The School of Life's recreation of Plato's Symposium at the Latitude festival

I don’t wear a mauve toga very often. But it was my fashion item of choice at this year’s Latitude Festival, the annual extravaganza of music, theatre, comedy and literature held deep in the Suffolk countryside. On behalf of The School of Life, I hosted one of the more unusual events on the programme – a recreation of Plato’s Symposium, the first great conversation in the history of the art of living.

In the fourth century BC, Plato wrote a dialogue recording the conversation that was alleged to have taken place at a famous banquet attended by the philosopher Socrates and a smattering of ancient Greek playwrights, playboys and aristocrats. The subject of their discussion was nothing less than love, but it also strayed into ambition, truth, friendship and other potential ingredients of what the Greeks called ‘the good life’. There was plenty of booze to accompany the fine words – ‘symposium’ was their term for a drinking party – and Socrates managed to out-drink and out-talk the lot of them.

The forty honoured guests at our re-enactment of Plato’s Symposium were naturally greeted by slave attendants wearing white togas who, in typical ancient Greek style, helped them remove their shoes, anointed their hands with perfumed oils, and placed garlands of ivy on their heads. They were seated at long tables in a beautiful wood, surrounded by towering trees and enclosed by a forest of ferns, far away from the blaring speakers of the main festival arena. Ancient Greek flute music wafted around them.

My official title was ‘symposiarchos’, the King of the Feast, which gave me the right to determine the mixture of wine and water in the ‘krate’, the communal bowl. It also permitted me to impose forfeits on anybody who didn’t obey my instructions, although I refrained from inflicting the favourite penalty at ancient Greek banquets, which was to make the person strip naked and run around the other guests three times. Following ceremonial rules, everyone was asked to stand, sprinkle a libation of wine on the ground, and then chant a hymn to Dionysus, god of wine and fertility. And at that moment, the feasting began.

Chanting a hymn to Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine, at the Latitude Festival

As well as a feast of food, there was a feast of conversation. The guests were seated with strangers, and between them lay a conversational menu to simulate their discussions. There were quotes from the Symposium to chew over, like this comment from the playwright Aristophanes:

‘Each of us is a mere fragment of a man; we’ve been split in two, like filleted plaice. We’re all looking for our other halves.’

The guests were also offered other conversational questions that helped them delve into the dilemmas of the art of living, such as: Do you live more in the past or in the future? Has money expanded or diminished your sense of personal freedom? What do you think is the best approach to growing old?

What was the point of all this conversational adventuring? It was more than an excuse to wear a bunch of leaves in your hair and be served wine by slaves. Modern society is suffering from a plague of superficial talk. Not only do we trot out the same old clichéd questions – How was your weekend? What was the weather like? – but new technologies are failing the improve the quality of our conversations. How many of the 100 billion text messages sent last year involved profound discussions? And what about all those one-line emails?

We need to find ways of creating conversations that allow us to take off our masks and talk openly about the issues that really matter in life. We also need to break out of the straitjacket of our own worldviews, and enter the minds of people who have different backgrounds, experiences and beliefs than our own. It is time we all learned from the ancient Greeks, and made the conversational symposium a part of everyday life.

Yes, I really did wear a mauve toga in my role as symposiarchos, King of the Feast

‘The images developed from the late medieval period with the express function of inspiring devotion were not simply the “Bible of the unlettered” in the sense of translating words into images. Rather, they conveyed the essence of Christ’s sacrifice, the meaning of suffering, by promoting and facilitating an empathetic imitation of Christ.’

The idea of the imitation of Christ’s suffering had its most memorable form in the practice of flagellation which emerged in thirteenth-century Europe. This involved methodically flogging or whipping your own body using specialised implements such as rods, switches and cat-o-nine-tales, in the hope that you were experiencing the pain that Christ went through and were therefore bringing yourself closer into communion with him. Flagellation took off in the mid-fourteenth century during the Black Death. The plague was believed by many Christians to express the wrath of an angry God, and the rather sadomasochistic activity of flagellation was considered an effective way of appeasing him through a form of self-punishment.

Flagellants in the Netherlands during the Black Death, 1349. They carry the image of Christ before them to aid their empathetic ‘imitatio’.

Standing before a painting or sculpture of the crucifixion can only be an empathetic second best to a serious session of flagellant self-harm. So just how successful has Christian art been at creating an empathetic response in the viewer? Early depictions of the crucifixion were quite genteel, and did little to convey the suffering involved. But in the sixteenth century artistic depictions became far more gory. The classic example may be the German artist Matthias Grünewald’s ‘Crucifixion’ from 1515, the central panel on the Isenheim altarpiece. The upturned fingers at the end of Christ’s torturously extended arms makes the experience look genuinely painful. It is as if he has been stretched out on an inquisitor’s rack before being nailed to the cross.

Matthias Grünewald, ‘Crucifixion’ (1515)

The current exhibition at the National Gallery in London, The Sacred Made Real: Spanish Painting & Sculpture 1600-1700, offers several works that rival Grünewald’s effort to arouse our empathy. The most successful, in my view, is Gregorio Fernández’s painted wood sculpture ‘Dead Christ’ (c.1630). Christ has been taken off the cross and is lying completely naked apart from a loincloth. The corpse is still unwashed and awaiting burial. His half-lidded eyes look absolutely dead, his head tipped to the side like a car-accident victim. My own eyes were drawn to the blood – drooling from his gaping mouth, pouring out of the gash below his right nipple, caked on his knees and left shoulder. And then there were the gruesome holes in the feet and hands where the nails had been extracted.

Detail from Gregorio Fernández, 'Dead Christ' (c.1630)

Gregorio Fernández, 'Dead Christ' (c.1630)

I tend not to have a strong bodily empathetic reaction to these visual representations of Christ’s suffering (although I do occasionally get a few goose bumps). This may partly be because I don’t have the appropriate religious beliefs that might connect me to what I’m looking at. But it is also because the works do not draw me far enough into Christ’s perspective on the event – I can see what is happening to him but don’t feel I am really looking through his eyes or have entered into his skin. I remain outside the event as a spectator.

The one work that catapults me into Christ’s experience is Salvador Dali’s 1951 painting of the crucifixion, known as ‘Christ of Saint John of the Cross’. Although devoid of nails, blood or crown of thorns, by lifting me to the heights of Christ’s perspective, it has a greater empathetic effect than even the most blood-strewn of the Spanish works at the National Gallery.

Salvador Dali, 'Christ of Saint John of the Cross' (1951)

I do, however, recommend a visit to the exhibition. Perhaps the artworks will make your body twitch more than mine, and give you a tiny taste of the realities of flagellation.