UDC 1 Plato

875.09-83 Plato

Victor Castellani

PLATO'S PHAEDO AND SYMPOSIUM

AS COMPLEMENTS

APSTRAKT: Dva dijaloga iz Platonovog sredweg perioda", Fedon i Goz-

ba, posmatraju se kao komplementarni tekstovi u kojima se izlae nada u be-
smrtnost. U Fedonu se vie obrauje Apolon, a u Gozbi Dionis.
KQUNE REI: Platon, Fedon, Gozba, besmrtnost due, Apolon, Dio-
nis.

The literary excellence of both the Phaedo and the Symposium has
been admired since antiquity; consequently several of the features treated
here have long since been noted and discussed.1 The striking complemen-
tary relationship between these two dialogues has not, however, been ap-
preciated. In fact, instead of trying to determine which of the pair came
first, we might better try to place both among Plato's "middle" dialogues,
for they present of a comprehensive metaphysical philosophy by means of
alternative understandings, developed from Greek religious thought, of
how and when the human spirit may attain union with the divine. Phaedo,
with numerous references to Apollo and Apollonian themes, and Symposi-
um, teeming with Dionysus and dionysiaca, are so thoroughly and ingenio-
usly matched that their author can only have composed the one as he did
to complement, indeed to complete, the statement of the other. In fact, spe-
culations in these two works about the nature of a potentially godlike
"soul" and its proper activity, though they differ in focus, offer great hope
for the philosopher who aspires to happiness both now, in this finite life,
and forever, only when they are combined. It is quite reasonable to hypo-

1 The scholar C. J. Rowe has recently written excellent commentaries on both, Plato:
Phaedo (Cambridge University Press 1993) and Plato: Symposium (Warminster: Aris & Phil-
lips, 1998). Extensive bibliography may be found therein. This study antedates both, however,
deriving from a paper I gave at the spring meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlan-
tic States in April 1987 in Madison, New Jersey.

27
thesize, therefore, that their author designed the two from the very first as
a complementary pair.
In sheer length and in format these two dialogues are comparable.
Once printed, Phaedo was longer, by about nine Stephanus-pages. On the
other hand, the more numerous short questions-and-answers in Phaedo as
against the denser nature of much of Symposium make them much closer
in bulk.
But never mind bulk. Whereas most of the dialogues attributed to
Plato are direct, that is, they display dramatic form with two or more alter-
nating speakers, these two are indirect. Phaedo and Symposium thus both
belong to a minority among the Socratic conversations that Plato repre-
sents.2 These and the probably much later Parmenides are, in fact, the only
indirect ones that Socrates himself does not report.3 The events and words
of Socrates' day of execution are recounted in Phaedo by the young
eye-witness who gives the work its title (and ali is therefore given to us,
the readers, "second hand"). In contrast, Socrates' disciple Apollodorus re-
lates the events and speeches of the Symposium in a unique "third hand"
fashion, inasmuch as he himself received the account from one of the ac-
tual symposiasts, Aristodemus.4 Both dialogues are reported, moreover, to
individual hearers who, just like Plato's readers, are remote from the
events in geography or in time. Phaedo describes Socrates' last day to
Echecrates of Phlius some time afterward (57a-b), while Apollodorus, who
on the previous day told the story of Agathon's banquet to another person
Glaucon (who had not understood that the affair had taken place ten years
or more ago), rehearses it now to unnamed companions who may be
equally unaware of its date and circumstances.
These two dramatic gems are interrelated by several other features
that deserve our attention and consideration.
In both instances the reported events are set, unusually for Plato's di-
alogues, indoors, or at least (for the Phaedo) neither on a street or in the
agora, nor on a road to somewhere or otherwise out in the countryside.
The time of day in which the two stories are set, however, is completely
opposite: Phaedo recounts the events and conversation of an entire day,
from very early in the morning (10e) until the setting sun touched only the
mountain tops (116e). Symposium, on the other hand, describes an entire
night, from the late afternoon-or-early-evening hour before Agathon's ban-

