Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/325

THE SYMPOSiyM 301 the Symposium was absolutely the highest work of prose fiction ever composed, most perfect in power, beauty, imaginative truth, it would be hard to deny it ; nor is it easy to controvert the metaphysician who holds it to be the deepest word yet spoken upon the nature of Love ; but in it, as in almost all Plato, there is no enjoyment for him who has not to some extent learnt ' Hellenisch zu empfinden.' We will only notice one point in its composition ; it is the last echo of 399. The spirit of the Charmides has come back, in a stronger form ; we reach all the splendour of the Symposium only by crossing the gulf of many deaths, by ignoring so- called facts, by seeing through eyes to which the things of the world have strange proportions. Of the characters, some are as little known to us as Callicles was ; of the rest, Agathon, the triumphant poet, the idol of Athens, who gives the banquet in honour of his first tragic vic- tory, has died long since, disappointed and a semi-exile, in Macedon ; Phajdrus has turned false to philosophy — * lost,' as Plato says in another place ; Socrates has been executed as a criminal ; Alcibiades shot to death by barbarian assassins. Aristophanes had been, in Plato's belief, one of the deadliest of Socrates's accusers. It is a tribute to that Periclean Athens which Plato loves to blacken, that he always goes back to it to find his ideal meetings and memories. The Symposium seems like one of those ^^ glimpses of the outside of the sky " in the Phcedrus, which the soul catches before its bodily birth, and which it is always dimly struggling to recover. We get back to it through that Apollodorus whose sobs broke the argument of the Phcedo ; he is nicknamed 'the Madman' now, a solitary man, savage against all the world except Socrates. It is he who tells Glaucon, 21