Plato's Symposium by Richard Hunter;

Author:Richard Hunter; [Hunter;, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0195160797
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2004-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

In view, however, of Plato’s persistent association of Gorgias with a persuasive rhetoric which pays no regard to truth, Socrates’ charged comparison of Agathon to Gorgias looks to the (lack of) substance of what was said, as well as to the style in which it was expressed.

Of the real Agathon’s tragedies only the scantiest fragments survive; a high proportion of these is indeed marked by verbal wit (including rhyme and assonance) and smartness, but the body of evidence is extremely small.42 Of greater interest for present purposes is the fact that Agathon appears as a character already in the Women at the Thesmophoria of Aristophanes (411 BC). In this play Euripides asks his fellow tragedian to infiltrate an all-female gathering to speak on his behalf; Agathon would be able to do this because he is “fair-faced, white, shaven, of feminine voice, soft, and lovely to behold” (Thesm. 191–92). We recognize here a comic version of the same characteristics which are highlighted in the Symposium.So too, in the Women at the Thesmophoria both the comic Agathon and his servant are characterized by a self-consciousness about tragic art, which is revealed in a series of craft metaphors applied to poetic composition (Thesm. 52–57, 67–69; cf. Plato, Phaedrus 234e) and in a rather confused set of principles about the relationship between a poet and his productions which the comic Agathon enunciates:

I wear my clothes along with my mentality. A man who is a poet must adopt habits that match the plays he’s committed to composing. For example, if one is writing plays about women, one’s body must participate in their habits. . . . If you’re writing about men, your body has what it takes already; but when it’s a question of something we don’t possess, then it must be captured by imitation. (Aristophanes, Women at the Thesmophoria 148–56; trans. Sommerstein)

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