Author: M. C. Howatson

Plato wrote the Symposium; M. C. Howatson translated it. Her English version appeared in 2008 in the Cambridge Texts series on the history of philosophy, edited by Frisbee C. C. Sheffield, who supplied the introduction and notes. The dialogue puts a drinking party in Athens in about 416 BC and has each guest in turn make a speech in praise of love, ending with Socrates reporting what the priestess Diotima had taught him and with Alcibiades arriving drunk to say what Socrates is actually like. Margaret Howatson is a classicist who edited The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature, the standard one-volume reference on Greek and Latin writers, and taught at Oxford. The name on the cover of a translated text is doing a different job from the name of an author.