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THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE TWO PLAYWRIGHTS: SOCRATES, AGATHON, AND ARISTOPHANES IN PLATO'S SYMPOSIUM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2008

Freddie Rokem
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Extract

This article reflects my current research, exploring the complex interactions between the discursive practices of theatre and performance on the one hand and philosophy on the other. Instead of beginning by trying to formulate the general principles for such an interaction, I examine actual encounters: direct face-to-face meetings and actual dialogues between philosophers and representatives of the Thespian professions. The earliest recorded encounter of this kind is in Plato's Symposium depicting the banquet in Agathon's house, celebrating his victory at the Lenaean theatre festival in 416 b.c., during which the celebrants spent the whole night eulogizing Eros. On this occasion Socrates and the two playwrights, Agathon and Aristophanes, interacted directly on several occasions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 49 , Issue 2 , November 2008 , pp. 239 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2008

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References

Endnotes

1. Benjamin, Walter, The origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. Osborne, John (London: Verso, London, 2003), 27Google Scholar.

2. The encounter among Socrates, Agathon, and Aristophanes serves as my point of departure for a more comprehensive study of a number of such meetings/dialogues that have been “documented” or left other forms of traces. So far I have published a study on one such meeting, between Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht during Benjamin's first visit to Brecht in Denmark in the summer of 1934, and in particular their discussion of Franz Kafka's short story “The Next Village,” analyzing in detail the implications of this discussion for Brecht's theatre: Rokem, Freddie, “Philosophy and Performance: Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht in Conversation about Franz Kafka,” Bertolt Brecht: Performance and Philosophy, eds. Kaynar, Gad and Ben-Zvi, Linda (Tel Aviv: Assaph Books, 2005), 1–22Google Scholar.

3. Plato, , Symposium, trans. Waterfield, Robin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. All references will be indicated in parenthesis after the quotation.

4. The ending of the dialogue has received ample critical attention by philologists, philosophers, as well literary scholars, drawing attention to its enigmatic, unresolved ironies. In this context I want to mention in particular Clay, Diskin, “The Tragic and Comic Poet of The Symposium,” Arion, n.s. 2 (1975): 238–61Google Scholar; Kahn, C., Plato and the Socratic Dialogue: The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Sheffield, Frisbee C. C., Plato's ‘Symposium’: The Ethics of Desire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. The views about poetry and drama presented by Socrates in The Republic are diametrically opposed to the arguments Socrates has supposedly used to convince the exhausted playwrights in the Symposium. In the Republic Socrates quotes himself (because he is also the narrator of this dialogue) as having said that, “It is unlikely therefore that anyone engaged on any worthwhile occupation will be able to give a variety of representations. For the same writers are incapable of equally good work even in two such closely allied forms of representation as comedy and tragedy. /…/ Nor can the same people be reciters and actors, or actors in tragedy and comedy. /…/ And human nature seems to be more finely subdivided than this, which makes it impossible to play many roles well, whether in real life or in representations of it on the stage” (89).

Pronouncements like this, and there are quite a few of them in the Republic, express a very outspoken animosity toward the theatre and in particular toward the art of acting. In book X of the Republic, when he is arguing that poetry should be banned from the ideal polis, Socrates reminds us again of “the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (351). However, at the same time, he continues, “let us freely admit that if drama and poetry written for pleasure can prove to us that they have a place in a well-run society, we will gladly admit them, for we know their fascination only too well ourselves” (351). Plato's ambivalence toward the arts can not be easily accommodated.

6. See, for example, Arieti, James, Interpreting Plato: The Dialogues as Drama (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991)Google Scholar; and Statkiewicz, Max, “Platonic Theater: Rigor and Play in the Republic,” MLN 115 (2000): 1019–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. My reading radically differs from Dover, K. J., “Aristophanes' Speech in Plato's Symposium,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 86 (1966): 41–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who claims “that Plato means us to regards the theme and framework of Aristophanes's story as characteristic not of comedy but of unsophisticated, subliterate folklore” (45).

8. Lévi-Strauss, Claude, “The Structural Study of Myth,” in Structural Anthropology (Chicago: Anchor, 1983), 206–31, at 212Google Scholar.

9. One source, Euripides, Phoenician Women, trans. Elizabeth Craik (Wiltshire: Aris & Phillips, 1988), 61, included the following poetic formulation:

Riddle:
There is on earth a creature with two legs, four legs and one voice:
three legs too. Alone it changes in form of creatures who exist
on earth, in air, on sea. But when it goes resting on more feet
then the strength of its limbs is weaker.
Answer:
Listen, like it or not, ill winged songstress of death
to my voice, which will end your folly.
You mean man, who crawling on the ground
at first is four footed, a babe from the womb
then in old age leans on a stick as third foot,
with a burden on back, bent double in old age.;

This is also the formulation quoted by Jebb in Sophocles, The Plays and Fragments, trans. and ed. Richard C. Jebb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 6, and Segal, Charles, Tragedy and Civilization (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1981), 214 and 454 n. 20Google Scholar. Cf. the formulation in Apollodorus, The Library, trans. James George Frazer (London: Heineman, 1967): “What is it that which has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?”; and in Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, trans. Charles Burton Gallick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 4: 569: “There walks on land a creature of two feet, of four feet, and of three; it has one voice, but sole among the animals that grow on land or in the sky or beneath the sea, it can change its nature; nay, when it walks propped on most feet, then is the speed in its limbs less than it has ever been before.” In my article “One Voice and Many Legs: Oedipus and the Riddle of the Sphinx,” in Untying the Knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes, eds. Galit Hasan-Rokem and David Shulman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 255–70, I also tried to speculate on the “wrong” answers to the riddle.

10. This is the translation given by Goodhart, S. in his article, “Leistas ephaska: Oedipus and Laius' Many Murderers,” Diacritics 8.2 (1978): 55–71, at 56CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Line 934 in Robert Fagles's translation reads: “One can't equal many.” Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, ed. Bernard Knox (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), 208, line 934. The translation given by Jebb is somewhat less pointed: “If then, he still speaks, as before, of several, I was not the slayer: a solitary man could not be held the same with that band” (844–5). In his notes, however, Jebb says that “one cannot be made to tally with (cannot be identified with) those many.” Sophocles, The Plays and Fragments, trans. Richard C. Jebb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914).

11. See Plato: Selected Myths, ed. Catalin Partenie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).