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Symposium. Analysis.

how they were at Potidaea together, where Socrates showed 220 his superior powers of enduring cold and fatigue ; how on one occasion ho had stood for an entire day and nigiit absorbed in reflection amid the wonder of the spectators ; how on another occasion he had saved Alcibiades' life ; how at the battle of Delium, after the defeat, he might be seen stalking about like 221 a pelican, rolling his eyes as Aristophanes had described him in the Clouds. He is the most wonderful of human beings, and absolutely unlike any one but a satyr. Like the satyr in his 222 language too; for he uses the commonest words as the outward mask of the divinest truths. When Alcibiades has done speaking, a dispute begins between him and Agathon and Socrates. Socrates piques Alcibiades by a pretended affection for Agathon. Presently a band of revellers 223 appears, who introduce disorder into the feast ; the sober part of the company, Eryximachus, Phacdrus, and others, withdraw ; and Aristodemus, the follower of Socrates, sleeps during the whole of a long winter's night. When he wakes at cockcrow the revellers are nearly all asleep. Only Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon hold out; they are drinking from a large goblet, which they pass round, and Socrates is explaining to the two others, who are half-asleep, that the genius of tragedy is tlic same as that of comedy, and that the writer of tragedy ought to be a writer of comedy also. And first Aristophanes drops, and then, as the day is dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to rest, takes a bath and goes to his daily avocations until the evening. Aristodemus follows.

Introduction.

If it be true that there are more things in the Symposium of Plato than any commentator has dreamed of, it is also true that many things have been imagined which are not really to be found there. Some writings hardly admit of a more distinct inter- pretation than a musical composition ; and every reader may form his own accompaniment of thought or feeling to the strain which he hears. The Symposium of Plato is a work of this character, and can with difficulty be rendered in any words but the writer's own. There are so many half-lights and cross- lights, so much of the colour of mythology, and of the manner of sophistry adhering — rhetoric and poetry, the playful and the