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Catalogue no: NA338312D
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Review by Sue Arnold, The Guardian

Here’s your chance to find out if, as the above book claims, Plato is the best writer of all western thinkers. The Symposium is the dialogue most classics teachers choose to start students off with, being the account, at first sight at least, of an all-night, men-only drinking binge in 416 B.C. Athens where some of the lads are so wasted they can scarcely stand up. Agathon, the host, has just won Best Play in the Dionysian drama awards, and Plato uses the occasion as a vehicle to expound on his theory of the true nature of love. Between hiccups, Aristophanes attempts to explain that human beings were once circular but became so conceited that Zeus cut them in two, since when their only aim has been to find their other half. Socrates raises the level of debate to predictable stratospheric heights, until latecomer Alcibiades totters in, falls over and proceeds to tell everyone of his lifelong (and so far unrequited) passion for the philosopher. It’s all great fun and almost certainly based on a real event. The tooling of the Greek language for analytic theorising on the nature of reality, truth, mortality and love reached its zenith in the fifth century B.C. Significantly, it had no word for homosexual.

Review from Audiofile Magazine

Plato’s Symposium is often assigned, but is it actually read? As a written text, it’s a challenging work. Listening is a much more accessible way to understand this classical work, as well as the rhetorical strategies of its speeches. The ensemble cast is well matched to recreating the famous dialogue and speeches. David Shaw-Parker is a wily and sophisticated Socrates. As the first speaker on the topic of Eros, Hayward Morse is a gentle and thoughtful Phaedrus. Tim Bentinck makes a lively but still articulate entrance for the drunken Alcibiades. Susan Sheridan is a stately Diotima. The recording is supported by notes containing background information on the text and Athenian society.

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