Symposium

At a banquet celebrating the poet Agathon's victory, seven Athenians each deliver a speech in praise of Eros. Phaedrus invokes the god's antiquity, Pausanias distinguishes earthly from heavenly love, Aristophanes tells the myth of the split souls, and Agathon praises love's beauty — but it is Socrates, reporting the teachings of the priestess Diotima, who transforms the conversation into philosophy. Love, she taught him, is neither beautiful nor ugly but a daemon mediating between mortal and divine, driving the soul upward through stages of beauty until it glimpses Beauty itself. Then Alcibiades arrives drunk and delivers a devastating portrait of Socrates as the man who embodies this philosophy. Translated by Benjamin Jowett.