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Epilogue StillAwakeandDrinking Symposium As soon as a man starts drinking, he finds himself in a merrier, more self-indulgent mood than before, and as he increases the dose, he finds himself entertaining foolish fancies, and begins to think he has powers he does not really possess, and when he is very drunk he thinks he is a philosopher. . . . Laws 649a–b1 Without the ridiculous (geloivwn) it is impossible to learn the serious (spoudai'a), or any contrary without its contrary, if one is to be of good judgment (frovnimo"). Laws 816d–e If what I have been arguing for is true about comedy, then it might also have been a thought familiar to that one-time dramatist and lover of Aristophanes , Plato, and so, feeling merry and self-indulgent at the end of this project—it being a season of merriment—and entertaining the fleeting recollection of having been, in a previous life, a flute girl in the house of Agathon , I will make bold in closing to philosophize a little about the famous drinking party. Plato’s Symposium concludes with the “outrageous paradox”2 that the same man who can write tragedy can write comedy as well (223d). Unfortunately, the argument has been lost. Unlike Aristotle’s second book of Poetics, lost due to the accidental slaughters and casual mischances of history , the Socratic argument about comedy and tragedy is lost at its origin. 284 1. The translation here is that of H. A Mason, from his book Fine Talk at Agathon’s, 71. It is a little loose, a little freer than usual—in a word, perfect. 2. F. H. Sandbach, The Comic Theatre of Greece and Rome (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 13. 285 Aristodemus—the uninvited guest who originally related the speeches and happenings of the Symposium to our erstwhile source, Apollodorus—apparently drank too much and fell asleep (like the other revelers) and woke only for the stunning conclusion of the bout between Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon (Sym. 223c–d). Though little more than a child at the time of the banquet, Apollodorus (who relates the story of the symposium) should himself share some of the blame for the lost argument since he took the trouble to check the story with Socrates much later and had time and opportunity to have him rehearse it—but he didn’t, or he did and forgot (173b). And then this is all fiction anyway, so the real nonexistence of the argument is due to the coyness of Plato, author of the comedy we are discussing. Perhaps , on the other hand, the claim was so obviously true that the proof of it is, as they say, trivial, though history is more mendicant than usual in getting the truth to cash out. Professor Allen, in a footnote to his translation of Symposium, says that “the argument must have been that tragedy and comedy are opposites; the same art has knowledge of opposites; therefore, anyone who is by art a tragic poet is a comic poet too.”3 Curiously, he treats the dialogue as ending with the entrance of the revelers in his accompanying commentary (109), thereby skipping both Alcibiades’ ecomium and the report of the sleep-soaked argument , and does not discuss the issue of the unity of the arts further. While a critic stuck in the trammels of historicism could only treat Socrates’ argument as (given the times and his audience) deliberately provocative and offensive , and Plato’s presentation of it as irony (or provocation and offense), in the course of this book it has become clear not only that Professor Allen’s suggestion has something to it, but how that something, which he leaves as a bare suggestion, could begin to be fleshed out and dressed. Let us begin somewhat symbolically: Socrates spends a night drinking in Agathon’s house two nights after Agathon’s tragedy takes first prize; in the course of the evening’s discussion he convinces Agathon and Aristophanes of the “outrageous paradox” and then he leaves early in the morning to spend the day in his usual way (223d). A drinking party in the house of tragedy is apparently an appropriate psychic preparation for, as well as plausible re-creation of, the daylight of philosophy. In the recreation of the philosopher tragedy and comedy discover their deep and original unity, as if they 3. Reginald E. Allen, The Symposium (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 170n. This agrees with the sort of...

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