ABSTRACT
This chapter will reinterpret the Socratic daimonion in the light of the much-celebrated Platonic dialogue on love. The chapter is another exercise in Straussian interpretation. Socrates claims to be a diviner. In Plato’s Symposium, he had also claimed to ‘know nothing except the erotic things’. These two things, divining and eros, are interrelated. The Socratic daimonion is usually interpreted as something like conscience, but that would mean that it is a widespread phenomenon, and the daimonion was clearly a peculiarity of Socrates. We receive a description of this ‘demon’ in Diotima’s teaching from the Symposium.
