St. John's College Spring Lecture Series: The Dread Head of Gorgias: Agathon’s Speech in Plato’s Symposium.

January 13, Carl “Tripp” Young, assistant professor of classics at Hillsdale College, will present “The Dread Head of Gorgias: Agathon’s Speech in Plato’s Symposium.”

In the Symposium, Plato staged a contest in which the philosopher, Socrates, competes with the poets, Aristophanes and Agathon, concerning their respective claims to wisdom. However, the medium through which they all compete is logoi (speeches), or more specifically, a kind of epideictic speech, the encomium. In other words, rhetoric is the medium through which philosophy and poetry compete for the prize of wisdom. This talk will focus on the contest between Agathon and Socrates because, Young will argue, Agathon represents the most significant danger to Athenian society and is the clearest threat to Socrates’ claim to wisdom.