Aeacus: son of Zeus and Aegina, the eponymous nymph of the island near Athens, on which Aeacus lived. He was famous for his piety, for being Achilles’ grandfather, and for becoming one of the judges of the underworld. Plato is the first to name these judges, at Apology 41a.
Aeschylus: c. 525-456, the earliest of the three outstanding Athenian tragic playwrights; he established the basic forms of classical tragedy.
Agamemnon: the leader of the Greek army during the legendary Trojan War of the Homeric poems; son of Atreus and brother of Menelaus; he was murdered on his return from Troy by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus.
Agathon: born c.445. In his time, he was a highly regarded tragic playwright, though only a few lines of his work are extant now. He was famous as a modernizer (e.g. for not drawing his plots from myth and for not integrating his choral odes with the plots of his plays), for his somewhat overblown poetry, for his physical beauty, for his affair with PAUSANIAS, and for having been influenced by the sophistic movement. He left Athens in 407 and emigrated to the court of King Archelaus of Macedon, who was a great patron of the arts.
Aphrodite: the goddess of attraction and sexual love (originally of fertility); married to HEPHAESTUS and lover of ARES.
Apollo: god of disease, medicine, music, reason, civilization, and prophecy. Delphi, in the district of Pytho, was sacred to him as the god of prophecy.
Archelaus: king of Macedon 413–399 BCE. He continued the unifying work of his predecessor Perdiccas II, and was also famous as a patron of the arts: Euripides and Agathon, the tragedians, accepted invitations to his court, for instance. He apparently also issued such an invitation to Socrates, but Socrates refused. He was, at least for a while, a valued ally of Athens. In painting him as the type of immorality, then, Plato is justifying Socrates’ judgement over that of Athens.
Ardiaeus: a fictional character in ‘Er’s Journey into the Other World’, who was supposed to be a dictator in Pamphylia (a region occupying part of the coast of what is now Turkey, north-west of Cyprus).
Ares: the god of the frenzy of war. He fell for APHRODITE’S charms and they had a notorious affair which ended when Aphrodite’s husband HEPHAESTUS ensnared them in flagrante delicto in a magic net he had made and summoned all the rest of the gods to come and look.
Aristophanes: C 450-C385. The greatest playwright of Athenian Old Comedy, notorious for its slapstick obsessions with sex, food, alcohol, farting, and belching. It was also a powerful tool of social and political satire—no public figure was safe (Socrates himself is unfairly parodied in the Clouds, as is AGATHON in Thesmophoriazousae). His speech in Symposium approximates to his plays only in the element of the fantastic.
Atalanta: mythical female athlete; like Artemis, she enjoyed hunting and virginity; she was so sure of her abilities that she promised to marry anyone who could beat her in a race, but the cunning Hippomenes slowed her down by dropping golden apples, which she could not resist.
Athena: the patron goddess of Athens, and the goddess of skill at war and of traditionally female skills, especially weaving.
Atreus: accursed father of Agamemnon and Menelaus; see note to Statesman 268e (p. 146).
Atropos: one of the three Fates; her name means ‘implacable’.
Callicles: unknown outside Gorgias, but surely a historical person, rather than a Platonic fiction, since Plato tells us about his love for Demus (481d–e, 513b), and names his deme (495d) and three of his friends (487c). He may well have died young, and therefore left no further traces in the historical record. Nevertheless, Plato uses him as a type: he is a conventionally educated young Athenian aristocrat who has been influenced enough by the new ideas current at the end of the fifth century to be a spokesman for a materialistic and hedonistic personal philosophy.
Cebes: see SIMMIAS OF THEBES.
Clotho: one of the three Fates; her name means ‘weaver’ and she was supposed to weave the threads of a person’s life.
