BERNARD FREYDBERGforgot others—including his own, presumably—completely. Yet Aris-
todemus deserves ku'do~ for his recollection of the speeches and his re-
lating them to Apollodorus.
Much has been made of the ending of the Symposium, where we
fi nd Socrates challenging Agathon and Aristophanes, the two (drunk
and exhausted) poets present, to admit that the same person could
write comedy and tragedy. As the poets fall asleep, Socrates goes off
to spend the next day “as he did the others” (223d11). This is taken to
bear witness to the superiority of the philosopher to the poet, at least
as a disciple of Dionysus, as well as one who answers the call of Apollo.
However, even a brief overview of the speeches as recorded reveals a
more complex relation.
The speech of Aristophanes is a tragic speech given by a come-
dian. The original spherical, four-armed, four-legged human beings
committed u{bri~, and so were sliced in half by Zeus for their insolence.
“Erw~ is the search for one’s other half. A human being, by himself or
herself, is incomplete. “Erw~ is the search for one’s other half, so as to
make oneself whole as far as possible in this, our realm of fated fi nitude.
Aristophanes’ speech presents e[rw~ as concerned with completeness,
but does not give an account of its orientation toward goodness.
Agathon’s speech, by contrast, presents a direct leap of e[rw~ to
goodness, without stopping at all for consideration of human fi nitude
with its struggles and its errors. In other words, Agathon, the tragedian,
presents a comic speech, in the sense that the limits to which human-
ity is given over present no obstacle to such a leap.^8 “Erw~ is everything
good, nothing bad, “ornament of all gods and men together, most beau-
tiful and virtuous leader whom all men must follow, singing beautifully
and sweetly and partaking of the music he sings as he enchants the
mind of every god and man” (197e1– 5). To readers of English only it
may seem mysterious that this speech, so transparently superfi cial in
content, would receive such enthusiastic applause. Even Agathon’s po-
sition as host and recent victor could not justify it. However, in Greek
Agathon’s speech is a tour de force of spontaneous rhythm and rhyme,
a showpiece of a talented poet. As is well known, Socrates immediately
sets out to chide his friends for applauding Agathon’s false and sophist-
like praise of e[rw~, then performs an e[legco~ upon Agathon’s view that
reveals e[rw~ lack of beauty and goodness.
However, Socrates’ own speech has three features that bind it to
that of his poetic predecessors. (1) The speech is presented as inspired
by a Muse-like fi gure, Diotima of Mantinea. Further, although this fi g-
ure is original with Plato, Mantinea was associated with the mythical Ar-
cadian region upon which pastoral poetry called.^9 (2) The presentation