Finally it is Socrates’ turn. He is as elusive, and his speech as strange and unexpected, as ever. He tells of a meeting long ago with a prophetess, Diotima, who taught him about love. Love is the desire for eternity implanted in a mortal being; we seek love, she said, in order through our offspring to overcome our mortality and leave something enduring behind us. Thus we can love our works as well as our children, Socrates is explaining, when suddenly the doors are thrown wide and into the banquet chamber bursts a company of half-drunken revelers who insist on joining the party—and who refuse to accept the rule of no hard drinking.
The leader of this ribald band is none other than Alcibiades, the greatest man of Athens (by now Pericles is dead), the hero who has been chosen to command the Athenian expedition against Syracuse that is to embark the next day. Alcibiades, brilliant, handsome, rich, and unpredictable, soon discovers what has been the order of the evening and demands to be heard, whether or not it is his turn. No one has ever denied Alcibiades, and he begins to speak.
His speech is one of the most moving ever made, and it produces a high drama in this dialogue. For Alcibiades discourses not of love itself but of Socrates his beloved friend, the man who above all, he says, has made him what he is but who also above all, Alcibiades admits, disapproves of what he is. For Socrates, says Alcibiades, is the most demanding of teachers and you can never satisfy him; he always wants more from you, indeed nothing less than all you can give.
Alcibiades tells stories about their life together, in the army and out, how Socrates once saved his life in battle, and how his own attempts to seduce Socrates into a life of pleasure and ease have utterly failed. Finally he describes Socrates in an unforgettable image. Socrates, says Alcibiades, is like those cheap little statues of Silenus, the god of drunkards, which are to be found in all the markets—little clay figurines that, when broken open, are found to enclose a sweet within. Socrates is just such a figure, says Alcibiades, with his short, squat body and his rolling gait, his simple courtesy, and most of all his homely manner of speech. But, says Alcibiades, when you break open those simple words and sentences and truly seek to understand them, “you find a delicious treasure at the center that is to be found in the words of no other person and which is, in short,” Alcibiades concludes, “the whole duty of a good and honorable man.” And, repeating that he will praise Socrates in this figure and drink to him, too, Alcibiades raises his glass and drinks deep. Thereafter he insists that all do likewise, whereupon the party disintegrates into a rout.
It ends hours later in another famous scene. Alcibiades is long gone, together with his companions; most of the other guests are sleeping, on or under the table; but Socrates, together with Agathon and Aristophanes and one or two others, are soberly discussing, as the first light of day shows in the windows, the nature of tragedy and of comedy. Socrates is defending the interesting proposition that “in the deepest sense they are the same.”
The banquet, or its consequences, did not end there, as Plato well knew. Alcibiades, on actually leaving this party, went on a drunken revel through the city. As a joke he, or some of his friends, or perhaps some of his enemies (in order falsely to accuse him later), defiled many of the little statues of household gods that stood outside of houses. This caused no comment at the time, and Alcibiades sailed for Syracuse in all the glory of Athenian might. Once he’d gone, however, Alcibiades' enemies became dominant in the government and accused him of impiously destroying the religious icons, and on failing to appear he was tried and convicted in absentia. No longer able to command the expedition, Alcibiades deserted to the enemy and gave over his command to Nicaeus, who shortly suffered the worst defeat in Athenian history. This led to the final defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. Socrates, harmed in reputation by his close association with the traitor Alcibiades, was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens—meaning Alcibiades?— and put to death.
Was all this in Plato’s mind when he wrote? Certainly. What then was he saying in the dialogue? Did he mean us to understand that when love is transferred from an ideal to a living person—from the idea of eternity to the man Socrates—it really does corrupt the lover? Did he mean that carelessness about solemn things, as exemplified in Alcibiades’ interruption of Socrates’ speech about love, was the real corruption of Athens and led to its fall? Or did he mean that despite these dire consequences life goes on much the same as ever, for the tragic and the comic are merely different versions of the same scene? It is interesting to speculate about these matters, but of course no final answers are possible. One thing, at least, is certain: Plato’s Symposium remains one of the great entertainments.
If the Passion of Jesus Christ is the greatest story ever told, The Trial and Death of Socrates, as described by Plato in four dialogues, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, is a close second. Socrates was an important early philosopher in his own right because he was Plato’s teacher (as Plato was the teacher of Aristotle), but his memory survives primarily because of his martyrdom. Not a few great men and women have become immortal by dying unjustly at the right time and place.
Let us set the scene. Socrates, an old man (he is about seventy), has been accused by two enemies of corrupting the youth of Athens. It is a trumped-up charge, but much anger and frustration lie behind it. Athens has finally lost the long-drawn-out Peloponnesian War and Sparta, the victor, has replaced Athens as the dominant political and economic force in Greece. The wealth and power of Athens are gone; there is not much to look forward to. Mean-spirited rulers have succeeded the great men like Pericles and Alcibiades who once led the city-state. The artistic force that had produced playwrights such as Aeschylus and Sophocles, painters and sculptors such as Phidias, and thinkers such as Socrates, seems to have played out. Business goes on but no longer with the imaginative brilliance that marked it before. From a growing, confident society, Athens has turned inward upon itself. Bitterness and nostalgic regret are the main emotions of the citizenry.
The trial itself—as was true at the time of all capital trials, for the accusers in this case are asking for the death penalty—takes place in the open, in the central place (or Agora) of Athens, before an audience of hundreds. All present male citizens of the city are jurors who will vote to decide the issue. The entire trial will occupy no more than one day.
The accusers speak first. Their charges are false, hollow. Socrates replies. His magnificent defense is, more than anything else, an explanation and justification of his entire mature life during which he has persisted, as he says, in being a kind of “gadfly” to the Athenians—an insect whose sting has driven the “animal of the state” onward to greatness.
He has been a teacher to the Athenians, he reminds them, and teachers, especially when critical of their pupils, are not always loved. Socrates knows this well. But he will not step out of character and cease to be the severe though caring teacher he has always been. He will not beg for forgiveness; he will not even beg for his life. When the verdict goes against him—by a vote that Socrates declares to be closer than he expected—the question becomes one of punishment.His accusers propose death; Socrates himself proposes a monetary fine, which his friends, he concedes, will have to help him pay. Again the decision goes against him. Death it shall be.