medieval “Vierges
ouvrantes” statues were similar.
We do have
depictions
of Silenus as the (significantly older) tutor of Dionysus, however.
Next episode: The
Metamorphoses
by Ovid. (Use whatever translation you can find.)
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