Plato

Gallery

The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours | Gallery: Part 6

The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours[1] is based on a course that Professor Gregory Nagy has been teaching at Harvard University since the late 1970s. The book discusses selected readings of texts, all translated from the original Greek into English. The texts include the Homeric Iliad and Odyssey; selected Homeric Hymns; the Hesiodic Theogony and Works and Days; selected songs of Sappho and Pindar; selections from the Histories of Herodotus;… Read more

History,  Visiting Scholars

Open House | Plato and the Tyrant, with Professor James Romm

We were pleased to welcome Professor James Romm, The James Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics, Bard College, when he joined members of the Kosmos Society for the Open House discussion (below) on Plato and the Tyrant: The Tale of the Platonic Letters.  Plato made three trips outside Athens during his life, all of them to the Greek city of Syracuse (in Sicily). His relations with two powerful tyrants there, a… Read more

Visiting Scholars

Open House | How to Talk About Love, with Professor Armand D’Angour

We were pleased to welcome Professor Armand D’Angour, of Jesus College, Oxford, who joined members of the Kosmos Society for an Open House discussion on “How to Talk about Love: Plato’s Symposium.” The earliest and most brilliant philosophical treatment of Love is Plato’s dialogue Symposium. In it, a group of seven men, including the comic playwright Aristophanes and the philosopher Socrates, offer speeches describing what they think love is. The… Read more

Topic for Discussion,  Word Study

Androgyne in myth

I became intrigued in the subject of androgyny after some of our Book Club readings. Plato, in the Symposium, reveals a myth on the origin of mankind through the speech of Aristophanes (starting at 189d). The Symposium is a series of amusing speeches on the subject of love, supposedly composed during a meal given by the young poet Agathon. Aristophanes decides to demonstrate the origin of love. In the beginning, he says,… Read more

Book Club

Book Club | February 2022: Plato Symposium

This month’s selection is Plato’s Symposium, a discussion or series of speeches that takes place at a feast or banquet, in which the participants discuss Eros, or Love/Desire. In his “Introduction to the Symposium,” W.R.M. Lamb says: The Symposium of Plato holds an acknowledged place among those few masterpieces of human art which unveil and interpret something of the central mystery of life. It has been a source of light… Read more