Week 1: Setting the Context
The entire dialogue and the Index of Names (pages 97-104)
About the life of Alcibiades.
The narrative situation of the Symposium is complex: Apollodorus speaks to unnamed companions, relating a conversation he had a few days before with Glaucon, in which he related what happened at a symposium ten years earlier that he did not attend. His information came from Aristodemus, who was there, supplemented with what Socrates had told Apollodorus. The symposium occurred in 416 BC, on the eve of the Sicilian Expedition. The narration in the Symposium is set around 406 BC, by which time Alcibiades was once again in Athenian employ, shortly before he was exiled and then assassinated. The Symposium was written around 385, by which time Plato and his audience knew the whole story of Alcibiades and knew also about Socrates’ condemnation and death in 399 BC.
What dramatic purpose is served by setting the Symposium up this way?
Is it important that the occasion of the party is a celebration of Agathon’s success in a play writing competition?
Contents of this page © Copyright 2023 by Karl F. Oles and Bruce A. McMenomy.
Permission to print or reproduce this page is hereby given to members of Scholars Online for purposes of personal study only. All other use constitutes a violation of copyright.