ABSTRACT
Situated on a flat marshy plain, surrounded on all sides by mountains, Mantineia was an ancient city in the central district of the Peloponnesian peninsula known as Arcadia. The founding of Mantineia was attributed to Mantineus, a grandson of Pelasgus, the mythical first king of Arcadia, and one of the reputed fifty, impious sons of the infamous Lycaon. The character of Diotima is found only in Plato’s Symposium, represented by Socrates as a woman wise in diverse types of knowledge, and the source of the Platonic doctrine of eros. Diotima was not Athenian, a literary facet which uniquely reflects the ambivalence of Socrates’ social position, that of atopos, or outsider. While existing evidence, ranging from written testimony to bas-relief bronzes, cannot with certainty prove the historicity of Diotima, never, since Plato’s writing of the Symposium, has it been suggested that Diotima of Mantineia was anything but a ‘long-deceased philosopher-priestess’ and the revered teacher of Socrates.
