Daemonic Eros

Abstract

In fifth-century Athens, a symposium—a “συµ-πóσιoν” or “drinking together”—was not the sedate affair it is today with professors sitting around a table discussing matters of scholarly interest. It was a festive even rowdy gathering not unlike a present-day fraternity party. Music played to spur on the drinking. Depending on the taste of the guests, handsome adolescent boys or female prostitutes and courtesans were brought in for entertainment. Poetry readings, speeches, and jokes went on long into the night. On the night in question festivities were somewhat subdued. Agathon was host and center of attention due to his win at the festival of Dionysius the night before, but both he and his guests were under the weather from a previous night’s celebration. This was to be a smaller gathering of old friends and lovers. Pausanias, Agathon’s long-time lover, was there. Eryximachus, a medical doctor, came with his young companion Phaedrus. Aristophanes, the comic playwright, attended, forgiven it would seem for his lampoon of Socrates and his followers in the Clouds. Socrates brought Aristodemos in from the street. Short, barefoot, and ill-bred, he was one of Socrates’s “principle lovers at the time” according to Apollodorus, although what that meant in the case of Socrates was never quite clear. Another of Socrates’s admirers, the rash young general Alcibiades, came at the end of the evening, stumbling drunk. All the men were in their thirties except for Socrates, who at fifty-some was by far the oldest.

Daemonic spirits are multiple and take many forms, and one of them is Eros.

—Symposium 202e7–203a9