Plato’s Symposium: Summary and How to Read It

Plato's Symposium is about love, though perhaps not in the way its title suggests. The setting is a banquet, and almost everyone at the table praises love without explaining what it actually is. Only toward the end does Socrates reply, and his answer takes an unexpected turn: he delivers no grand oration, but instead asks questions, and then recounts what he learned from a woman. This summary follows the book in the order it unfolds, concluding with practical advice for anyone wishing to open the dialogue today.

The Scene: A Dinner Party in Athens, 416 BC

A tragic poet named Agathon has just won a tragedy competition in Athens. The year is 416 BC. He gathers his friends at home to celebrate, and the guest list includes figures readers will quickly recognize or come to know: a physician, the comic playwright Aristophanes, several young men, and, of course, Socrates.

Because everyone had drunk far too much the night before, they agree on a curious plan. On this evening, no one will overindulge. Instead, each guest will take turns offering a speech in praise of love. Take note, for the entire dialogue hinges on this premise: a succession of people saying what love is, and each of them missing the mark in his own way.

Speeches That Ascend, and "Miss the Mark"

The speeches do not appear in random order: they rise. One guest depicts love as an ancient god. Another separates noble love from vulgar love (introducing customs of ancient Athens that modern readers often find unsettling, which is why many stumble at the start). The physician claims that love is what harmonizes opposing elements in the human body and across nature.

Each guest praises, yet none defines what love truly is. That is why they "miss the mark": not from any lack of eloquence, which they have in abundance, but because they describe love's effects without answering the simplest question. If these initial speeches feel difficult, remember that they are steps. The book itself will correct them.

Midway through the night it is Aristophanes’ turn, and he tells the most famous tale in the Symposium: the first human beings were whole, with four arms and four legs, and Zeus cut them in half. Ever since, each half spends life searching for the other. It is a beautiful image of the feeling of incompleteness, and it has an article of its own here: Plato’s soulmate myth and Diotima’s response. Note, for now, that the teller of this myth is a comic poet, and that the host who follows him, Agathon, is the tragic poet.

Socrates: Love Is Lack

When it is Socrates' turn, he does what he always does. Instead of making a speech, he asks questions, and he asks them precisely of Agathon, who had just given the most beautiful speech of the evening. Is love directed toward something or nothing? Toward something, naturally. And does whoever loves that thing desire it, whether he has it or not? Agathon admits what seemed self-evident yet had gone unsaid: we desire what we do not have. Socrates closes the argument like this:

"Is it not then agreed that what he lacks and does not have is what he loves?" (Symposium, passage 200e)

The scale of this is easy to miss. If love desires the beautiful, it is because it does not yet possess it in full. Love is not the beautiful: it is the lack of the beautiful moving toward it. Even someone who already holds what they cherish continues to desire it, because what they lack is time, the certainty that it will not slip away. Getting, therefore, does not end desire. It is the question the book answers, and the article why getting what we want is not enough follows it.

Diotima: The Woman Who Instructs Socrates

Here Socrates does something rare: he says he learned all of this from a woman, a priestess from Mantinea named Diotima, and proceeds to recount the conversation he had with her in his youth. Diotima begins by dismantling the notion that love is a god, for gods lack nothing, and whoever lacks nothing does not desire. Nor is love an ordinary mortal: it is an intermediary, living midway between the divine and the human, between ignorance and knowledge.

She tells his origin as a myth. Love is the child of two parents: his mother is Penia, poverty, and his father is Poros, resource, the ingenuity of someone who always finds a way. From his mother he inherited lack; from his father, the hunter's nose, which never stops seeking. For this reason, as Diotima puts it, "what he manages to get always slips away from him, so that Love is neither impoverished nor enriched" (passage 203e). For Diotima, the philosopher is precisely this: someone who knows enough to realize what they lack.

From here emerges the central point of the book, which deserves slow reading. What we seek is not the piece that completes us: it is the good, and the good forever. Because we are mortal, we beget in beauty, and we leave behind something that outlasts us: children, works, poems, or virtues that teach. And the path takes the form of an ascent, from the beautiful body to the soul, to occupations and laws, to knowledge, until the Beautiful itself. This is Diotima's famous ladder of love, explained rung by rung in The ladder of love, and from it comes the idea that centuries later would be called platonic love, the subject of What Having a Platonic Love Means, According to Plato.

Alcibiades: The Ladder Enacted

No sooner does Socrates finish than a guest nobody expected walks into the house: Alcibiades, the most beautiful man in Athens and also the most ambitious. He arrives drunk, and instead of praising love, he praises Socrates. He compares his teacher to the satyr figurines sold in Athens, ugly on the outside but full of images of gods within. Then he confesses, in front of everyone, that he tried to seduce Socrates and was turned away.

The scene seems like an interruption, yet it is the exact opposite: it is Diotima's ladder enacted before the whole table. The most desired man in Athens is still on the first rung, and Socrates refuses to stop there. The book presents in action what Diotima articulated in theory.

How to Read the Symposium

A piece of reading advice: the Symposium is undoubtedly one of the easiest dialogues for anyone starting out with Plato. It can comfortably be read in one or two evenings. What tends to block readers are the first speeches, and one of them defends a custom that makes us uncomfortable. If you stall, remember that they are steps, and the book itself corrects them.

Two practical suggestions. First: if you need to, skip directly to Socrates' speech and then go back. Second: read slowly the part where he says he learned from Diotima, because that is where the book opens up. It is only a few pages, but in them Plato says the essential. If you prefer reading Plato thematically, the shortest path here runs through the Theory of Forms, where you see what endures and what passes, and recollection, where knowing is in a sense recognizing. In the Symposium, the novelty is the road to get there: in the first ascent it was reason that climbed, here it is desire.

The quotations are our own English rendering. The references 200e and 203e follow the traditional Stephanus pagination, used in every edition, so they let you find the passage in whichever one you have at hand.

Continue: What Having a Platonic Love Means, According to Plato · Plato's Soulmate Myth and Diotima's Response · The Ladder of Love: What Diotima Teaches Socrates · What is hasty generalization?
Source lecture: O Banquete, de Platão | O que é, de verdade, o amor platônico