Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

In a famous scene at the end of Plato's Symposium , after a high-minded philosophical discussion about the nature of love at a festive dinner-party had degenerated into a drunken free-for-all, only three of the guests were sober enough to continue the conversation: the philosopher Socrates, the tragic poet Agathon, and the comic poet Aristophanes. Socrates, it seems, had been trying to get the guests to agree that “the same man is capable of writing both a comedy and a tragedy; that the tragic poet could also be a comic poet.” But before the topic could be pursued at any length, Agathon and Aristophanes fell asleep, and Plato's narrator — a devotee of Socrates named Aristodemus who had been up all night drinking with the others — became too sleepy himself to remember any details. It is not entirely clear why Plato chose to end the Symposium with this little flourish, especially considering that the work as a whole has nothing explicitly to do with tragedy or comedy, but the issues he fleetingly alludes to here are highly suggestive, and point to a curious relationship between the two genres within the literary culture of fifth-century Athens which we will explore in this chapter. The first thing we may infer from Socrates’ discussion with Agathon and Aristophanes is that it was not common for poets of his time to venture outside of their chosen genre. Greek tragic poets may have ... log in or subscribe to read full text