Abstract
In the Symposium, Plato refers repeatedly to theatre and in particular to Aristophanes’ Frogs and Euripides’ Bacchae, which share their Dionysiac nature with the Symposium: in the verbal competition of the philosophic symposium, Socrates is seen as the comic Aeschylus of Aristophanes’ Frogs (crowned by Dionysus like Socrates by Alcibiades), and also as the tragic Dionysus of Euripides’ Bacchae. The message we receive is that the mysterious “player who is able to write comedies as well as tragedies” is precisely the philosopher: Platonic philosophy is proposed as a new form of theatre that puts together comedy and tragedy in a single search for truth.
