¹ See LSJ s.v. For discussion of such adjectives see Barrett, W. S., Euripides: Hippolytos (Oxford, 1966 ²),ad 677–9.Google Scholar

² Bury, R. G., The Symposium of Plato (Cambridge, 1932), p. 127.Google Scholar

³ Robin, L., Platon: Œuvres Complètes, vol. 4 (Paris, 1929).Google Scholar

⁴ Groden, S. Q., The Symposium of Plato (Amherst, 1970); Nehamas, A. and Woodruff, R., Plato: Symposium (Indianapolis, 1989)Google Scholar; and Cobb, W. S., The Symposium and the Phaedrus: Plato's Erotic Dialogues (Albany, 1993). figures in a description of the abundance spontaneously generated by the earth during the Golden Age at Hes. Op. 118; cf. Aesch. fr. 196.5 Radt. Perhaps with these associations in mindGoogle Scholar, Joyce, M. (Plato's Symposium [London, 1935]) translates: ‘turning his eyes towards the open sea of beauty, [the lover] will find in such contemplation the seed of the most fruitful discourse and the loftiest thought, and reap a golden harvest of philosophy’.Google Scholar

⁵ Dover, K., Plato: Symposium (Cambridge, 1980), ad loc.Google Scholar

⁶ See, e.g., Pit. 272bl, Phlb. 40a 10, Leg. 677e 8, 736d 5, and 761c 2.

⁷ Dover's ‘ungrudging’ goes some way in this direction by implicitly linking the adjective to the verb (‘The relation between Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus’, in Moravcsik, J. M. E. (ed.), Patterns in Plato's Thought [Dordrecht, 1973], p. 59).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁸ See Walcot, P., Envy and the Greeks: A Study of Human Behaviour (Warminster, 1978), pp. 3–6 and passim. We prefer the translation ‘jealousy’ to Walcot's ‘envy’ because our concern here is primarily with attempts to retain what one has rather than to acquire what is not currently one's own.Google Scholar

⁹ On this point see Wackernagel, J., Vorlesungen über Syntax, vol. 2 (Basel, 1924), p. 293: ‘der privative Ausdruck… wird da angewandt, wo man das Fehlen von etwas Normalem oder Üblichem festzustellen hat, oder wo eine Erwartung getäuscht wird’.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Nussbaum, M. C. (The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy [Cambridge, 1986], p. 197) takes note of Alcibiades' use of the vocabulary of slavery, but does not connect it to the earlier passage; indeed, she translates at 210dl not as ‘slave’ but as ‘servant’ (p. 180).Google Scholar

¹¹ For other such uses of , with the meaning ‘giving birth’, appears in this context at 206b7, c6, and e5.

¹² On Plato's list of entities to which one who has made the Symposium's ascent will no longer be attached are not only beautiful boys, but also gold (21 Id). This stipulation is interesting in light of Rep. 5's provision for the abolition of private property in the case, at any rate, of rulers and auxiliaries. For the relation between the Symposium and Republic, see section IV.

¹³ For the notion of ‘pederasty combined with philosophy’, cf. Phdr. 249a2. For pederasty as an Athenian institution, see Halperin, D. M., ‘Why is Diotima a woman? Platonic Erôs and the figuration of gender’, in Halperin et al. (edd.), Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton, 1990), pp. 258–259.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Bacon, H. H., ‘Socrates crowned’, Virginia Quarterly Review 35 (1959), 415–30, at p. 428.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Nussbaum (n. 10), pp. 167 and 171.

¹⁶ For Plato, structural and dramatic considerations take precedence over verisimilitude. Alcibiades takes up themes from Diotima's speech even though he was not present to hear it; with equal implausibility, Diotima alludes (205d 10) to the speech of Aristophanes.

¹⁷ On see Fantham, E., ‘ : a brief excursion into sex, violence, and literary history’, Phoenix 40 (1986), 45–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁸ The parallels between the two passages are also underscored by Plato's attention in 210c-d and 213d to the activities of looking and speaking

¹⁹ Of course, the earlier speeches of Phaedrus, Pausanias, and Aristophanes also contribute to this contrast, since they emphasize in various ways the nature and intensity of lovers' attachments to the individual objects of their affection.

²⁰ The recurrence of this term is noted by Harder, C., Platons Ausgewählte Dialoge (Berlin, 1915), p. 165. Cf. Nussbaum (n. 10), pp. 182,184,192, and 198.Google Scholar

²¹ To Nehamas and Woodruff ([n. 4], p. xxii), the instance at 212c6 suggests that Plato is ‘marking explicitly a reversal in the atmosphere which Diotima had created by her own reversal of the mood that had prevailed earlier when she introduced the Form of Beauty, which also … comes “all of a sudden” into view (210e)’.

²² For comparative discussion of the two speeches, see Ferrari, G. R. F., Listening to the Cicadas: A Study of Plato's Phaedrus (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 95–102Google Scholar

²³ There is clearly a change of perspective at 239a-b, although critics disagree about how radical it is. According to de Vries, G. J. (A Commentary on the Phaedrus of Plato [Amsterdam, 1969], p. 91), ‘the Platonic overtones … are not entirely absent’,Google Scholar while Rowe, C. J. (Plato: Phaedrus [Warminster, 1986], p. 159) believes that Plato refers here more directly to ‘philosophy in the narrow sense’. On the interpretation of Ferrari ([n. 22], p. 101), ‘it is no accident that in this speech we hear for the first time of the ideal of “divine philosophy” … since by positing a struggle in the soul the non-lover has at least made an opening for a philosophically mature approach to the ethical issues raised by his suit, and a genuine advance on the thesis of Lysias' persona’. All of these commentators acknowledge the presence of at least an allusion to philosophy in the technical sense, which is what concerns us here.Google Scholar

²⁴ Regarding the lover's jealousy, cf. 240a5

²⁵ For additional relevant passages involving jealousy, see Rep. 580a3, Leg. 679cl, 731a3, 5, 863e7, and 934a5

²⁶ For example, Plato does not merely require that children born to guardians be taken over by officials chosen for this task (460b7–8) since this arrangement is compatible, at least in principle, with parents' still having some relationship with progeny they know to be their own. Plato insists that this recognition itself must not take place, prescribing that ‘no parent will know his own offspring, nor will any child know its parent’ (457d2–3). He adds that when nursing mothers are brought to the creche in which their infants have been placed, the presiding officials ‘will go to great lengths to ensure that they do not learn who their children are’ (460c9–dl). For further discussion of Rep. 5's handling of kinship relations, see Levin, S. B., ‘Greek conceptions of naming: three forms of appropriateness in Plato and the literary tradition’, Classical Philology 92 (1997), 52–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁷ In particular, a full treatment of is only possible in light of the articulation of soul, and specifically of , presented in Rep. 4–7.

²⁸ Moravcsik J. M. E., ‘Reason and Eros in the “ascent”-passage of the Symposium’, in Anton, J. R and Kustas, G. L. (edd.), Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy (Albany, 1971), p. 293 Google Scholar

²⁹ Ibid., p. 293

³⁰ Vlastos, G., ‘The individual as an object of love in Plato’, in Platonic Studies (Princeton, 1982 ²), p. 31.Google Scholar