2 Approximately twenty eight dialogues are universally or at least often regarded as

Plato's. Besides the two under discussion here and Republic (which seems likely to have been
written at about the same stage of the philosopher's career as these), the early Charmides,
Lysis, and Protagoras are also indirect, and the late Parmenides. The Euthydemus, also indi-
rect, is hard to date. (Although Theatetus has a unique extraneous preamble, it introduces a
direct dialogue.)
3 He could hardly narrate his own death, of course! However, when Apollodorus tells
his hearers about the memorable symposium of 416 BCE, Socrates is clearly still alive. In
fact, Apollodorus has checked parts of Aristodemus' account with Socrates himself (173b).
4 Indeed this person Apollodorus connects the two dialogues, for he was also perso-
nally present at the death of Socrates. He is mentioned early (59a-b) and late: his uncontrolla-
ble weeping is mentioned near the end (117d).

28
quet (174a-e) all through the evening, all through the long winter night, tili
dawn of the following morning (223c-e).5
Perhaps most important of all, each of these two dialogues is set at
the end of an Athenian festival in honor of the god who dominates it and
its message: Phaedo at the end of the voyage of the sacred ship to Delos
that marks the Athenians' annual period of thanksgiving to Apollo (10a-c;
cf. 61a), Symposium on (probably) the final day of the Lenean Dionysia
(173a and 175e). That each of these pieces "belongs" to a particular son of
Zeus is an essential feature for us to remark.
Phoebus Apollo, the Bright One, who in the 5th and 4th centuries was
ever more closely identified with Helius, the Sun, pervades Phaedo, him-
self and his associates.6 Like the Sun, Socrates is a worker by day, especi-
ally during the sacred season just ending (59d), and completes his mission
to the human race before night falls (Asclepius, Apollo's son who, like the
philosophical soul, survived death is named in Socrates' famous last words
at the end (118a); but so is Theseus mentioned at the beginning, Apollo's
proteg in Attic and Ionic myth and ritual. Furthermore, the Orphic-Pytha-
gorean tone of this dialogue (especially at 62b and 70c) tends toward the
Apollonian aspects of the doctrine ascribed to another the god's sons,
Orpheus. One major component of Orphic teaching emphasized the purity
or purification of the god-like soul, and was thus fundamentally other-
-worldly. "The body is a prison." The most memorable of non-speaking
characters on the scene is, in fact, the aforementioned Apollodorus, whom
the narrator Phaedo singles out for his extreme emotional reaction to the
prospect of the sage's death. Also contributing to a pervasive Apollonia-
nism are [1] swans who sing joyfully at their death, whom Socrates
explicitly declares to be servants, like himself, not of Aphrodite as they so-
metimes are, but of Apollo (84e85b); [2] the discussion of lyre and har-
mony at the center of the work (85e86c and 92a95a); and [3] the
"Hymn to Apollo" about which Cebes asks Socrates in the poet Evenus'
behalf (60d).7 Socrates is supposed to have been composing such a hymn
(61a-b); and from some such hymn Diogenes Laertius quotes what pur-
ports to be the first line (Vit. Phil. II, 42) taken in, we may believe, by
a literary hoax, for we should rather understand that the eschatological
conversation on his death-day is both the philosopher's "swan-song" and
his Apollonian "music" as "priest of the same god" as those swans (85b).

5 Aristodemus'/Apollodorus' statement that Socrates spent the following day "as usual"
after a bath at the Lyceum and spent the next day as usual indicates how life goes on, after
someone who has had the Dionysian ecstasy, under the rule of Apollo Lykeios, the patron
of that place.
6 Note Socrates' analogy of philosophical inquiry to observation of the sun during an
eclipse at 99d-e.
7 We may note also that for an example of how an object can remind us of a person
Socrates uses "lyre" and "beloved boy" (73b). In ancient Greek iconography, of course, a lyre
immediately reminds the viewer of Apollo. The most Apollonian of the speakers in Symposi-
um, the physician Eryximachus, compares the balance that medical love strikes with harmony
in music, achieved, as Heraclitus (whom he quotes) said, in the tension of a bow- or
lyre-string. Both bow and lyre, of course, belong to Apollo.

