The Symposium

The Symposium is told at second hand. Apollodorus repeats to a companion an account he had from Aristodemus, who was present years earlier at a banquet in the house of the poet Agathon, celebrating Agathon's victory in the tragic competition. The frame of remembered, relayed talk sets the dialogue at a distance and gives it the air of a story preserved for its worth.

Rather than drink heavily, the guests agree each will deliver a speech in praise of Love. Phaedrus opens by calling Love the eldest of the gods and the source of honor and courage, the force that makes a lover ready to die for the beloved. Pausanias answers that there is not one Love but two, a common and a heavenly, and that only love joined to virtue deserves praise. The doctor Eryximachus widens Love into a principle of harmony running through medicine, music, and the whole of nature.

Aristophanes the comic poet tells a myth. Human beings were once whole, round, double creatures who were split in two by Zeus, and love is the longing of each half for its other half, the desire to be made one again and to heal the wound of separation. Agathon, the host, then praises Love as the youngest, fairest, and most virtuous of the gods, delivering an ornate and self-admiring speech.

Socrates speaks last among the invited guests and changes the method. By questioning Agathon he shows that love must lack what it desires, so love cannot itself be beautiful or good but must be the desire for them. He then reports the teaching of Diotima, a wise woman of Mantinea. She describes Love as a great intermediate spirit between mortal and divine, neither wise nor ignorant but a lover of wisdom, and defines love as the desire for the everlasting possession of the good. From this comes the ascent: rightly guided, the lover rises from one beautiful body to all, then to beautiful souls, institutions, and sciences, and at last glimpses beauty absolute, unchanging and pure, of which all lovely things are only reflections.

The philosophical climax is interrupted. The drunken Alcibiades bursts in and, instead of praising Love, praises Socrates. He compares him to a carved Silenus, ugly on the outside but containing images of the gods within, and confesses that Socrates alone makes him ashamed of his own life and that his attempts to seduce the philosopher failed against Socrates' self-command. The party dissolves into revelry; by dawn only Socrates is still awake and reasoning, before rising and going about his ordinary day.