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Text Box: First Intermission.  Table Service Resumes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Text Box: Agathon, thinking with his lust, sees this as an opportunity to trade in his older lover, Pausanias, for a young and more beautiful lover.   He agrees on one condition: that Phaedrus will not only judge, he will be the self-awarded prize. 

 

 

 

 

 

Text Box: Eryximacha  counters with her conditions.  The prostitutes must leave, no heavy drinking and string instruments must be gently plucked but she will not have any of the decedent sound of wind instruments associated with Dionysus. 

 

 

 

 

Text Box: The arrangement angers the Dionysian, Aristophanes and especially upsets Pausanias.  Agathon responds by ordering his own lover, Pausanias out of the room. 

 

 

 

 

 

Text Box: Phaedrus begins stiffly with stage fright.  He recites his carefully metered lesson but after  a while he gains confidence and breaks away from his teacher's rigid style and sings of love as the source of honor and courage in war.

 

 

Text Box: At the end of Phaedrus' song, Pausanias reenters with a vengeance.  He criticizes Phaedrus and then sings and dances his way through an elaborately stage song about earthly love and and heavenly love. 

 

 

 

 

 

Text Box: Aristophanes, having a distaste for the severity of Spartan manners, fakes being overcome with all sorts of bodily ailments and passes his turn to Eryximacha.  He then uses all the noises a body can produce to annoy and distract her.