Critias: c. 460–403, an Athenian, first cousin of Plato’s mother. An associate of Alcibiades, he was opposed to the Athenian democracy, and was one of the most extreme among the Thirty Tyrants, the oppressive dictatorship which seized power in Athens from 404 to 403. He was killed in the fighting which accompanied the overthrow of the tyranny. He was a poet, dramatist, and prose writer, of whose works some fragments survive (DK 88). He has a prominent part in the Charmides (one of Plato’s early dialogues, named after Charmides of Athens, Plato’s uncle and a member of Socrates’ circle).
Cronus: father of Zeus and chief deity before Zeus took over; Zeus raised an army of horrendous giants etc. to defeat Cronus and his fellow Titans and imprison them in Tartarus; the best account is in Hesiod (Theogony 453-885).
Diotima: though the name is attested elsewhere, she is probably a fiction of Plato for the purpose of the dialogue. Even if she is, or is based on, a historical figure, she has become in the dialogue a mouthpiece for Platonic doctrine. As such, she allows Socrates to show up the superficiality of his friends’ speeches in a polite manner appropriate to the context, and to exhibit his question-and-answer technique while pretending to obey the rules of the contest and give a speech. Since there is a delicious ambiguity whether the intellectual side of Love’s mysteries is all that she initiated Socrates into, it is tempting to see her as one of those educated courtesans whose prime historical example is Aspasia (common-law wife of Pericles). Her primary model, however, is that of the itinerant mystic: see note on Symposium 201d (p. 127).
Ephialtes: a giant in mythology who, with his companion Otus, was notoriously hostile to the rule of the Olympic pantheon. Their most famous escapade was to launch an attack on heaven by piling Mount Ossa on top of Mount Olympus (high above which was the abode of the gods), and then Pelion on top of Ossa.
Epimetheus: the son of Iapetus and Clymene, and brother of PROMETHEUS.
Er: the fictitious subject of the extremely vivid near-death experience with which Plato concludes Republic. His name is meant to suggest the Middle East; his father’s name – Armenius – is reminiscent of Armenia; and Er is said to come from Pamphylia (see ARDIAEUS).
Eros: the Greek god of love and sexual desire. One of the oldest gods; according to one genealogy, he was the son of Aphrodite and Ares.
Eryximachus: one of the new professional doctors of the end of the fifth century, who was obviously well known in Athenian intellectual circles, since he crops up from time to time in other Socratic writings of Plato and Xenophon.
Fates: the goddesses who controlled the destiny of each human being, from birth to death. They are CLOTHO, LACHESIS and ATROPOS. Although immortal, even gods fear them.
Ganymede: a good-looking legendary prince of Troy with whom Zeus fell in love. In his only act of homosexual seduction (compared to his many heterosexual affairs), Zeus took him away to Olympus to act as cup-bearer to the gods.
Glaucon: brother of Plato and Adeimantus; one of the two secondary interlocutors of Republic.
Gorgias: c.480-376, from Leontini in Sicily; one of the giants of the sophistic movement, and a well-known figure in Athens. He specialized not in philosophy, but in the budding art of rhetoric, in which he was a great innovator; although much of his style seems horribly artificial to us today, it seems to have dazzled his contemporaries. ‘Starting with the initial advantage of having nothing in particular to say, he was able to concentrate all his energies upon saying it’ (J. D. Denniston, Greek Prose Style (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 12).
Hades: see PLUTO.
Hephaestus: the lame smith of the Olympic pantheon (originally with all the magical connotations that accrue to smiths the world over). In one tradition, mankind was his creation: this, as well as his role as metal-worker, probably underlies his role in ARISTOPHANES’ speech at Symposium 192d-e.
Hermes: god of communication, heralds, magic, and wayfarers.
Hesiod: fl. c.700; after Homer, considered the second greatest epic poet of Greece; his Theogony orders the gods into rationalistic genealogies and recounts stories about many of them, while Works and Days is full of practical and moral advice for rural daily life.
Homer: fl. C.750 BCE. The greatest epic poet of Greece; his Iliad sings of the death and glory of the Trojan War, while his Odyssey recounts the fanciful and marvellous adventures of one hero, Odysseus, returning from the war.
