GREK 312 - Plato’s Symposium

Next Offered: 2008-09
Semester Offered: Second Semester
Credits (Range): 3 Hours
Attribute: 3 HU

This course will study the Symposium, one of Plato’s dialogues on love and literature. We will read significant portions of the text in Greek with close attention to philosophical, rhetorical, and linguistic aspects of the work. We will contextualize Plato by studying some of his precursors and contemporaries in translation, as well as reading secondary literature concerning the dialogue. We will close with a survey of the dialogue’s afterlife, from Petronius’s Satyricon to the “re-birth” of Platonism in Renasissance Italy.