Relationship To Plato's Symposium
There has been some dispute about whether Xenophon's or Plato's work was written first. Henry Graham Dakyns, a Victorian-era scholar who translated many works by both Plato and Xenophon, believed that Plato knew of this work, and that it influenced him to some degree when he wrote his own Symposium.
However, most later scholars have taken one particular argument, the argument against an army of lovers in Socrates' final speech, as proof that Xenophon had based his work on Plato's, since this concept is mentioned in Plato's work. The speech seems to parody or pastiche the erotic speeches in both Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus.
Though some scholars have argued that the long speech of Socrates contains later additions, and opinion is divided as to which author was first to write a Socratic symposium, recent scholarship generally holds that Xenophon wrote the Symposium in the second half of the 360s, benefiting from Plato's former Socratic literature.
Read more about this topic: Symposium (Xenophon)
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