ABSTRACT
Socrates and Alcibiades were lovers—after a fashion—as we learn in some detail from the gossipy final speech in Symposium, a brief book full of speeches about love, all written by Plato. The Symposium has always been recognized as the most dramatic and entertaining of Plato’s dialogues, and is one of the cluster of great ‘middle period’ dialogues (along with Republic, Phaedo and Phaedrus) that are normally taken to express Plato’s mature, positive philosophy. Plato himself was likely homosexual (he never married and had no children, which was highly unusual in his time). While all of his party guests in this dialogue are male and clearly conceive of Eros mainly as the love of men for boys (part of the socially accepted Greek practice of male bisexuality), we also find here the first explicit references in Western literature to exclusively gay and lesbian couples.
