American Journal of Philology

Xenophon's Symposium is one of his minor Socratic works, and even though other opera Socratica Xenophontis, his Memorabilia and probably also his Oeconomicus, are much more famous, occasionally it has been called his best work.¹ Nonetheless the Symposium has often been judged very negatively in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.² If one looks closely at its Forschungsgeschichte, there can be no doubt about the origin of most of these critical statements: it has suffered from comparison with Plato's famous work of the same title. In 1972 Gallardo's report on recent research on Xenophon's Symposium had to state that little had changed since the days of Wilamowitz–Moellendorff: "El Banquete de Jenofonte, obra amena y de agradabilísima lectura, siempre, o casi siempre, es puesta, inevitablemente, en relación con su homónimo platónico, y a través de esta comparación se la suele juzgar."³

The vast majority of modern Platonists and Xenophontists tend to agree about the relative chronology of the two works. There is very little doubt that Plato wrote his Symposium first. It seems certain that Pla [End Page 381] to's was published between 385/84 and 378,⁴ and Xenophon very probably produced his only in the late 360s.⁵ The considerable number of parallels between the two⁶ proves that Xenophon knew Plato's Symposium. And not only did he know it—his own opusculum was strongly influenced by Plato's opus. Still, Plato's Symposium is not the only work Xenophon quotes and uses while constructing his story of the evening at Kallias' house: he is also influenced by Plato's Phaedrus and other Platonic dialogues as well as by other Socratics, namely Antisthenes and Aeschines. And one should not forget the well–known fact that Xenophon generally does not just quote other authors, but rearranges the elements he borrows from them according to his own needs in order to create largely independent new works of art which are neither Platonic nor Antisthenic but simply Xenophontic. Therefore Gallardo certainly is right: looking at Plato's Symposium while making statements about Xenophon's can be helpful, but "reconociendo, pues, lo razonable de esta actitud, nos parece sin embargo más justo estudiar la obra de Jenofonte por sí misma, prescindiendo, en principio, de cualesquiera otras consideraciones."⁷

My primary goal here is to promote a better understanding of both the peculiar intention and the literary technique of this underestimated work. For this purpose, let us first look at a particular passage of Xenophon's Symposium which has often been misunderstood by ancient and modern interpreters (and which is a good example of more [End Page 382] general misunderstandings concerning the work as a whole) and then attempt to draw a number of conclusions regarding the composition and meaning of this text.