British Museum 1865,1118.39

Attic Black Figure Amphora

Painter of Berlin 1686

c. 540 BC

Plato's Symposium

Spring 2014

Jenny Lynn

In this course, we will be reading selections from Plato's Symposium as well as passages from other works, ancient and modern, which shed light on it.  One 6-page paper will be due in the final week of the quarter (topics will be due in the sixth and rough drafts will be due the seventh week); there will also be three tests, on or about the end of the third, sixth, and ninth weeks.  Students' work will be assessed as follows:

Paper (including draft and editing of others' drafts)	25%
Quizzes and tests	40%
Participation and preparedness	35%

Daily assignments will be listed on our class assignments page.

The following books for the course should be available at the Bay Tree Bookstore:

• Dover, Kenneth J. Plato: Symposium. Cambridge University Press, 1979.
• Waterfield, Robin, trans. Plato's Symposium. Oxford University Press, 1998.

The follwing books and articles will be on reserve or on eCommons:

• Nussbaum, Martha. The Fragility of Goodness. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. (pages 165-199 on eCommons)
• Vlastos, Gregory. Platonic Studies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. (pages 3-42 on eCommons)
• Nussbaum, Martha, and Juha Sihvola. The Sleep of Reason: erotic experience and sexual ethics in ancient Greece and Rome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
• Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: and other essays on Greek love. New York: Routledge, 1989.
• Halperin, David M., John J. Winkler, Froma I. Zeitlin, edd. Before Sexuality: the construction of erotic experience in the ancient Greek world. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.
• Dover, Kenneth J. Greek Homosexuality. New York: Vintage, 1978.
• Dover, Kenneth J., ed. Plato: Symposium. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
• Rose, Gilbert P., ed. Plato's Symposium. Bryn Mawr: Bryn Mawr Commentaries, 1981.
• Griffith, Tom, trans. Symposium of Plato. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
• Waterfield, Robin, trans. Plutarch: Greek Lives. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. (Life of Alkibiadeson eCommons)
• Vernant, Jean-Pierre, "One...Two...Three: Eros." In David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, and Froma I. Zeitlin. Before Sexuality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990, pages 465-478 (eCommons)