49 pages • 1 hour read
PlatoSymposium
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 380A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Sileni Sculptures
During his speech, Alcibiades compares Socrates to “those Sileni you find sitting in sculptors’ shops, the ones they make holding wind-pipes or reed-pipes, which when opened up are found to contain effigies of gods inside” as well as to the satyr Marsyas (59). Sileni are elder satyrs—creatures that are half man, half beast—and have a dual nature, being associated with brutality and ugliness but also with the god Dionysus: They are often depicted as leading initiates of Dionysus with their reed pipes.
Satyrs and Sileni symbolize the dual nature of Socrates. He is traditionally portrayed as physically unattractive but preoccupied with the search for truth and beauty. His unflinching quest can make him seem brutal, as Alcibiades accuses him of being, but Socrates also functions as a priest of the mystery rite of philosophy. Like the Sileni sculptures, Socrates’s exterior hides a divine essence inside of him that is revealed in philosophical dialogue, his “reed pipes” that lead initiates deeper into the quest for essence of wisdom and goodness.
Sirens
In his encomium for Socrates, Alcibiades states that Socrates makes him realize that, rather than immersing himself in Athenian politics, he should be trying to improve himself. As a result, he covers his ears and runs away, “as if I were escaping the Sirens” (61). Sirens are portrayed as figures of dual nature: half bird and half woman. In Homer’s Odyssey, their beautiful song lures sailors to their deaths, but Odysseus insists on hearing it. Plugging their ears, his crewmen tie him to the mast so that he can hear the song, which promises to “initiate” Odysseus into the sum of all knowledge. This knowledge cannot be known by any mortal, thus, Odysseus and the others before him would have to die before they could possess such knowledge.
As a result of mystery rituals being closely guarded secrets in antiquity, few specifics about them are known, but it is believed that a ritual death takes place through which the initiate ascends to a new plane of existence. The Sirens represent the ritual death and ascension that Alcibiades cannot make, as he remains embroiled in the material concerns of Athenian politics and its temptations of earthly pleasures.
Mystery Cults
Historian Kiki Karoglu describes the mystery cult:
A pendant to the official cults of the Greeks and Romans, mystery cults served more personal, individualistic attitudes toward death and the afterlife. Most were based on sacred stories (hieroi logoi) that often involved the ritual reenactment of a death-rebirth myth of a particular divinity (Department of Greek and Roman Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oct 2013).
Information on mystery cults is scarce, particularly information on initiation rituals since the mysteries were, as intended, closely guarded secrets. Despite this, it is possible to track, throughout Diotima’s dialogue with Socrates, language and concepts associated with mystery cults and how the cults symbolize the practice of philosophy.
Diotima repeatedly instructs Socrates to be attentive, as one might during an unveiling process. The final step of initiation is described in terms of ascent (“Diotima’s Ladder”). Not only Socrates’s speech but also Aristophanes’s and Alcibiades’s incorporate elements that evoke cult worship. Aristophanes describes human nature as a state of loss: Humans have lost their other halves and are in a perpetual search to recover it. Alcibiades describes himself as unable to see through the initiation process; he runs away from Socrates even as he knows that he should be following him. Socrates himself is the figure transformed by his initiation, becoming fused both with philosophy and Love. Mystery cults promised their participants a better afterlife based on their access to arcane knowledge and ritual: Philosophy promises its initiates a better life (or the opportunity to improve their lives) through knowledge that can only be gained by participating in ritualized dialogue, as presented in the Symposium.
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