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Jiyoung Song, Diotima on Love (Plato, "Symposium")
- Jiyoung's Greek-English Alignments: Nehamas and Woodruff translation
- Jiyoung's Greek-English Alignments: Jiyoung's translation
- Jiyoung's Greek and Latin Alignments: Hirschig translation
- Brian's Greek-English Alignments: Nehamas and Woodruff translation
- Sadie's Greek-English Alignments: Nehamas and Woodruff translation
Much of the scholarship on Plato’s Symposium has focused on the elusive character of Diotima and her famous speech, which is told in a series of questions and answers similar to the method of Socrates (Steadman). Though many interpretations of the philosophical content of her speech exist, I have summarized a handful of some of them, to give the reader a (though limited) overview of the current scholarship on Diotima’s speech. Diotima describes the ascent of a man from beholding beautiful bodies to beautiful customs to beautiful knowledge until he reaches the sight of absolute Beauty itself. Donald Levy views this progression as symbolizing a hierarchy, where the worth of the successive love object is inherently more valuable than the one preceding it, and therefore the ascent is a search for better things to love (285).
C. D. C. Reeve has a slightly different view. He states, “Her story is not about a lover who abandons the individual boys he loves, but about someone who comes to love boys correctly by coming to love something else as well” (xxxi). He calls the lover a philosopher, or more specifically, Socrates himself, who is essentially learning Plato’s theory of the Forms from Diotima (xxix). F. C. White also interprets the true lover as Socrates because of the philosopher’s goal of “furthering the moral goodness, the virtue, of others” (376). Diotima emphasizes that the one who beholds Beauty begets true virtue and could become immortal, and White claims that philosophical works and dialogues are the enduring works of virtue of a true lover (375-6).
In contrast, Suzanne Obdrzalek takes a view that focuses not on the virtues and potential immortality of the lover, but on perfect and immortal Beauty itself, which Diotima exhorts Socrates to do as well. Obdrzalek calls this “our becoming absorbed in Beauty,” the result of which is that “not only do we become directed towards something which has value, but in this process, we become directed away from ourselves” and our shortcomings (433). Beholding Beauty liberates us from our mortal concerns because we are “caught up in the perfection of the Form” (435). I hope that these different interpretations of Diotima’s speech in the Symposium are useful for engaging with the text in a critical way, but the true appeal of this passage on Love and Beauty is in its universal applicability to us all, and our individual interpretations make it meaningful to us.
For the purposes of closely reading this passage in Greek, I have included treebanks of the Greek text and treebanks of the Latin translation of the Greek text (Hirschig, 1891). Each word is labelled with its morphology and syntactic function, and the treebanks are particularly useful for distinguishing secondary clauses from the main clause, for some of Diotima’s sentences are long and complex. The value of reading the text in Latin lies in being able to compare grammatical structures, for while Greek and Latin grammar are similar, they are not identical, and some idiomatic phrases in Greek are more straightforwardly rendered in Latin. Also, Latin has endured as a more universal language than ancient Greek, which may be the reason why Hirschig published a two-volume Latin translation of the works of Plato, and readers may be more familiar with the vocabulary and grammar of Latin, and hence more comfortable reading a Latin version of Plato’s Symposium.
I have also included three text alignments: alignment of the Greek text and an existing English translation (Nehamas and Woodruff, 2006), alignment of the Greek text and my own literal English translation, and an alignment of the Greek text and the Latin translation. When making these alignments, I chose to strictly align words that match with respect to not only meaning, but also grammatical function. As a result, the reader will be able to quickly recognize clauses among the translations where the grammatical structures differ yet deliver a similar message. The exception are the verbs: I match subjunctive Greek verbs with indicative English verbs of the same meaning, and Greek participles with English verbs. The treebanks make up for this limitation by displaying each verb’s mood and function.
The treebanks of my collaborators (Brian and Sadie) and my own vary widely, which is unsurprising because of the highly complex and vague language of Diotima’s speech. Sadie suggested to add ‘ἔφη’ to all the sentences where Socrates is directly quoting Diotima. After attempting to, I had trouble reconciling the need to label the predicative use of the subjunctive (PRED-OPT) as a simple nominal direct statement (NOM-DIRSTAT), so I added the ‘ἔφη’ in ellipses but left it unconnected to the tree (see sentence three). Brian gave me suggestions on how to treebank repeated ideas without needing to explicitly add ellipses (see sentence four). When Diotima says “this is that for which all the toils beforehand existed,” I had interpreted the ‘this’ as referring to the act of seeing Beauty, but Brian interpreted it as referring to Beauty itself (see sentence one). I realized that Brian was correct because the following participles all agree with Beauty, not the act of seeing Beauty. The alignments were all generally similar.
- Levy, Donald. "The Definition of Love in Plato's Symposium." Journal of the History of Ideas 40, no. 2 (1979): 285-91.
- Plato, Plato on Love. Edited by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2006.
- Plato, Plato’s Symposium: Greek Text with Facing Vocabulary and Commentary. Commentary by Geoffrey D. Steadman. Published by Geoffrey D. Steadman, 2009.
- Plato, Platonis Opera. Edited by R. B. Hirschig. Paris: Firmin-Didot et Sociis, 1891.
- Obdrzalek, Suzanne. "Moral Transformation and the Love of Beauty in Plato’s Symposium." Journal of the History of Philosophy 48, no. 4 (2010): 415-44.
- White, F. C. "Virtue in Plato's Symposium" The Classical Quarterly 54, no. 2 (2004): 366-78.