Symposium — who's who

Plato's Socrates, in his early fifties at the time of the party. Arrives late because he has stopped on a neighbor's porch to think through a problem. He refuses to praise Eros directly and instead reports what the priestess Diotima of Mantinea taught him: that love is a longing, not a god, and that the longing leads up a ladder from particular bodies to the eternal Form of Beauty itself. He drinks all night without getting drunk and is the last one awake at dawn.

The most gifted Athenian of his generation — beautiful, brilliant, ruinously charismatic, and within the year a defector to Sparta. Bursts in after the six speeches are finished, propped up between a flute-girl and another reveler, garlanded with ivy and violets. Sees Socrates already on the couch and flinches. Then gives the seventh speech, in praise not of Eros but of Socrates — including a confession, in front of everyone, about the night he tried to seduce him and was gently refused.

The author of The Clouds, which had mocked Socrates a decade earlier and contributed to the public hostility that would later kill him. Arrives at the party with hiccups severe enough to require swapping his speaking slot with Eryximachus. Tells the myth of the split halves — the most quoted speech in the dialogue and the one Plato gives him precisely because it is the most beautifully wrong account on offer.

A young tragic poet celebrating the prize his first play has just won at the Lenaia. Beautiful, polished, generous host. Delivers the speech immediately before Socrates — full of balanced clauses and mythological flourishes, asserting that Eros is the youngest and most delicate of the gods. Socrates dismantles it in three questions. The contrast between Agathon's polish and Diotima's substance is the dialogue's central technique.

The young man whose enthusiasm for speeches gave the evening its shape. Eryximachus credits him with proposing the topic. He gives the first speech — Eros is the oldest god, the source of courage, the inspiration to die for one's beloved — earnest and slightly conventional, framing a topic the others will spend the rest of the night escalating beyond him.

A sophist and Agathon's long-standing partner. Gives the second speech, which splits Eros into two — Heavenly and Common — in a way that conveniently defends the kind of attachment he himself is in, and criticizes Athenian ambivalence about it. The speech reads partly as a theory of love and partly as an apologia for his own life.

A physician who steps in to the speaking order while Aristophanes recovers from his hiccups. Takes Pausanias's distinction between two Eroses and expands it into a cosmic principle — love as the harmony that governs medicine, music, astronomy, and even divination. Exactly the speech a doctor with too much theory would give.

A devoted follower of Socrates who relays the entire evening to a friend years later. He was not present at the party — he is recounting what Aristodemus told him. He calls himself, only half-jokingly, obsessed with Socrates and his conversations. The dialogue's first words are his.

A small, barefoot devotee of Socrates whom Socrates picks up on the road and brings along uninvited to Agathon's party. He is the primary eyewitness, the source from whom Apollodorus has the whole story. He falls asleep before dawn and so does not catch the very last conversation.

A priestess from Mantinea whom Socrates says taught him about Eros years before. She is not in the room. She is, in all of Plato, the only figure who teaches Socrates rather than being taught by him. In a dialogue full of Athenian men praising love, the deepest account belongs to a woman who is not there. The ladder of beauty is hers, not his.