Lachesis: one of the three Fates; her name means ‘she who allots’.
Minos: legendary king of Crete, and builder of the labyrinth. The son of Zeus and Europa, he was credited with establishing a good legal code in Crete, which is presumably what entitles him to become a judge in the underworld. One of the other judges, Rhadamanthys, was his brother.
Niobe: in Greek myth the archetype of grief; she boasted that, because she had borne twelve children, she was better than Leto, who had only borne two; but those two were the deities Apollo and Artemis, who then killed all her children; in her grief Niobe was turned into a weeping rock, which was a famous spectacle.
Oceanus: the personification of the ocean. Son of Uranus and Gaia, and father of all rivers.
Odysseus: the resourceful hero of Homer’s Iliad and (especially) Odyssey, which tells the stories of his arduous journey home from the Trojan War, plagued by the hatred of the god POSEIDON.
Otus: see EPHIALTES.
Pausanias: scarcely known apart from Symposium, and chiefly known as AGATHON’S lover. This probably explains his entry into this dialogue, where he is the champion of homosexuality—a rather outspoken champion, to judge by Xenophon’s criticism in his own Symposium (8. 32-4).
Phaedo: a close friend of Socrates, from Elis in the Peloponnese. Little is known of him beyond what can be gathered from the Phaedo dialogue. According to Diogenes Laertius (philosophical biographer of the third century CE), he was taken captive by the Athenians, was ransomed at the instance of Socrates, and thereafter practised philosophy ‘as a free man’ (Lives of the Philosophers, 2. 105). It is not known why the dialogue is named after him, but possibly it was he who gave the original, first-hand account of Socrates’ death to Plato himself.
Phaedrus: c.450–390. Phaedrus is mentioned briefly in Plato’s Protagoras, but figures prominently in Symposium, where he gives the first speech about love. He was exiled from Athens in 415, when he was caught up in the scandal, which also brought down Alcibiades, surrounding the mutilation of the Herms just before the vast Athenian expedition set sail for Sicily. Herms were busts of Hermes on top of square-cut blocks of stone, set up at road junctions in Athens. They had erect phalluses, and on one night they all had their phalluses broken off, and were otherwise mutilated. Phaedrus returned to Athens after the end of the war, when a general amnesty was declared.
Phaethon: son of Helios (the personification of the sun). One day Helios allowed him to drive the chariot of the sun across the sky; the horses ran wildly and Zeus, fearing the chariot might burn the earth, destroyed Phaethon with a thunderbolt.
Pluto: also known as Hades or Dis. Brother of Zeus and Poseidon, in a tripartite world he gained the underworld as his domain, while Zeus took the upper air and Poseidon the surface of the earth.
Polus: from Acragas in Sicily, a pupil of Gorgias, and imitator of his rhetorical techniques. He was the author of a handbook on rhetoric, and a professional teacher of the subject. Plato’s portrait of him is severe: he is rude and unintelligent. Callicles’ robust self-reliance would almost have seemed attractive to Plato, especially in his youth, if it were not so arrogant; but there is little attractive about Polus’ superficial ideas, though Plato may well have taken them to be typical of his times.
Poseidon: brother of Zeus and Pluto, and lord of the surface of the earth (hence mainly of the sea), as Zeus is of the upper air and Pluto is of the underworld.
Prometheus: his name means ‘foresight’, which perhaps explains why Zeus used him as he did at Gorgias 523d–e: since foresight is his domain, he deprived humans of their foreknowledge of their death, so that it always comes as a surprise. More generally, he is seen in Greek myth as a benefactor of humanity, especially by providing them with the civilizing and evolutionary knowledge of fire.
Protagoras: c.490–420, from Abdera, on the north coast of the Aegean. The first professional sophist, i.e. itinerant professor of higher education. He had a long and successful career, travelling widely throughout the Greek world and making very large sums of money. He aimed to teach upper-class youths how to attain personal and political success, putting considerable emphasis on skill in speech and argument, in which he developed a systematic method of teaching. He is said to have written a number of works in this area, and on more general ethical and philosophical topics. A few quotations are preserved, expressing agnosticism on the existence of the gods and extreme subjectivism, according to which every belief is true for the person who holds it. The latter position is criticized at length by Plato in Theaetetus.
