Banquet, Wine, Dead and Love in Plato

Abstract

This study deals with the various types of banquets among the Greeks, and in particular the use of wine, with a mention of the god Dionysus. In a well-ordered symposium, where men are able to communicate with each other and strengthen the bonds of friendship that unite them, one prefigures, in the Platonic dialogues, that eternal symposium that, in myth, the gods promise to the good, after death. There are, in the Phaedo, various meanings of the term “death”, the scientific, the psychological and the metaphorical, and it is precisely in the latter that death is associated with love for a delineation of the mortal immortality that alone for Plato is granted to men.