29
 Throughout the Symposium, in contrast, the presiding, pervading deity
is not the God of Love, though Eros and his mother (or two Erote and the-
ir mothers?) are obviously quite important, but rather Dionysus, he of noc-
turnal rites (see Euripides' Bacchae 485486) and, as Socrates points out
with reference to the art of Aristophanes, a close associate of his sister
Aphrodite (177e). Socrates, according to this dialogue, is likewise a work-
er by night, in his solitary meditations that extend into the evening (174d
175d) or through an entire day and night (220c-d). As one recent translator
acutely points out, the drinking party would have taken place amid wall
paintings and would have used decorated serving vessels.8 The walls of the
triclinium, perhaps, and the mixing bowls, pouring jugs, cups, and the rest,
whether ceramic or metalwork, almost certainly represented Dionysus him-
self, his companions, and his rites.9 This immanent god is the dikastes who
judges between the wisdom of beautiful, young Agathon and that of ugly,
middle-aged Socrates (175e) in the person of the drunken, ivy-wreathed
Alcibiades.10 Both the tragic poet Agathon and his comic colleague Ari-
stophanes, in Socrates' discussion of the unity of whose dramatic arts the
night of drinking wearily ends, number among Dionysus' many associates.
These include also the mythic figures of Silenus and the satyr Marsyas.
Alcibiades compares the hollow and deceptive figurines of the former,
which contain, in fact, precious images of gods, to the deceptive surface
ugliness of Socrates (215a-b, 216d and, 221d); and he likens the over-
powering "music" of Socrates' argument to the latter's captivating, irresi-
stible flute melodies (215b-c). Dionysus' confusion of boundaries appears
very early, in Agathon's instructions to his slave to behave as free men,
hosts of the company (175b), and very late, when Socrates argues that the
Dionysian arts of comedy and tragedy must coincide (223d). Dionysus in
the form of wine is consumed throughout this dialogue, of course, though
at first in conspicuous moderation (176a-e). Later, however, under Bacchic
Alcibiades' presidency, he/it flows in Gargantuan volume (213e214a)
and finally, after drunken comasts crash the party, without any restraint at
all (223b). Such ritual allusion as this dialogue contains is bound closely
with ecstasy. This in turn is associated, metaphorically, with "mysteries"
(215c-e and 218b, both; cf. 180b).11 This all therefore suggests a different
theme from the complex Orphic-Dionysiac doctrine, that which emphasizes
not the post mortem purification/apotheosis that "Orpheus" elsewhere (with
the Phaedo) promises, but rather the mystical union between a human

8 Robin Waterfield, translator, Plato: Symposium (Oxford University Press 1994), In-
troduction p. XV.
9 For the pictorial content of the drinking service, see Klaus Vierneisel, Kunst der
Schale Kultur des Trinkens (Munchen: Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek,
1990).
10 See Waterfield, notes to 175e, 212e, and 220a (= pp. 74, 90, and 93).
11 At 210a Diotima mentions, metaphorically, the highest grade of initiate, that of the
epoptes, in Eleusinian mysteries, whose Iacchus was identified with Dionysus, and others
(e.g., the Samothracian, which were even closer to the Dionsysian). On Dionysian mysteries
see Richard Seaford, Euripides: Bacchae (Warminster: Aris & phillips, 1996), Introduction to
Bacchae, pp. 3944 and further references there.

