The Tragedy and Comedy of Tyranny: Plato's Symposium and Aristophanes's Frogs

Diogenes Laërtius reports Socrates saying that beauty is a "short-lived tyranny." Ironically, the beauty of Plato's Symposium immortalized the tyranny within. I argue that theoretical reflection, especially concerning Plato's dialogues, must be understood in tandem with our reflection on the theater of life—its beauty and its terror. The dramatic structure of the Symposium comes into focus under the lens of Aristophanes's humor, which exposes tyranny in the Symposium and Athens in the fourth century BCE.