Plato’s Symposion in the Arabic tradition

Plato's Symposion was very little known in the medieval Arab world. As far as it can be ascertained, no direct translation of the full Greek text was ever made; the Arab bibliographers say nothing on the subject, and no verbatim quotations that might derive from such a translation have ever been recovered. The title of the dialogue also was almost completely absent from the Arabic lists of the Corpus Platonicum: the catalogue of Theon of Smyrna, in the form in which it is preserved in the Fihrist and Zauzani's abridgment of Ibn al-Qifti's Ta'rlx al-hukamd', does not list it;1 Ibn Abi Usaibi'a, who gives a complete list of the tetralogies (with the exception of the Epistolai) according to the Thrasyllean organization of the Corpus Platonicum, records the title in transliteration only, without translating it (test. 1)-an indication that the dialogue was not known either to Ibn Abi Usaibi'a or to his source;2 the four parts of Galen's Synopses of the Platonic Dialogues (Cawdmi' kutub Afldtun) translated into Arabic by Hunain b. Ishaq contained neither a summary of the dialogue nor a mention of its title;3 Farabi's list of the Corpus Platonicum, finally, which apparently derives neither from that of Theon nor from