Was Diotima real, and does it matter?

I just had an exchange with Sandrine Berges (@sandrineankara) on Twitter about Diotima, who appears in Plato's Symposium espousing a theory of love and beauty that is strongly linked to Plato's theory of Forms. (As it happens I'm about to be discussing this in an episode on Renaissance philosophy, which will look at the reception of the Symposium in Ficino and others.) Sandrine objects to those who voice skepticism about the historical reality of Diotima: "The fact that skepticism is systematically expressed about the named women philosophers of antiquity does not entail that they or others didn't do philosophy. But it does shape the perception that they didn't." I can see her point, and for what it's worth I would tend to assume that Diotima was a real person because most Platonic characters are real, though not all are, we get quite a bit of biographical info on Diotima in the Symposium itself, and the level of detail seems a little strange if Plato just made her up - a contrast case would be, say, the rather generic Eleatic Stranger in the Sophist. I also wouldn't deny that it "matters" whether she existed for real because it is interesting to know how frequent and well-known women philosophers were in antiquity.

In a sense though not so much depends on the historical reality of Diotima herself since there are other examples of known female philosophers, plus the fact that Plato presents Diotima as a plausible character tells us that, even if he made her up, he considered the fiction to be one the audience could accept. (I mentioned a similar point on the podcast about women thinkers in the Upaniṣads and other texts: even if they aren't real, their presence suggests that there were real women sages in India.) However I would still be careful here, insofar as Plato's characters are always literary creations whether they are based on real people or not: he takes enormous liberties with them and this applies to Socrates or Parmenides no less than Diotima. The same goes for Aspasia in the Menexenus, who was certainly a real person but who is pretty certainly being used there so Plato can make some point or other, not just because he was, like, transcribing a speech Aspasia wrote. (Indeed I argue in a forthcoming paper that her being female is actually crucial to the points he wants to make: roughly, he wants to get us to focus on the idea of civic unity as a kind of mirror of the family, which is a gendered issue for Plato).

Anyway, to sum up my ideas about Diotima: (a) we can't be sure whether she existed since we have no other evidence, but I reckon she probably did, (b) if she did exist, then whatever the real historical Diotima was like, Plato is bound to be doing something creative with her as a personality, which we probably would understand better if we had independent information about her as we do with Aspasia, and (c) there were women thinkers in antiquity anyway, whatever we make of Diotima, so one shouldn't act as if this one famous case is somehow decisive for the wider issue. (To put it another way, one shouldn't be a skeptic about women thinkers in general, even if one is a skeptic about Diotima.)

On that last point I'd add that if we insist too much on the accuracy of classical evidence concerning women philosophers - e.g. concerning Diotima or the supposed female authors of Pythagorean texts - we are apt to miss a significant point, namely that in late antiquity there is a real change in the nature of our evidence. Though we don't have works actually by women philosophers from late antiquity, we do have credible and detailed portrayals of such figures by male writers, which we can often contextualize with additional historical information about these women. Good examples would be Monica in Augustine's works and Macrina in the works of Gregory of Nyssa, and of course Hypatia, the most famous example. If we are too insistent on how much we can say about the classical women, we may obscure this observation and thus fail to appreciate a real sea change in the textual evidence that tells us about women thinkers in history.

By the way for more on all this you can check out my series of videos on women thinkers in antiquity and the middle ages.