I absolutely did not get the pro-man-on-boy-love propaganda in the speeches. I don’t know if it was because of my naivety, or because the English was bowdlerized. Of course I did understand the bawdy homosexual banter in Alcibiades’s speech, but I didn’t connect it up with what had gone before. This was long before Kenneth Dover brought AG pederasty into the public sphere of frank communication.
I’m sure that I read this on my own, with no instruction. I recall being confused by the reminders (“he said”, etc.) that this is a narrated dialogue, with a complex narrative structure. This makes me sure I didn’t read the Symposium under a teacher, who would have warned me about this. I just kept on reading, leaving aside the parts that confused me. I must have been mystified by most of the Symposium.
Now I’m working on the Symposium in AG, with the aid of Louise Pratt’s Eros at the Banquet. This is a very well-planned effort to help early-intermediate AG students wrestle with a big, important unadapted work.