Plato’s Symposium and the Pandemic: an Ode to Community

The story goes something like this:

Plato wrote of a dinner party at which a number of notable men gathered to eat, drink wine and give (rather lusty) speeches in praise of Eros, the god of love and desire. Aristophanes, a comic playwright, gave the third speech of the evening. He put forward that there was a time when humans came attached as pairs — all of these…