Symposium (The Banquet of the Ten Virgins)
Symposium sive Convivium decem virginum · Συμπόσιον ἢ περὶ ἁγνείας
Contents
Translation in progress.
Translation in progress. The passages will appear here when they are ready.
About this work
- Author
- Methodius of Olympus
- Attribution
- authentic · Methodius's best-known work, a dialogue modelled on Plato's Symposium: ten virgins at a banquet given by Arete (Virtue) each deliver a speech in praise of virginity, and Thecla leads a closing hymn. It is his only work that survives complete in Greek.
- Older English translation
- Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6 (1886) (public domain, at CCEL; for comparison: our translation is made from the original first and checked against it afterwards) · Printed there as “The Banquet of the Ten Virgins”; the discourses are numbered as here.
- Date
- late 3rd century (disputed) · No internal date; usually placed in the last decades of the third century.
- Written at
- Olympus, Lycia (Asia Minor) (disputed)
- Language
- Greek
- Genre
- treatise
- Reference system
- discourse.chapter (Bonwetsch's chapters, Discourses 1–11). The opening dialogue of Eubulion and Gregorion is 0 (prologue). Discourse 11 is one division in the digital text; it is split here at the start of Thecla's hymn (11.1, 11.2), and the closing dialogue is 12 (epilogue), a numbering of this site.
- SBL abbreviation
- Symp.Not yet checked
- Clavis
- CPG 1810 (unverified)
- Text from
- G. Nathanael Bonwetsch, ed., Methodius, GCS 27 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1917) (Printed edition in the public domain; digital text CC BY-SA 4.0)
- Critical editions
- Herbert Musurillo and Victor-Henri Debidour, Méthode d'Olympe: Le Banquet, SC 95 (Paris: Cerf, 1963) (cited, not reproduced)
- CTS URN
urn:cts:greekLit:tlg2959.tlg001