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This chapter explores the relationship between Socrates and his predecessors, and gives a significant philosophical role to all the speeches of the dialogue. It argues that Socrates' speech is continuous with his predecessors, and completes and resolves some of the issues raised in the previous speeches. In this way, the previous speeches can be compared to Aristotelian endoxa. The contrast between Socrates and his predecessors also exemplifies the contrast between the two sorts of lovers described in the lower and higher mysteries of Socrates' speech. Reading the speeches in light of this contrast provides a further reason to think that the previous speeches are for the sake of our philosophical education, in much the same way as the lower mysteries were taught to Socrates for the sake of the higher. The philosophy of the Symposium, in other words, is extended throughout the dialogue and is not limited to Socrates'speech.

This chapter considers two novels written in the wake of Rousseau which, although they are not consciously answering him, subject the theme of pedagogical authority to an almost fatal irony. Moreover, both are highly self-conscious as fictions and their overt narrative manipulations stand in contrast to more naïve attempts by central characters within the text to exercise pedagogical authority. While Walter Shandy's misbegotten attempts to form his son are the mainspring of the action, Tristram Shandy is as much a realisation of the Tristra-paedia as a riposte to it. In Wieland, the failures of Hippias the Sophist to convert Agathon are darkly echoed in Plato's archetypal failure with Dionys, the young tyrant of Syracuse. In their chastening sense of pedagogical limitation both books celebrate a private sphere refuged from public history, a private sphere embodied in the book itself.

This chapter examines scenes from two of Aristophanes' plays, where the tragic poets Euripides (in the Acharnians) and Agathon (in the Thesmophoriazusae) are encountered in the midst of composing their tragedies. One of the aims of the chapter is to shed some light on Aristophanes' own compositional processes as a comic writer. It is organized as follows. Sections I and II explore the way in which the composition of tragedy and the modus operandi of the two tragic poets are represented by Aristophanes. Section III places this representation within the wider context of ancient beliefs about the process of poetic composition and then assesses the extent to which Aristophanes' views of this process were either derivative or innovative. Section IV offers some concluding remarks on what the discussion can teach us about the nature of Aristophanes' own compositional technique.

This chapter examines how writers and men of letters responded to the birth of the social sciences in France by considering reactions to the foundation of sociology at the turn of the twentieth century. Figures such as Agathon and Gustave Lanson wrestled with the question of how to defend literature as a knowledge project when faced with the ambitions of sociology and the social sciences. Whereas the former takes up the dispossession of the artist by the social scientist, the latter rails against the new sciences’ claims to rigor and rejection of rhetoric. These analyses point to a significant change in the function of literature in the modern era, namely that the humanistic scholar can no longer claim to have anything to teach the scientist in the name of the exercise of aesthetic judgment.

This chapter proposes that for some twenty years, Aristophanes and Euripides were engaging in a cross-generic dialogue about the appropriate use and effectiveness of dramatic costuming, which concerned the costume choices of dressing a royal in rags and dressing a male character in women’s clothes. It argues that Aristophanes’s Acharnians caricatured Euripides’s tendency to stage heroes in rags and that some years later, Euripides’s Helen reacted by depicting Menelaus as Aristophanes’s caricature of a Euripidean hero in rags. The chapter then suggests that the following year, Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria mocked Euripides by dressing him, his Kinsman, and his fellow tragedian Agathon in women’s clothes and that Euripides’s Bacchae responded by making Pentheus participate in the same kind of cross-dressing scene that Aristophanes used in Women at the Thesmophoria. The chapter analyzes these reappropriations as a type of literary rivalry aimed at achieving poetic supremacy.

This chapter presents paracomedy as a tool that can help establish a relative chronology between plays in cases where we can detect an allusive relationship between a tragedy and a comedy but we do not know which play was performed first. Using examples from Sophocles’s Chryses, Euripides’s Cyclops, Euripides’s Heracles, and Euripides’s Ion, it lays out different interpretations for the possible chronologies in an attempt to unpack their implications and to clarify their underlying scholarly assumptions. The chapter analyzes Euripides’s Antiope as a corrective response to Aristophanes’s Women at the Thesmophoria that reverses Aristophanes’s critique that intellectual musicians are useless by making Amphion an intellectual musician who is politically efficacious. The chapter also proposes a new way to interpret the metrical evidence for dating Antiope and suggests that Euripides may have used old-fashioned metrics as an archaizing throwback to support the musical and political goals of his play.

This chapter sketches a trajectory stretching from Simone de Beauvoir to Marguerite Duras, as mediated by Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium. These texts stand as tokens for the intricate set of movements through which gender, philosophy, and the erotic have pursued their minutely choreographed dance from the dawn of the philosophical tradition to the deconstruction of Western metaphysics. This introduction, after an initial excursus that sketches the basic problematic, looks at: Simone de Beauvoir, for whom antiquity yields a moment of sublime transcendence analogous to the concepts of woman and liberté ; Hélène Cixous, who coined the term écriture féminine; and Marguerite Duras, whose novels and films elaborate a uniquely feminine style that looks forward to the textual practices of Cixous and Irigaray.