Abstract

Daniel Anderson's commentary on the Symposium consists of careful readings of all the individual speeches, in which he is concerned not only with the overt arguments but even more with their subtext. The subtext is Dionysian--a theme implicit in the dialogue's setting as the celebration of Agathon's victory at a drama festival, since such festivals were in honor of Dionysus--and the dialogue as a whole is about the irreducible dialectic between form and formlessness, Apollo and Dionysus. Dionysus represents the life force, so "all living things may be regarded as manifestations of Dionysus" and the masks worn by the actors in Greek drama symbolize the fact that "Each living thing is a mask of Dionysos". Beneath each mask, therefore, is only life force, and not a stable individual identity. Even the removal of a mask is only the creation of a new mask. In his discussions of the speeches Anderson keeps this leitmotiv [[sic]] in view, and attributes particular masks to the first six speakers, while Alcibiades, on the other hand, "is the persona of Dionysos".