Diotima and Penia as Outsiders in Plato’s Symposium

In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates relates what he has learned from Diotima, a foreign woman. This paper argues that her status as a foreigner helps us better understand what she taught. For example, she depicts Eros’s mother, Penia, as a political outsider who generates a new relationship between the mortal and the divine. Similarly, Diotima herself generates a new understanding of one’s relationship to one’s ideas with her claim that “all human beings are pregnant in both body and soul.” In the Athens of Plato and Socrates, there was constant dispute over whether immigrant women could give birth to citizens. In this controversial context, Diotima’s expansion of the notion of pregnancy beyond corporeal reproduction operates against the culturally dominant obligation on women’s bodies to procreate. Surprisingly then, Plato’s text emphasizes how the political disadvantage of a foreign woman results in an epistemic advantage.