Xenophon’s reputation in antiquity was for the charm of his writing, and his witty and playful Symposium must have contributed to that assessment. It opens with the statement that people’s characters are revealed both in their serious actions and at play, a programmatic claim that illuminates its eight chapters of dialogue, set at a dinner-party hosted by Callias in honour of the youth he is courting, Autolycus, and attended by Socrates among others. G.’s exploration of the dialogue is substantially longer and less charming than the work it attempts to describe. He leads readers through the dialogue slowly, and with a thoroughness and earnestness one might expect given the book’s origins in a 2003 doctoral thesis.
G. begins by setting out the context of the work, by which he means its dramatic setting in fifth-century bce Athens rather than the circumstances in which Xenophon composed it at an unknown location in the fourth century; he overlooks the anachronism of Xenophon’s authorial presence. Unusually for a Socratic dialogue, the setting can be straightforwardly pinned on to a historical timeline; the young Autolycus’ victory in the pankration contest at the Greater Panathenaea was in 422/1 bce (Xen. Symp. 1.2). G. appears to treat the dialogue as a record of a conversation that took place then and that could have motivated the hostility of Lycon towards the philosopher (p. 295); Lycon chaperones his son Autolycus in this dialogue and later became one of Socrates’ prosecutors.
After setting out the context and introducing the principal characters, G. embarks on an exegetical retelling of the work. This occupies the bulk of the book’s eleven chapters and is a slow and detailed business, with the substantial text of each chapter followed by voluminous notes. The second chapter, ‘Setting the Stage: sophistry versus philosophy’, illustrates the strengths of G.’s scholarship; he has chased down much of the relevant realia for his notes; so details of the historical context of the Athenian Panathenaea, the biographies and interrelationships of historical individuals, and the fifth-century setting are made clear.
Less helpful is G.’s reluctance to explore intertextual relationships with Plato’s work; he initially eschews any critical stance on this vital point beyond briefly noting the existing debate on who wrote first (pp. x, 267, 286 n. 2). As a result, he misses many opportunities in his analysis of the dialogue to explore how Xenophon is in conversation with his contemporary, not just in the Symposium but also in other dialogues featuring an overlapping set of characters. His conclusion reworks an earlier publication on L. Strauss’s account of the dialogue, one of the German-American political philosopher’s final publications (L. Strauss, Xenophon’s Socrates [1972]; D. Gish, ‘Socratic rhetoric and political philosophy: Leo Strauss on Xenophon’s Symposium’, in: T.W. Burns [ed.], Brill’s Companion to Leo Strauss’ Writings on Classical Political Thought [2015], pp. 258–84). In this section G. makes explicit important connections between Xenophon and Plato, which he mostly avoids in the preceding chapters. Elsewhere in the book Strauss is an interlocutor who slides in and out of view but is more present than Plato; for example, G. offers ‘An alternative interpretation of the opening scene’ (pp. 44–6), presenting Strauss’s analysis of the dialogue’s opening, but naming him only in the notes. It seems that overall G. takes a more contextualist interpretative line than Strauss or at least aims to fill in details that Strauss left implicit. His analysis often falls back on Straussian traits, such as the obsessive counting of ‘oaths’ (for example at pp. 86, 109 nn. 32–3, 99, 176, 186, 276) and the deployment of etymological explanations, including those based on treating historical character names as ‘speaking names’ (examples at pp. 146 n. 25, 207 n. 123, 247 n. 5). Strauss’s work also provides the epigraph to several chapters. G. does at times offer mild criticism (e.g. p. 56 n. 67), but on the whole Strauss’s readings are accepted.
G. is often prudish about the erotics of Xenophon’s dialogue, perhaps oddly given the centrality of eros in the work and its presence in his own subtitle. He seems anxious to minimise or explain away the characters’ homoerotic interactions, which he sees as licensed by the sympotic context but otherwise as an embarrassment. In another setting, he says, Charmides, might have felt ‘obliged’ to keep his ‘erotic compliment’ to the young male dancer ‘to himself’ (p. 127). As the erotic interactions of the dialogue unfold, G. eventually gets to grips with this important theme, noting that Socrates’ speech about eros (Xen. Symp. 8.7–41) ‘establishes more a critique, or limitation, of traditional Athenian pederasty’ (pp. 276–7), as it aims to persuade Kallias to turn his attention from physical love to love of the soul. He worries a little about Socrates’ ‘near-purple prose’ in his account of the kind of chaste male same-sex affection that encourages kalokagathia in the noble (p. 278), and despite his refusal to read the work against Plato’s gets close to identifying Xenophon’s dialogic point.
I noted the curious absence of feminist scholarship from G.’s otherwise copious bibliography. V. Wohl and K. Gilhuly, for example, have published revelatory analyses of the dialogue and its interplay between politics, philosophy and erotics (V. Wohl, ‘Dirty Dancing: Xenophon’s Symposium’, in: P. Murray and P. Wilson [edd.], Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical Athenian City [2004], pp. 337–64; K. Gilhuly, The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens [2009], pp. 98–139, and now also ‘The History of Sexuality in Xenophon’s Symposium’, in: K. Gilhuly and J.P. Ulrich [edd.], Making Time for Greek and Roman Literature [2024], pp. 62–83). While it is impossible to cite all scholarship on a well-studied work, this omission appears to be a thematic absence; when women appear or are discussed in Xenophon’s text, G. interprets their presence as an analogy for the discussion of ‘gentlemen’, his main focus. He does not mention that the enslaved girl dancer is one of those who judges Socrates in the beauty contest (Symp. 5.9–10), although in identifying this as a key event of the dialogue he repeatedly treats its outcome as somehow incorrect and corrupt, even as he acknowledges Strauss’s (bizarre) suggestion that the dancers’ Syracusan owner is a surrogate for Xenophon.
Overall, Xenophon’s concept of kalokagathia is taken as a goal that is self-evident and subjected to little critical evaluation. G. regards Socrates’ companions as unproblematically ‘aristocratic gentlemen’ (p. 280); his interest in historical realia does not extend to unpicking this concept. Theses ‘gentlemen’ are always in the foreground; the dialogue’s other characters, whether present in the room like the enslaved dancers or brought into the discussion like Socrates’ wife Xanthippe, are treated as foils to Xenophon’s discussion of gentlemen rather than in their own right. The courage the young dancer shows when she performs with knives only illustrates the virtue as found in high-status men. The uninvited guest Philip is presented as an exemplar of moral deficiency against whom the higher-status participants appear more gentlemanly.
G. offers good guidance on the multiple levels at which Xenophon’s text operates, its slippages between playfulness and seriousness, and in particular its allusions to Socrates’ prosecution and trial. He articulates the role of the abrasive Antisthenes well, and also that of Hermogenes; his account of the prickly manoeuvres of the characters draws out Socrates’ intradiegetic role as a peacemaker while simultaneously pointing to Xenophon’s references to Aristophanes’ critique of Socrates. Yet this remains a book that makes most sense with an understanding of its context in Straussian scholarship and will be most appreciated by those working within that tradition.
