Symposium (World's Classics) - Softcover

Plato

4.08

71,638 ratings by Goodreads

9780192829085: Symposium (World's Classics)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0192829084 ISBN 13: 9780192829085

Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks, 1994

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In this text, Plato imagines a high-society dinner-party in Athens in 416 BC at which the guests, including the poet Aristophanes and Plato's mentor, Socrates, each deliver a short speech in praise of love. The sequence of short speeches ends with Socrates' account of the views of Diotima, a propetess who taught him that love is man's means of trying to attain goodness. And then into the party bursts the drunken Alcibiades, the most popular and notorious Athenian of the time, who insists on praising Socrates himself rather than love, and gives a sketch of Socrates' own enigmatic character. Robin Waterfield is the translator of Plato's "Philebus", "Theaetus", "Early Socratic Dialogues" and "The Republic", as well as Plutarch's "Essays".

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Review:

'This commentary ... does three things superbly. It explains Plato's Greek punctiliously, especially the less familiar constructions, particles, and words that are often loosely or wrongly translated. With a razor's sharpness it cuts through sloppy or faulty logic in Plato's Greek. And it provides the necessary background material, whether historical, literary, sexual, or social.' Greece & Rome

' ... few books can have given in three pages so informative and at the same time so provocative an account of Plato's philosophy.' The Times Educational Supplement

'This is a tight-packed, authoritative, but readable edition.' J.A.C.T. Bulletin

Book Description:

Plato's Symposium is the most literary of all his works and one which all students of classics are likely to want to read. Sir Kenneth Dover provides here a sympathetic and modern edition of the kind that is long overdue.

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