Symposium - Blog Posts

Out of curiosity...

Just finished reading the Symposium, in which a guy named Phaedrus claims that Aeschylus is ridiculous for believing that Achilles is the lover and Patroclus the beloved. (i.e. that Achilles tops.)

Phaedrus argues that Patroclus was the lover (the top) and Achilles the beloved (the bottom), as Patroclus was older and Achilles more beautiful.

Hi all, here are some Diotima quotes from Plato’s Symposium that are making me lose my mind at 2 am. All quotes are from the Cambridge University Press (2008) Translation.

Image credit : Twitter

Soulmates. Better half. Portkeys. The love of your life. CMBYN & Vice Versa's plot at their core are essentially these aforementioned concepts.

Call me by your name is inspired from Plato's Symposium. In Greek mythology, humans were originally four-limbed, two-faced creatures; split apart by Zeus and condemned to spend their lives looking for their other half.

According to Symposium, one's quest for a female or male half depends on the nature of their original being. The relationship between the halves is subjective, but is ultimately companionship.

However, when one meets their other half, be it a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and would not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment.” This is the highest form of love — “the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another.”

"Call me by your name and I will call you by mine" implies that "you and I" are one being that was separated. Now Talay & Puen share parallels to Oliver & Elio.

Puen and Talay are going through something similar (as of ep 6) The duo find themselves naturally drawn to each other, but they do know what they desire from each other. They briefly even feign ignorance.

As for the concept of portkeys, it once again refers to the idea of 2 people who are destined for each other. Like a match made in heaven.

Puen is carefree like Oliver. It is very evident from his confidence when he says things like "I kissed you because I wanted to" or "I should simply marry my colorist then"

For a non believer of love, Talay treats love sacredly. He's quick to draw boundaries & teach Puen that love cannot & should not be faked. He's cautious, sensitive to language & doesn't take things for granted, just like Elio. Puen revealed himself to Pang in the first meeting but not to Talay who was practically joined to him by the hip on most days. Talay tries to hide his envy by telling Puen to get close to Pang by calling her his prospective portkey. This is parallel to Elio's jealousy over Chiara. And his attempt to objectify her to strike up a conversation with Oliver.

Although most Call Me By Your Name ends with Elio getting a little more cynical, here's to manifesting that Vice Versa will end with Puen feeling a lot less lonely & Talay losing his cynicism about love.

PS Call Me By Your Name is set in a town by the coast & a lot of scenes are on the beach. Talay happened to drown while playing at the beach. Not to forget his name itself means "Sea" (And the actor's nickname IRL is Sea lmao 😂)

(Some of the above information was sourced from Vox)

Hi, it’s “Rick really shot himself in the foot when he tried to differentiate Greek and Roman mythology and failed” anon again, and I just learned that apparently Rick is not only misrepresenting the gods and Greek culture, but actual Ancient Greek philosophers, and that really pisses me off as someone with a degree in philosophy.

I haven’t been a part of this fandom in a long time. I never finished HoO (I dropped it before the series was even finished), but I saw something upsetting the other day. I’ve seen a few posts talking about this one passage from HoO (Or, at least, I think it was from HoO. If I read that part, I don’t remember because It was a long time ago.) talking about “a story by Plato about how male and female were created because they used to be the same being that was split in half, and now they’re two halves of a whole looking for their soulmate or whatever” and this was supposed to create angst or something because then Nico didn’t know how he was supposed to fit into that equation.

Again, I don’t exactly know the context (I tried Googling it, but I couldn’t find anything), but I do know that it’s referencing The Symposium. The Symposium just so happens to be one of my favorite pieces of philosophical writing, and once had to write over 20 pages on this bad boy for an academic paper, so believe me when I tell you - that story is a load of BS, and I will not tolerate Plato slander.

First of all, that wasn’t even Plato that said that. It was Aristophanes. Yes, The Symposium was written by Plato, but he was essentially just documenting stuff that was said at a dinner where a bunch of dudes got together and decided to philosophize about what love is (there are 6 speakers in total, that all lead up to Socrates, and Aristophanes is just one of them). People debate about whether all the people and situations Plato wrote about were even real, or if they’re just a device to bounce ideas off of each other, and there’s even this whole theory that Socrates wasn’t a real person - but I’m not going to get into all of that. What’s important is that we DO know that Aristophanes was a real person, and it’s important to note that Aristophanes was NOT a philosopher. He was a playwright and basically the Ancient Greek equivalent of a comedian. I have seen a lot of people act like it was some profound theory of how humans came to be, but it was never meant to be taken seriously.

