Plato-- Symposium

This dialogue consists of a discussion at a banquet about the nature of love.

Each of several guests discourses on the topic. Socrates’ contribution is to recount a conversation he had with a woman named Diotima, who had taught him that Love is not a god but a daimon, an intermediate power who transmits mankind's prayers to the gods and the gods' answers and commands to mankind. Love is desire of the beautiful and the good, Socrates claims to have learned from her. Human beings begin by loving physical beauty in another person, then progress to love of intellect and from that level to see the connection among people. This leads to contemplation of the beauty of institutions such as the law and then the sciences. Ultimately the lover of beauty enjoys a kind of revelation or vision of universal beauty.

This dialogue has been called one of the "few masterpieces of human art that unveil and interpret something of the central mystery of life." Benjamin Jowett said, "If it be true that there are more things in the Symposium of Plato than any commentator has dreamed of, it is also true that many things have been imagined, which are not really to be found there."

The Symposium of Plato: The Shelley Translation by Plato, translated by Percy Bysshe Shelley, introduction and notes by David Kevin O'Connor ( St. Augustine ’s Press) In the summer of 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley pulled himself away from a flur­ry of other projects to devote himself to translating Plato's Symposium. Besides being one of the very great lyric poets of Romanticism, Shelley was an accomplished Hellenist, and had a natural sympathy for Plato's way of seeing the world. The result of his labor was a translation of Plato's principal work on love that is, in both clarity and felicity of expression, unmatched by any con­temporary translation.

Much of what the dialogue offers to today's reader ‑ namely, its invitation to see erotic experience as the privileged locus of our contact with the sacred and the divine ‑ is lost in translation by failures of tone more than by inaccu­racies or simple infelicities. The elevation and sophistication of Shelley's prose makes his translation a much better English vehicle for Plato's writing than the rather chatty and colloquial translations current today. Plato's speeches on love need an English idiom in which myth is at home, and in which humor rises to urbanity rather than descending to mere wit and joke. With Shelley, we get a translation of a great literary masterpiece by a writer who is himself a liter­ary master, and his mastery is of exactly the type required by Plato's text.

This translation came at the height of Shelley's powers, mirroring in language and conception some of his finest works, and so is itself a precious doc­ument in the history of Romanticism, for which the re-appropriation of Plato is second in importance only to the massive influence of Shakespeare. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, her husband's literary executor, upon publication of (a somewhat expurgated version of the dialogue, boasted that "Shelley resembled Plato; both taking more delight in the abstract and the ideal than in the spe­cial and the tangible. This did not result from imitation; for it was not until Shelley resided in Italy that he made Plato his study. He then translated his Symposium and Ion; and the English language boasts of no more brilliant composition than Plato's Praise of Love translated by Shelley." If this goes too far, it goes at least in the right direction.

David K. O'Connor, in his introduction and footnotes, provides the his­torical and philosophic framework to appreciate best the importance of the dialogue and translation.

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