# Reading Plato's Symposium, in the late 1950s, in English translation, a brief memoir

**URL:** <https://www.textkit.com/t/reading-platos-symposium-in-the-late-1950s-in-english-translation-a-brief-memoir/20828>\
**Category:** Civilization and Culture of the Greeks and Romans\
**Created:** [July 27, 2024, 8:44pm UTC](https://www.textkit.com/t/reading-platos-symposium-in-the-late-1950s-in-english-translation-a-brief-memoir/20828 "2024-07-27T20:44:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![hlawson38](https://www.textkit.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/bb73d2/32.png) [@hlawson38](https://www.textkit.com/u/hlawson38)\
**Post date:** [July 27, 2024, 8:44pm UTC](https://www.textkit.com/t/reading-platos-symposium-in-the-late-1950s-in-english-translation-a-brief-memoir/20828/1 "2024-07-27T20:44:03Z")

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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.