30
enthusiast and divinity, in the here and now, that both Dionysian cult and
the mystical side of Orphism appear to have proclaimed as available, if
only for a brief and rare time, to the living initiate.12 Corresponding to the
"Hymn to Apollo" in/of Phaedo is the hymn to "the god" (176a) to
Dionysus, I believe, who had just been mentioned, although commentators
have assumed Zeus that follows the dinner and, with libations, too, be-
gins the symposium proper at Agathon's in the narrative, and that turns out
to pervade it. Finally, whereas Phaedo shows Socrates using lyres and
clothes, fire and ice, and the sun for analogies, in Symposium Alcibiades
reminds his hearers that his wise beloved discourses about deceptively
humble "pack-asses and smiths and cobblers and leather-workers" (221e).
Donkey and smith are associates of Dionysus in the popular myth of the
Return of Hephaestus the smith-god to Olympus, illustrated on
many an Athenian painted vase.13 As already noted, Alcibiades compares
Socrates himself explicitly, and repeatedly, to Silenus and Marsyas, them-
selves and images of them, who are the Dionysus' companions.
Apollonian and Dionysiac musics indeed make a nice contrast bet-
ween the two dialogues. Each "music" is a distinct and very special sort.
Socrates' "swan song" is in effect the entirety of his hopeful, anagogical
talk in Phaedo. A distinguishing feature is his growing good cheer thro-
ughout. It excludes any suggestion of that mourning-in-advance that people
commonly but wrongly (according to Socrates) perceive in swans' beauti-
ful last songs. Indeed, to avoid any expression of grief that he sends away
his wife Xanthippe for most of the day (60a), that he reproaches his male
friends for "womanish behavior" when they break down in weeping near
the end (117d-e). The event of his departure from this world calls, rather,
for celebration, for thanksgiving, like that of the Athenians for the delive-
rance of Theseus and his shipmates that the festival season just ended of-
fers the god (10a-b). Furthermore, by a well-known interpretation of Soc-
rates' very last words, he himself orders a thank-offering to Apollo's son,
Asclepius the healer, the saver-from-death, who was himself saved, twice,
from death (118a).14 Furthermore, it seems certain that Apollo is one of
those good gods into whose keeping the philosopher expects to go upon
leaving the body, possible that Apollo is the very god who will free him
therefrom. "We must keep undefiled from it" [that is, of the body], Socra-
tes prescribes, "until the god himself sets us free" (67a). We all live as
mortals, and Socrates expounds this earnest last lesson under Apollo's con-
trol.

12 At Sym. 179d the speaker Pausanias derides the cowardly "musician" Orpheus for
being unwilling to sacrifice himself and thus failing to bring Eurydice back to life.
13 Frank Brommer, Hephaistos (Mainz am Rhein, 1978), catalogues dozens of in-
stances.
14 David Gallop, translator, Plato: Phaedo (Oxford University Press 1993), p. 102, ad
loc. 118a, doubts that Socrates thought of the soul's incarnation as a disease from which he
was grateful to expect healing upon his death. Since "purification" (katharsis) of the philo-
sophical soul by separating it from the body (67b; cf. 114c) is so vital to him, it is hard to
share that doubt. This naming of Asclepius reminds us in any case of the death of Apollo's
originally mortal son and his subsequent apotheosis.

