other · 290
Ten virgins recline at a banquet in a garden and each makes a speech in praise of chastity; Arete — Virtue — presides and crowns the winner, and the whole closes with a hymn. It is Plato's Symposium with the subject inverted, and it is the first time a Christian writer answers a pagan classic by taking its form rather than attacking it. Methodius is also the most substantial critic Origen had in his own century: he attacked the pre-existence of souls and the doctrine of a purely spiritual resurrection, and he did it while borrowing Origen's allegorical method wholesale, which is why his position is harder to summarise than either side would like. Almost everything else he wrote survives only in Old Church Slavonic.
To do for chastity what Plato had done for love, in Plato's own form, and to answer Origen while doing it.
The one work of his that survives entire in Greek, and the earliest Christian imitation of a classical dialogue.