IS THERE METHOD IN THIS MADNESS?he would himself prefer to recite the speeches than engage in a rigor-
ous Socratic dialogue in which he might have to think for himself. Here
Apollodorus is made to do what the fanatic does best: mimic the words
of others.
Yet Plato does not simply allow us to accept the veracity of this
mimesis at face value. The “noble dissembling” of Platonic irony forces
us to be on guard against the words received from Aristodemus and
recited by Apollodorus.^14 This is reinforced by a fi nal comment Plato
puts into the mouth of Apollodorus before beginning the fi rst speech
on eros: “Everyone of them spoke, but Aristodemus did not remember
everything, nor did I remember everything he said. But I will tell you
the things that seemed to me most worthy of remembering from each
of the speeches” (177e– 178a). This rather offhanded comment takes on
enormous signifi cance in light of our consideration of the characters of
Apollodorus and Aristodemus, for it alerts the careful reader again to
the tenuous nature of the accounts that are about to be recited.^15 Plato
engages here in a strategy of equivocation designed to heighten the
critical awareness of all who encounter his text. By distancing himself
and the reader from the speeches, Plato forces us into a mode of critical
self-refl ection even as the content of the text is being presented.
If the fi gures of Apollodorus and Aristodemus manifest one di-
mension of the distancing strategy of Plato’s method in the Symposium,
they, along with the constellation of fi gures who participate in the dis-
cussion of eros, contribute to the grounding strategy as well. As famil-
iar followers of Socrates, Apollodorus and Aristodemus do not speak as
strangers—they present themselves to us as liv ing beings each w ith a pe-
culiar history of his own. Thus, the Symposium is not simply narrated by
a disembodied voice, but by two dedicated students of Socrates himself.
As we have seen, this cannot but color our reception of the accounts they
present. All of the other characters who speak in the Symposium too come
with important political legacies that cannot be ignored, for they serve
to ground the content of the dialogue in a determinate political context.
Chief among these fi gures, of course, is Alcibiades, whose charm-
ing good looks and political acumen had brought him in 416—the dra-
matic date of the dialogue—to the height of his political infl uence.^16
Yet Plato situates the dialogue just one year before the greatest shame
of Alcibiades’ career: the destruction of the herms on the night before
Alcibiades commanded the ill-fated expedition to Sicily in 415. Indeed,
two other important speakers in the dialogue, Phaedrus and Eryxima-
chus, were accused of complicity in the destruction of the herms and
sent into exile. For their part, Agathon and Pausanias seem to have left
Athens to take up with the tyrant Archelaus of Macedonia.^17 As for the