Now, I have seen that story be taken out of context many times, and it always annoys me, but this might be the most egregious one yet. The Symposium is not heteronormative in the slightest. In fact, it is VERY queer, which is what drew me to it in the first place.

The ACTUAL story that this is trying to reference is when Aristophanes tells a story where originally humans had 2 heads, 4 arms, and 4 legs, and there were 3 genders - male, female, and androgynous (which represented the sun, earth, and moon, respectively). The gods were intimidated by the humans, so they split them in half. The ones that were originally male became men who were attracted to men, the ones that were female became women attracted to women, and the ones that were androgynous became men and women attracted to the opposite sex. That is the very short version, but needless to say, very inclusive of homosexuality.

I see how what Rick was trying to do could’ve worked for asexuality or aromanticism, however, this is only just one small part of The Symposium, and there is actually a lot of stuff in The Symposium that I would argue are very ace and aro coded, but I’m not going to get into all of that, though, because this would be very long and that’s beside the point.

(Just one thing, though, because I can't resist. It’s not relevant to this, but it’s cool, and it relates to my previous ask. At one point, one of the speakers, Pausanias, tries to define love as a complex being and says that Aphrodite is the personification of love. He acknowledges that there are two different versions of Aphrodite that the Ancient Greeks believed in, from different parts of Greece (again, this is pre-Roman), and instead of trying to determine which is the “true” Aphrodite, he embraces both of them and says they are the personifications of two different kinds of love, which eventually results in him basically figuring out the split attraction model 2000+ years before it was called that, and I love it so much.) Anyway, everyone should read The Symposium, it’s public domain.

All that to say, this means one of two things. Either Rick knew this story and intentionally changed it to be heteronormative to create angst, or he read some other version of the story, that was not a primary resource, where someone else had already changed to be heteronormative - and that really freaking bothers me, because it could not be farther from the truth.

As a queer person who found a lot of comfort in The Symposium, I find it disgusting that it was twisted for the sake of making a queer character feel bad about themself for extra angst (and don’t even get me started on how Nico’s character was handled, that is a whole other thing I can go off about, but I won’t because this is about Plato). Shame on you, Richard.

Again, I haven’t touched HoO since I was in high school and it was still being released, and I honestly don’t remember reading that part. So, if I am taking this out of context and later in the book they say “Wait, but that’s not actually how the story goes!” then I will be pleasantly surprised for once, and you can disregard all of this.

You are wonderful, anon, and I love you and this message that you've sent so much. I will definitely check out Plato's Symposium sometime soon.

Don't worry-you're not taking this out of context. What you're talking about is, unfortunately, written in either HOH or BOO-I clearly remember that.

Rick Riordan does tend to misrepresent cultures in his stories-especially Greek culture, so I wouldn't be surprised if this was true. His views on Hellenistic Paganism and Greek Gods when he was writing PJO and HOO were unfortunately very derogatory and it's clearly reflected in his writing.

The fact that he changed a story to fit his version does not surprise me at all, though it's painful to learn that he has committed yet another infraction regarding Greek Mythology.

It's terribly discouraging to me when I see how many people think that what Rick Riordan writes is true and urge them to read up on real sources regarding Greek Mythology. This twisted version of Plato's Symposium is only one of many examples in Percy Jackson.

Knowing Rick Riordan, he either read the full version and twisted it to form his own terrible version, which he has done before (Hephaestus' attempted rape of Athena) and is quite good at or he read a version that wasn't the primary resource and just took it to be the real thing (like he did when researching for Piper Mclean).

Nico's moment there was pretty poignant, very relatable for many LGBTQ readers wondering how they would fit in to heteronormative society...........

But unfortunately, a lot of nice moments in PJO come at the cost of incorrectly interpreting Ancient Greek Gods and culture. It's pretty sad, honestly. Rick really likes to slander Greece in his works. First with the flame of the West, then with slandering all the gods and all those mythological inaccuracies, now with this twisted Symposium version of his.

Rick Riordan doesn't even do his research properly, so of course he said that Plato said it and not that Plato wrote down what Aristophanes said out loud. I wonder if it would actually kill him to do some more research. Is he really that bad at it?

Anyway, I will read the Symposium to gain more insight onto how Rick could have handled it better. I really like aro-ace coded stuff, too, so I'll love this one.