Socrates, Aristophanes, and you can Agathon are left about sharing catastrophe and you will comedy: “a portion of the point was that Socrates was trying convince them the exact same guy knows (epistasthai) just how to build one another funny and catastrophe, that a person who is by the craft (techne) a heartbreaking poet was a comic poet also” (223d26).
An exact description, undoubtedly, of your speeches from most of the symposiasts which talk previous so you’re able to Socrates
Typical poets cannot make both comedy and you may disaster, as they do not make out of knowledge and you may hobby (techne) but from divine motivation (Ion 534c56). If they performed make out out of craft and you may education, once they was basically craftsmen poets, they’d create both comedy and problem, given that opposites are always analyzed by same craft. Hence the new comedic hobby plus the tragic pastime will have to feel one plus the same; as a possible and the same craft, drug, works together one another infection and you may wellness.
After the newest Symposium, Alcibiades moved out-of, allegedly to the throng from Bacchic revelers, which burst into their lives while the agencies regarding their seizing love on the approval and you will flattery of crowd
Socrates tells us exactly what a good craftsman poet could establish, he will not let us know exactly what he’d produce. Other Platonic spokesmen are somewhat more impending. “We ourselves try poets,” the fresh Athenian Stranger confides in us regarding Laws, “that towards the best of all of our ability written a disaster that is the better additionally the better; at any rate, the entire constitution is actually created given that a reproduction of the greatest and best traditions-the actual procedure which i claim is the truest problem” (817b15). Before in identical discussion, the latest Stranger is actually similarly direct that the exact same structure, whether or not perhaps not a comedy, do nonetheless embody comedic knowledge:
A person who is going to acquire basic insights cant know severe things without learning ridiculous of these, or whatever else, for that matter, as opposed to its opposite. However, if we’re going to acquire advantage, also with the a small level, we cant feel big and comic as well, and this is why we need to discover ways to acknowledge what is actually ridiculous, to cease getting involved because of the the ignorance of it to the performing otherwise claiming anything absurd, when we cannot have to. (816d5-e5)
The latest Symposium is a tragedy to possess a keen analogous reasoning: it includes a replica of a single element of for example an existence, namely, exactly what the Protagoras terms and conditions an effective “symposium of stunning and you can a good males” whom “sample for each and every other people mettle when you look at the shared disagreement” by 
the inquiring and you can responding questions (347d3348a9). This is how Socrates reacts so you can Agathons address. It is how Diotima converses having Socrates. It will be the sort of symposium Socrates tries to lso are-introduce whenever Alcibiades “satyr-play” is fully gone, therefore the throng out-of Bacchic revelers has left.
Instead of the new Statutes, however, the fresh Symposium are a comedy too, because it also includes a replica of second best kind from symposium discussed in the Protagoras-you to definitely in which there are poets establish, and you will where people “dispute more issues that cant end up being founded that have people certainty” (347e17).
In the end, Alcibiades happens that have-somewhat adequate-a beneficial flute-lady (212c5-e3; evaluate 176e6-7). And even though she cannot gamble, the woman arrival inaugurates the newest subsequent refuse of the symposium toward one thing much more for instance the style of symposium reviled on the Protagoras as “good symposium of well-known, down and dirty fellows… exactly who, incapable of entertain each other with their individual dialogue, arranged the cost of flute-ladies, and you may spend large sums to learn the new voice of your own flute in place of her speak” (347c4-d2). This is the part of satyr-enjoy regarding the Symposium-satyr graphics was regular in the Alcibiades address.