In Plato’s Symposium, the central insights are gleaned from a wise woman from whom Socrates learnt the single thing to which he laid claim to expertise: ta erotika. Since there is a widespread view that Plato stands at the head of a tradition of philosophical thinking in which women are eclipsed, or marginalised, this fact has been seen as significant. This chapter explores whether Diotima’s gender is significant for the philosophy of the Symposium. Gender categories are an explicit feature of this text, but Plato’s playful and provocative use of them is not just a dialectical ploy to provoke reflection on the social norms around sexuality and gender that held sway in his day; toying with them exposes the contingency of gendered categories and, ultimately, their irrelevance to the philosophical life. The wisdom of Diotima is that philosophy is beyond gender; it is, in that respect at least, inclusive.

Platonic and Plotinian conceptions of beauty played a role in Ficino’s understanding of beauty in De amore and subsequently in Leone Ebreo’s (Judah Abravanel’s) understanding of beauty in Dialoghi d’amore. Plato’s Symposium is an inspiration to both but does not determine the structure of either author. This essay contrasts Ficino’s presentation of seven friends’ viewpoints on love and Leone’s dialogue between Philo and Sophia, who together create PhiloSophy. While Ficino’s letters to Cavalcanti, to whom he dedicates the work, provide further documentation of Ficino’s intent to experience a higher form of love, Leone’s view of Aristophanes’ androgyne as based on a pre-Talmudic Hebraic concept of Adam as a hermaphrodite indicates his subordination of the Symposium to the Hebraic tradition.

The essay shows the influence of Plotinus’ idea of love of intellect alone for the heavenly Venus and the influence of the Middle Stoics and Middle Academics on Ficino’s belief that there are generative seeds of virtue and knowledge in the human soul. Alberti’s concept of concinnitas and measure are at the root of Ficino’s notions of harmony of sounds and harmony of sights. Leone, like Ficino, values the senses of hearing and sight and disparages the senses of taste, smell and touch.

Both authors correlate beauty and virtue. Ficino is a major source for the Renaissance tendency to view the picture of a beautiful woman as a picture of a virtuous woman. Sophia and Philo both grasp the relationship between beauty and virtue and that the highest goal is a love relationship with the Divine Creator; nevertheless, Philo resorts to lecherous longing for Sophia despite recognizing that coppulazione is the moment of a human’s intellectual vision of God.

Marsilio Ficino adopted the concept of love from Plato and the Neoplatonists in order to elaborate his philosophy of humanity and divinity. In commenting on Plato’s Symposium, he employed amor/eros for his philosophical theology according to which God and the universe are united: love is that which binds all levels together. As such a mediator and power, it engages humans as a species, as individuals, and in societies. Love is the formula that makes the metaphysical reality intelligible and teachable. Love divides the good from the abject and sets the standard that is attainable and binding for all.

This chapter explores the different treatments the topic of love received in the Symposium and the Phaedrus. The Symposium expressly addresses the question of the character and benefits of eros – and the question of its nature. It is a philosophical enquiry into this phenomenon, conducted by a set of mature men (and the memory of one exceptional woman) who have personal experience in this topic and have thought about it. In the Phaedrus, by contrast, the topic is addressed from the point of view of a would-be lover trying, through a speech addressed to the young and inexperienced man, to persuade him to submit to his overtures and desires. For Plato, eros is crucial to the practice of philosophy, a force which can take us in two separate directions, towards the good and towards the bad.

With special reference to Diotima’s teaching in Plato’s Symposium, this chapter discusses the central importance to Hermetic spirituality of beauty and reverence (eusebeia), Hermetic psychological theory, and the centrality of imagination to the Hermetic concept of “becoming aiōn” and gaining cosmic consciousness.

How is it that female figures—though whether they are properly female is debatable—come to voice in Christian texts of late antiquity? How, in particular, do their voices enter into debates about desire, traditionally the province of masculine speech? And what do these virginal voices sound like? Are they distinct and recognizable to our reading ears? There is a story to be told, and it starts with Thecla. We might say that every Christian virgin who arrogates voice in some sense follows Thecla, speaking her desire in speech that both is and is not her own. Thecla, in other words, both inaugurates and serves as a figure for virginal voice in its startling, in-breaking forcefulness. But Thecla, however definitively novel, follows others as well. This chapter first backtracks to consider Thecla’s precursors, Diotima (Plato, Symposium) and Leucippe (Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon). It then follows the reworking of those figures in the Acts of Thecla and Methodius’ Symposium respectively. Finally, it explores the legacy of Thecla in two little-known late ancient Latin dialogues that feature notably voluble virgins—the Lives of Saints Helia and Constantina, respectively.