The piece below is part of an ongoing project in which Carla Nappi, an historian, and Carrie Jenkins, a philosopher, reimagine Plato’s Symposium into a collection of poems that centre women’s voices. It transforms a speech from Symposium, “Socrates Questions Agathon,” into the story of what might have happened if Sappho and Medusa had become lovers. Instead of Socrates pressing Agathon to anatomize and dissect the depiction of love that the poet had offered in his own speech, here Sappho herself is anatomized into rocks and gems and fossils through the love of her interlocutor. (Readers who are interested in reading this piece in conversation with the original text will spot the section of Plato’s “Socrates Questions Agathon” that informed its corresponding poem by following the numbers in each poem’s title: 198B-C, 198D, etc.)
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Geist 111