Book: The Symposium

Frame and Setting
The Symposium is set at a drinking party in Athens, held in 416 BCE at the house of the tragedian Agathon to celebrate his victory. The story reaches the reader at several removes: Apollodorus recounts it years later, repeating Aristodemus’s eyewitness account. The guests agree to forego heavy drinking and to pass the evening praising Eros, the god of love, each delivering a speech. The frame highlights memory, narration, and the distance between appearance and truth, fitting for a dialogue about desire.

Phaedrus to Agathon: Early Speeches
Phaedrus begins by calling love the oldest and most honorable of gods, a source of virtue that inspires lovers to noble deeds and sacrifice. Pausanias distinguishes two loves: Common Love, directed to bodies and pleasure, and Heavenly Love, directed to noble souls and moral improvement; he links good love to social conventions that guide it toward virtue. Eryximachus, a physician, expands love beyond human relationships to a cosmic force that harmonizes opposites in bodies, music, and seasons; when rightly ordered it fosters health and concord, when misapplied it breeds disease and discord.

Aristophanes’ Myth and Agathon’s Flourish
Aristophanes offers a comic yet poignant myth: humans were originally spherical beings split in two by Zeus, and love is the longing of each half for its missing counterpart. This tale explains desire, attachment, and the search for wholeness, and it dignifies varied pairings by tracing them to original natures. Agathon, the host, delivers a brilliant, lyrical encomium, listing love’s virtues, youth, delicacy, justice, moderation, and beauty itself. His speech celebrates love’s grace and beneficence but treats Eros as already perfected, an ideal that invites Socratic probing.

Socrates and Diotima: The Nature and Ascent of Love
Socrates declines to ornament love, instead questioning Agathon to show that love desires what it lacks; therefore Eros is neither beautiful nor good but longs for those qualities. He then reports teachings he learned from Diotima, a wise woman of Mantinea, who reframes love as a daimonic mediator between mortals and immortals. Love is the desire to possess the good forever, which, for mortals, expresses itself through reproduction, physical children or, at a higher level, the begetting of virtues, laws, and knowledge.

Diotima describes a “ladder” of love. A lover begins with desire for a single beautiful body, then recognizes the kinship of beauty across all bodies. Next, the lover turns to the beauty of souls, preferring character over form, and from there to the beauty of customs, institutions, and sciences. Finally, the lover contemplates Beauty itself: eternal, unchanging, not embodied in any single instance. Beholding this Form enables the soul to give birth to true virtue and to approach immortality through wisdom.

Alcibiades’ Entrance and the Living Example
The revelry is interrupted by the dramatic arrival of Alcibiades, drunk and crowned with garlands. He insists on praising Socrates rather than Eros, portraying him as a silenus figure, grotesque on the outside, filled with divine images within. Alcibiades recounts attempts to seduce Socrates and the philosopher’s imperturbable self-control, his courage in battle, endurance, and ironic power to enchant with speech. The portrait makes Socrates the embodiment of Eros rightly ordered: desiring wisdom, immune to flattery, guiding others upward.

Closing Note
As the night wanes, most fall asleep; Socrates continues arguing with Agathon and Aristophanes about the kinship of comedy and tragedy, then departs at dawn to begin his day. The gathering leaves a layered vision of love: from social custom and cosmic harmony to comic myth and poetic rapture, culminating in philosophical ascent toward the Beautiful itself, and grounded by Socrates’ lived example of desire disciplined by reason.