Rhadamanthys: brother of MINOS. Little legend accrued to him, apart from his being just and hence becoming one of the judges in the underworld.
Simmias of Thebes: Thebes was the chief city in Boeotia, about sixty kilometres north-west of Athens. Simmias and Cebes are mentioned in Crito (45b), as having brought money to procure Socrates’ escape from gaol.
Sirens: although in Homer they were wicked women whose charming singing lured sailors to their death, by Plato’s time they were well on their way (largely through Pythagorean influence) to becoming virtual demigods of song, and singers of universal harmony.
Sisyphus: one of the great sinners of Greek myth, though details of his crime against Zeus are unclear. His punishment was to roll a stone up a hill, which then rolled back down and he had to start all over again.
Socrates: 469–399 BCE. Born in Athens, where he spent all his life, apart from periods of military service, engaged in the informal discussion of philosophical (mainly ethical) topics. Though he never engaged in formal teaching, he gathered round himself a circle of mainly younger men, including Plato, many of whom were opposed to the extreme form of democracy current in Athens. He was put to death on vague charges of impiety and corruption of youth, which were probably politically inspired. His philosophical views and methods were a major influence on Plato, but the ascription of any specific doctrine to Socrates is a matter of much controversy. He wrote nothing himself, but in the fourth century many accounts of his personality and teaching were written, mostly friendly, but some hostile, with different degrees of approximation to historical truth. The most substantial element of this literature to survive is in the dialogues of Plato; Socrates also figures in a number of works by Xenophon. The Clouds of Aristophanes, first produced in 423, gives a contemporary caricature.
Solon: fl. C.590, Athenian statesman and lyric poet; one of the constant members of the varying lists of seven sages of Greece; considered in Athenian popular history as the founding father of democracy in Athens.
Tantalus: perhaps the most famous of the great sinners of Greek myth. Of the several versions of his story, the best-known has him standing in a pool of water, with a fruit-laden tree above him. Every time he bends down for a drink, the water recedes; every time he reaches up for some food, the branches withdraw. This was punishment to fit the crime, because he had killed and cooked his son Pelops and served him up to the gods to see if they could tell.
Thersites: the only non-aristocrat to have a speaking part in Homer’s Iliad (2. 212 ff.); it is not a favourable part, however, and to later ages he was the archetype of the buffoon or villain.
Theseus: son of POSEIDON; legendary early king, and national hero, of Athens; a great many tales were told about his various adventures.
Timaeus: active in the latter half of the fifth century BCE. Astronomer and philosopher, he was elected to high office in Locri. Unknown outside Plato’s Timaeus and Critias.
Tityus: for attempting to rape the Titan Leto, he was punished in Hades by being spreadeagled on the ground and having vultures rip out his liver (which was seen as the seat of desire). Each night the liver grew again, ready for the vultures the next day.
Young Socrates: of Athens. He is present in Theaetetus (147c) and Sophist (218b), and he is the interlocutor of the Stranger from Elea in Statesman. ‘I have no reason whatever to think this is a fabricated character or a stand-in for someone else’ (D. Nails, The People of Plato (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 269). The name ‘Socrates’, however, was common and we cannot be sure who ‘young Socrates’ might have been.
Zeus: king of the gods. As the most elevated of the gods, he is taken by Plato to be the appropriate god for philosophers.
For information on others appearing or mentioned in the ten myths collected here, see Explanatory Notes. For more information on the characters appearing or mentioned in Plato’s dialogues see D. Nails, The People of Plato: A Prosopography of Plato and Other Socratics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002). For more information on the deities appearing or mentioned in Plato’s dialogues see M. Grant and J. Hazel, Who’s Who in Classical Mythology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).