31
 Throughout the Symposium, in contrast, everyone speaks under Dio-
nysus' influence. We even learn that the majority of the speakers are hung
over from the previous night's drinking, and all of them drink again this
evening. Granted, at first the usual heavy drinking and a flute-girl's music
and other services are missing for most of the festivity (since, at Eryxi-
machus' motion, an auletris has been sent away, 176e); but later, when Al-
cibiades arrives, he staggers in leaning on a flute-girl and disrupts all the
household's order, all decorum, all obedience to rules for the gathering
established hours earlier. He even confounds places at the tables, paving
the way for the final anarchy when a group of drunken revelers burst in
near the end. The young general's words, however, celebrate the Marsyas-
-like yet wholly serious "music" of Socrates, as we have already noted,
and the ironic Silenus-like tutelage of ugly Socrates to handsome Alcibia-
des' own youthful Dionysus.
Some other themes and events from the two dialogues are worth our
notice before we attempt an explanation of why Plato composed them as
he did. One is drink and drinking. In the Symposium, of course, it is wine
that brings illness or ecstasy, and that brings truth to Socrates and Alcibia-
des (perhaps to the hiccuping Aristophanes as well). In the Phaedo, on the
other hand, the hemlock potion which Socrates treats like a draught of
wine (117b-c) apparently brings death, yet in truth admits the godly
soul to true life.15
Then there is the matter of baths. Phaedo includes near its end Socra-
tes' odd anticipatory funeral bath, while our other dialogue begins and
ends with Socrates' daily baths on the days that preceded and followed the
symposion. Among narrated events the following ought also to be noted.
First, recall how in the dialogue that relates his death in prison Socrates is
not very surprisingly! the first on the scene, for he has been impri-
soned for some weeks; but he is also the first to depart, since we must ta-
ke him at his word that he has departed for a better existence at the end,
leaving only an obsolete body among the friends with whom he has spent
his last day in this world (115c-d). In Phaedo, on the other hand, set some
seventeen years earlier in his life, Socrates is the last to arrive for Aga-
thon's party except for the uninvited, unexpected Alcibiades; and, apart
from the two dramatists whom he has drunk "under the table," and one of
whom is at home, he is the last to leave, attended by his devotee (and our
ultimate informant) Aristodemus. Note further how, when the reporter Ari-
stodemus first meets him on the second day after Agathon's triumph in the
Theater of Dionysus, the philosopher is, most unusually for him, not bare-
foot as usual but shod (174a). In contrast, when his friends and admirers
first come upon him in the Phaedo, he has just had his leg freed from a

15 The clear criticism of sexual and alcoholic excess at Ph. 81e80a, according to
which a soul who has indulged itself therein is condemned to be reincarnated as a donkey or
the like, may be thought an attack on the Dionysian life. Even in the Dionysian Symposium,
Apollo's representative Eryximachus condemns drunkenness (methe, 176c-d). Socrates, how-
ever, is only enlightened by wine, never intoxicated (Sym. 220a); and Alcibiades' speech ma-
kes the master's continence clear (219c-d).

32
painful fetter and, after sending Xanthippe away, discusses for a moment
the interconnection of pain and pleasure of which his leg's recent successi-
ve feelings have made him acutely aware. Both of these narrative bits are,
to be sure thematic: barefoot Eros (203c) and barefoot Socrates (220b) are
or should we say "is"! important later in Symposium; while alterna-
ting states, with the better often succeeding the worse, are a central con-
cern of Plato's Phaedo (70d72d). But the foot-leg business also connects
the two scenarios.
Third, note the opposite yet related situations at the center of both di-
alogues. In the one, his youthful friends Cebes and Simmias have just ar-
gued powerfully against the thesis Socrates' thesis that the soul sur-
vives the body's death ever or at least always; the rest of those present are
terribly depressed all, that is, save Socrates who, after a short conversa-
tion almost "aside" to Phaedo, proceeds to refute both the young Thebans.
That he does in question-and-answer with each of the two successively,
following the refutations with a long, "mythical" discourse on cosmology
and eschatology. The state of bliss for which the philosophical soul may
fairly hope is an Apollonian one, characterized not by pleasure but by he-
alth and godly insight as well as a perpetual integration with the divine
(111b). In the other work the Athenian Agathon has dazzled his company
of guests with a Gorgonic-Gorgianic encomium on Eros (198c), winning a
general ovation from all but Socrates, who after a short discussion with
the physician Eryximachus refutes the brilliant young poet. He does this
first in question-and-answer (beginning at 199c), then in his continuous ac-
count of his own "schooling" in erotica by Dame Diotima (from 201d).
Her very name, of course, suggests both Zeus and his son Dionysus.
Among the minor characters of the dialogues let us remark that in the
Athenian prison Xanthippe, who appears twice in Phaedo, early weeping
and wailing (60a), later under control (116b), corresponds in a peculiar
way to the flute girls at Agathon's house, one of whom, as we have remar-
ked, was sent away without playing (Sym. 176e), another subsequently re-
entering to help Alcibiades into the dining room (212d).
There is also a more fundamental structural correspondence, with in-
version or reversal, between our two dialogues. To the eschatological myth
of Phaedo correspond two mythical discourses: one by Aristophanes on
the "original nature" (archaia phusis) of human beings (189d193c), and
the second by Diotima, which Socrates recalls, on the parentage of Eros
(203b204a). This time a doubling occurs in Symposium as against Phae-
do. To Diotima's instruction of Socrates, who passed under her tutelage
from ignorance to wisdom, in Symposium (201d212b) the counterpart
in Phaedo is Socrates' non-education by "wise" Anaxagoras (97b99c),
which he remedied by his modest "second voyage" (99d).
Finally, and most moving, there is a structural correspondence with
functional inversion between the jailer-executioner in Phaedo, who soberly
brings Socrates the hemlock and thereby separation, as a condemned cri-
minal, from men, and Alcibiades in Symposium, who, with drunken banter

