Clown World

Geoffrey Steadman, in his introduction to his didactic Greek edition of the Symposium, says,

The role of memory and oral history in the telling of the Symposium becomes even more meaningful when we realize that all the party’s guests were real Athenians whom Plato’s contemporary readers could place at a significant moment in the recent past. Imagine that instead of the Symposium we were reading about a nightlong seminar on the nature of love attended by the statesman Robert Kennedy, singer Mick Jagger, theologian Paul Tillich, actor Rock Hudson, minister and activist Martin Luther King, philosopher Michel Foucault and General William Westmoreland on the eve of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964. [...] Needless to say, there would be much more on our minds than the discussion of love. Our attention would turn not only to the topic of love but also to the past and often tragic, future lives of the speakers, their occupations, and the relationship between these figures and the view of love that each espouses.

Sometimes the gulf between the previous generation and my own seems unbreachable, as of the people and events Steadman lists, only one was familiar to me. (My wife didn't do much better, either, so it's not just me!) So I don't think his point holds: in trying to make the events of the distant past more relatable, he has only served to distance the recent past, since in many ways, the almost-archetypal characters of Socrates and Alcibiades are infinitely more relatable than those of the bizarre clown world of the 20th century.