AGATHON AS SOCRATIC CONDUIT

It is a familiar pattern in Plato's definitional dialogues that the individual definitions are proposed and examined in an ascending order of quality, seeming for that reason to move towards the correct, Socratic definition. Whatever gulf may remain between the last non-Socratic definition in the sequence and the usually elusive one that Socrates himself would approve, the progression offers an optimistic perspective on the value of dialectic.

In Plato's Symposium, the series of speeches about Love that culminate in Socrates' own seem to me to be contrived by the author to run in a similarly ascending order. This is not the occasion to argue such a claim systematically with regard to all the early speeches, but I shall later take the opportunity to support it with examples. And in more direct support, it is worth pointing out that in Socrates' climactic speech it is only the two immediately preceding speeches whose content is picked out for critical discussion in the light of insights supplied by his erotic counsellor Diotima. Although Socrates deplores all the preceding speakers for not caring sufficiently about truth (198d3–e4), he does not go so far as to accuse any of their speeches of being altogether devoid of it, and it seems clear enough that the final two, those of Aristophanes and Agathon, from his point of view do have the merit either of being nearer to the truth, or at any rate of discerning and addressing some of the right issues.