33
(215a), glorifies him for his military achievements as an Athenian and his
moral ones as a man.
It is rather time for us to try to understand what the author of these
two so ingeniously interrelated dialogues meant by their interrelation. The
thesis offered here rests in the main upon the Apollo-Dionysus opposition
described earlier. This opposition coincides with the ostensible antithetical
ideologies of the two dialogues. The Apollonianism of the Phaedo preac-
hes precisely that sort of barrier between mortal and immortal natures
which Leto's son characteristically defends: the mortal (i.e., a human be-
ing's body) must suffer and accept death, while the divine (his or her soul)
properly keeps itself pure and aloof from the perishable.16 God-like human
souls can therefore only realize their potential divinity after people die
that is, after their separation from the mortal part that holds them down.
Quite on the contrary, the Symposium, like Dionysiac religion, teaches that
divinity is attainable, if only for a moment, in the ecstasy a bakkhos/bak-
khe may experience occasionally during his/her lifetime. According to this
doctrine human and divine are as thoroughly confounded as are any others
of the numerous polarities that (for example) Euripides' Bacchae so stri-
kingly confounds. That seems to make the two dialogues irreconcilable.
One may become permanently divine later, or one may become so, flee-
tingly, now, but have not both prospects a very reasonable disjunction.
Indeed the several inversions/oppositions between the two dialogues menti-
oned so far suggest just such a disjunction between their respective anthro-
pologies and theologies. So, too, do the physical positions of the famous
myths in the two pieces. Aristophanes' memorable myth of "divided" hu-
man nature comes just before the center of Symposium (189d193a), Soc-
rates' myth of the birth and nature of Eros just after (203b-e); in Phaedo,
on the other hand, the one great eschatological myth comes very near the
end (108e114c).17 It begins to appear that Plato meant to sharpen the
contradiction between the two positions. Yet we well know that the half-
-brothers Apollo and Dionysus, themselves seldom, if ever, directly at
odds, repeatedly cooperated, sharing the sacred site at Delphi and alike in-
fluencing the religious movement named after Orpheus. Perhaps some
complementary relationship between the views of both, between different
yet compatible aspects of the nature of philosophical man occurred to Pla-

16 If we reinterpret Aristophanes' myth of the unhappily split wholeness of man to re-

fer to the soul's human soul's longing for reunion with the divine, the role of Apollo at
190e191a gains greater depth. Apollo is, of course, aptly involved in the punishment of
mortal unruliness as well as in the healing of major wounds. Father Zeus would, however,
with special fitness choose him to prevent the non-philosophical masses, who live and think
according to their bodies, from mingling with divinity. Hephaestus, who later in the myth
shows compassion toward the divided persons (192d-e), was himself restored to Olympus
by Dionysus, as noted above.
17 Another, much shorter myth in this dialogue, really more a fable, comes very near
the beginning: Socrates' little Aesop-like conceit of Pleasure and Pain joined together at the
head by Zeus (60b-c). In fact, this resonates with Aristophanes' fantasy in Symposium in an
intriguing way another hint that the two dialogues were conceived together?

