SymposiumPlato

The Symposium is a drinking party at which each guest delivers a speech in praise of Eros. The speeches ascend in philosophical seriousness. Phaedrus speaks of love as the oldest god; Pausanias distinguishes common from heavenly love; Eryximachus extends love to a cosmic principle of harmony; Aristophanes tells his comic myth of the divided halves, each person searching for the other half from which they were split. Agathon praises love's beauty and youth in polished rhetoric.

Then Socrates speaks. He reports the teaching of Diotima, a priestess from Mantinea, who told him that Eros is not a god but a daimon, a spirit intermediate between mortal and divine. Love is the desire for what one lacks; it is born of poverty and resourcefulness together. The lover of beauty, if rightly guided, ascends from love of one beautiful body to love of all beautiful bodies, then to beauty of soul, of laws and institutions, of knowledge, until at last the lover beholds Beauty itself, eternal, unmixed, absolute. This is the "ladder of love," and to see Beauty itself is the highest human achievement.

The dialogue closes with the drunken arrival of Alcibiades, who delivers not a speech about Eros but a speech about Socrates, testifying to his strangeness, his self-control, and his erotic power. The concrete particularity of Alcibiades' devotion to one person stands in tension with Diotima's abstract ascent, and Plato leaves the tension unresolved.