The Portable Plato by Plato Read Free Book Online Page A

thread. Theseus and his fourteen companions stopped at Delos on their way back to Athens and danced the crane dance, which imitated the windings of the Labyrinth. It seems that Socrates in the dialogue represents Theseus, and there are fourteen companions present. The dialogue is a dialectical dance celebrating the slaying of a monster, the fear of death.
     
    The Persons of the Drama
    Echecrates. Name means “holding power.” He is the Pythagorean narrator of the dialogue. He is aware of the power of the “idea.”
    Cebes. Name possibly means “monkey.” A Theban, close friend of Simmias, and follower of Philolaus, the Pythagorean teacher. Interested in mathematics and physics.
    Simmias. Name means “snub-nosed,” a play on this well-known feature of Socrates. Also a follower of Philolaus, interested in the physiological doctrines of the Pythagorean schooL
    Crito. Name means “judge at a contest.” He was devoted sentimentally to justice with mercy.
    Apollodorus. Name means “gift of Apollo.” He eagerly accepted Socrates’ teaching as his sentimental education.
    Phaedo. Name means “shining.” He was later a founder of the Elean and the Eretrian schools of philosophy.
    Socrates. “Master of life.” His irony consists in his role as Job, being his own and his companions’ comforter.
    Others present are: Critobulus, son of Crito; Hermogenes; Epigenes; Aeschines, writer of dialogues; Antisthenes, the first Cynic; Ctessippus, a youngster; Menexenus, a young friend of Ctessippus; Phaedonides, a Theban; Euclides, founder of the Megarian school of philosophy; Terpsion, also a Megarian. These are the witnesses and the recipients of a last will and testament.

    SYMPOSIUM
    Probably the latest of the earlier dialogues, written about 389 B.C.
    The scene is laid in Agathon’s house to celebrate the prize for a tragedy that he has written and has had performed. It is on the eve of the great Athenian expedition to Syracuse.
    There are many allegorical readings of this dialogue, but the banquet itself is enough to provide the plot. Wine, dancing girls, and flute playing are put aside or postponed to give place to talk. Characteristically enough, the talk becomes the medium for fancy rhetoric, inspired and comic poetry, and some of the highest speculation in any literature. In a closely related dialogue about love, the Phaedrus, there is considerable discussion of the kinds of madness: poetry, demonic possession, speculation, and love. The Symposium might be read as the medical theory of madness, Greek psychiatry.
     
    The Persons of the Drama
    Phaedrus. Name means “bright, beaming with joy.” A pupil of Hippias and Lysias.
    Pausanias. Name means “allayer of sorrow.” A pupil of Prodicus.
    Eryximachus. Name means “savior in battle” or military physician. A medical man talking Sicilian medicine.
    Aristophanes. Name means “best appearance.” He may have invented the definition of a sophist as the man who makes the worse reason appear the better. He casts his own comic character as the cure for sophistry.
    Agathon. Name means “good.” A pupil of Gorgias and Prodicus.
     
    Diotima. Name means “honor to Zeus.” A soothsayer, perhaps an imitation of the Pythian Maiden at the Delphic Oracle. She and the old philosopher, Parmenides, in a dialogue named for him, are the only persons who turn the tables on Socrates and ask him questions.
    Alcibiades. Name means “strong defender of life.” Here he is the elected commander-in-chief of the Sicilian expedition, embodying all the riddles of the Hellenic man, including those of Odysseus and Socrates.
    Socrates. “Master of life.” He says in this dialogue that the only science he knows is the science of love.

    THE REPUBLIC
    or the Polity [which in Greek means the constitutional government of a city]
    Probably written immediately after Plato’s first Syracusan expedition.
    The scene is laid in the house of a rich merchant of foreign origin in the Piraeus, the port