34
to circa 380 B.C., when he seems likely to have composed both the dialo-
gues we have been considering.
Granted that other "middle" works show Plato finally leaning toward
the Apollonian-Orphic alternative of Phaedo, for example the Gorgias and
the Republic (in both of which a great myth likewise appears near the
end), nevertheless, at one stage of his long career of thinking and re-thin-
king about the human condition Socrates' greatest disciple seems to have
hesitated between hope, on the one hand, for god-like existence after the
soul escapes the body's prison a hope that may well have belonged to
Socrates himself and, on the other, a more mystical ambition for perfect
intuition/experience of the divine during one's lifetime, attained by means
of an ascetic, contemplative regimen and depending upon a kind of divine
grace.
The parable of the cave in Republic VII does, of course, allow that
the philosopher may emerge from its darkness and shadow-show. He may
experience the Good Itself, although he is in humane duty bound to return
among the troglodytes. This is related to the central doctrine of Symposi-
um, including the evidence of how, after his trances, Socrates returns to or-
dinary Athenian life (however extraordinarily he lives it!). Perhaps when
he wrote the latter Plato was momentarily unconcerned about practical in-
volvement in high politics or, after one or another of his Sicilian disappo-
intments, despaired of achieving anything in that department. Nevertheless,
without abandoning hope for an intellectually blessed afterlife, and for a
benevolent totalitarian order in this life, he also offered to himself, and
held out for at least a few others, an avenue to personal satisfaction in the
here-and-now. He opened the prospect of superhuman intuition, a kind of
epistemic vision, for the still-living adept, who would (in the Phaedo's
terms: 64a, 66d-e, 67d-e, etc.) "practice death" so perfectly as to escape,
for an eternal moment, into the rapture that Socrates describes at the end
of his long speech in the Symposium (210d211b and 211d212a). In-
deed Diotima explicitly declares that experience to be qualitative if not
chronological immortality! Socrates in 416 B.C. was, after all, still of an
age like Plato's when he composed our two dialogues at which he
could expect many years more of "pre-afterlife".
In conclusion, therefore, the following may be stated: Two of his fi-
nest works invite a reading in tandem, the result of which is that we learn
from "Middle" Plato the appealing lesson that people may both entertain a
hope of immortality and realize it, that they may contract friendship now
with Dionysus, hereafter with Apollo may serve a good god now, an
equally good one henceforth. It is perhaps unfortunate that Plato would lo-
se the optimism of this moment later, and that later he would seldom, if
ever, write with such charm and good humor.

35
Viktor Kastelani

PLATONOV FEDON I GOZBA KAO KOMPLEMENTARNI DIJALOZI

Rezime

Autor posmatra Platonove dijaloge Fedon i Gozba kao wegova najboqa

dela, ijoj se kwievnoj lepoti divimo jo od antike, uz pokuaje da se je-
dan od wih datira kao ranije napisan. Nasuprot tome, autor se zalae da se
oba ova sjajna dijaloga sveobuhvatne metafizike filozofije tretiraju kao
svojevrstan i komplementarni tandem, koji razmatra kako i kada se qudski
duh moe ujediniti s boanskim. Pri tom se u Fedonu vie obraa pawa
Apolonu i apolonskim temama, a u Gozbi Dionisu i Dionysiaca.
Autor oba dijaloga smeta meu Platonove naslove sredweg perioda",
zasnivajui svoja prouavawa na svom izlagawu o toj temi na klasinom
kongresu 1987. godine u Americi, ime je prethodio nekim kasnijim naslo-
vima s komentarima o oba dijaloga.

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