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Like the goddess Demeter, Diotima from Mantineia, the prophetess who teaches Socrates about eros and the "rites of love" in Pluto's Symposium, was a mystagogue who initiated individuals into her mysteries, mediating to humans esoteric knowledge of the divine. The dialogue, including Diotima's speech, contains religious and mystical language, some of which specifically evokes the female-centered yearly celebrations of Demeter at Eleusis. In this essay, I contextualize the worship of Demeter within the larger system of classical Athenian practices, and propose that Plato borrowed Eleusinian language because it criticized conventional notions of the divine, thereby allowing him to reimagine the possibilities for the philosophical process among humans. All this flows from the arguments of Plato-laughter and movement; people getting up and going out; the hour changing; tempers being lost; jokes cracked; the dawn rising. Truth, it seems, is various; Truth is to be pursued with all our faculties. Are we to rule out the amusements, the tendernesses, the frivolities of friendship because we love truth? Will truth be quicker found because we stop our ears to music and drink no wine, and sleep instead of talking through the long winter's night? -Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf's Plato did not stop his ears or refrain from wine, and Socrates in Plato's Symposium did indeed talk through the long winter's night. The scene Hypatia vol. 21, no. 2 (Spring 2006) 0 by Nancy Evans 2 Hypatia is a damp, cold January night in perhaps 416 BCE, and the poet Agathon has just won his tirst tragic victory. He holds a party at his house, attended by group of young and handsome aristocratic Athenian men. Some of them are lovers and some are would-be lovers. Socrates, neither the youngest nor the most handsome, is also present. Instead of drinking the night away into oblivion, the group of friends agrees to drink moderately while honoring Eros, the god of desire, with a series of speeches praising love. In the course of this evening, Socrates gives a speech in praise of Eros that suggests a redefinition of love. In fact, Socrates' praise of Eros becomes a philosophical discussion of Being' that redefines the relationship not simply between human erotic partners, male-female as well as male-male, but even the relationship between human and divine. Interestingly, Socrates claims from the outset that the speech he gives is not his own, but rather one he heard from a woman. It is the prophet Diotima from Mantineia, Socrates says, who taught him about love, about Eros, and about eros and the divine.Diotima is in fact more than an ordinary prophet; like the goddess Demeter, Diotima is a sort of mystagogue, one who initiates individuals into her Mysteries and who mediates to humans information about the divine. This essay will explore Diotima's speech as recalled by Socrates in Plato's Symposium, looking to the language and images that specifically evoke the yearly celebration of Demeter and Kore (the Maiden, also known as Persephone) at Eleusis. Drawi...

Modern scholars studying Eleusis have consistently made some assumptions about the sanctuary and the famous rites that took place there throughout antiquity. Although we have no evidence for altars within the sanctuary walls, archaeologists continue to produce plans with altars in the courtyard before the temple, while historians of religion propose narratives for the Mysteries that feature scenes of animal sacrifice. While precise details of the famous nocturnal teletai may remain unknown to us, we can infer other significant details about the festival from the evidence that we do have. This essay argues that the type of animal sacrifice known as thusia that regularly took place at public altars in ancient Greece was deliberately excluded from the interior of the sanctuary at Eleusis. Beginning with a review of the development of the sanctuary, the essay focuses on the Anaktoron and Telesterion, and then turns to important features that were consistently located outside the sanctuary walls. Objects were dedicated both within the sanctuary walls and outside them. The analysis of the locations where the dedications were made suggests that mediation with the divine during the nocturnal teletai was not accomplished by priests officiating over animal sacrifices. Altars were absent from the interior of the sanctuary because the Mysteries entailed a more egalitarian experience of the gods than did the traditional customs of thusia.

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This paper will explore one of the more creative and influenti;il moments of mythmaking and fictionalizing from the ancient Mediterranean world: the (re-)invention of prophetic madness as recorded in Plato's Phaedrus. The fictionalized encounter between Socrates and Phaedrus ranged over topics ranging from homoerotic lovers to the skills of rhetoricians. In the midst of this dialogue Socrates famously interrupts himself with the palinode where he invokes ancient rites of purification that facilitate human access to knowledge ofthe divine. Here Socrates investigates the links between prophecy and divine madness, and ultimately applies the purported gifts of this madness to pursuits that are generally considered to be more rational. Overlapping social identities and cultic traditions are alluded to in the palinode; drawing from the work of Walter Burkert, Eric Hobsbawm, Bruce Lincoln and Jonathan Z. Smith the paper concludes with an inquiry into whether the multiple religious identities that lie behind this dialogue could be thought to advance and invent a tradition that later came to be known as philosophy.