A dinner-party of speeches in praise of Love, climaxing in Socrates' account of Diotima's ladder from bodily desire to the vision of Beauty itself.
The Symposium is Plato's dramatized account of a drinking party at the house of the playwright Agathon in Athens, at which the guests agree to take turns giving speeches in praise of Eros, the god of love. The frame is elaborate: Apollodorus retells the story secondhand, from an account he once heard from Aristodemus, who was actually present years earlier. This distancing device lets Plato present the dialogue as a kind of Athenian legend already being passed around by the time it is written down.
Each speaker approaches love from a different angle. Phaedrus praises love as the oldest and most honor-inducing of the gods, citing lovers' willingness to face death for one another. Pausanias distinguishes a noble love of character from a base love of bodies alone, and describes the elaborate Athenian customs that test which kind a suitor is pursuing. The doctor Eryximachus generalizes love into a cosmic principle of harmony found in medicine, music, and the seasons. Aristophanes, the comic poet, tells the myth of original round humans split in two by Zeus, so that love is the desire to be reunited with one's lost other half. Agathon delivers a florid, poetic eulogy praising Love's youth, softness, and mastery of every art.
Socrates then dismantles the whole approach: rather than praising Love with borrowed compliments, he interrogates Agathon and shows that love, by definition, desires what it lacks, so Love himself cannot be beautiful or good but must be a desirer of them. Socrates then recounts what a priestess named Diotima once taught him: love begins with desire for one beautiful body, rises to love of all beautiful bodies, then to beautiful souls, laws, and branches of knowledge, and finally arrives, as if climbing a ladder, at contemplation of Beauty itself, eternal and unchanging. The dialogue closes with the drunken arrival of Alcibiades, who instead of praising Love directly praises Socrates as a living embodiment of it, describing his indifference to hardship, drink, and physical beauty, and his uncanny effect on everyone who truly listens to him. The work matters because it fuses erotic desire, education, and metaphysics into one continuous ascent, giving later philosophy its most influential account of how appetite for beauty can be redirected into the pursuit of wisdom.
“that what desires, desires what it lacks, and doesn't desire unless it lacks”
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“At last Zeus, thinking hard, said: I believe I have a plan by which human beings can continue to exist, yet stop their unruly behavior, by being made weaker.”
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“beginning from these beautiful particulars and always climbing upward for the sake of that beauty, as though using rungs of a ladder, from one body to two, and from two to all beautiful bodies”
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“I say he's most like those figures of Silenus you find sitting in the sculptors' shops, the ones the craftsmen make holding pipes or flutes, which open up in the middle to reveal images of the gods inside”
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“Well, I've been bitten by something more painful, and in the most painful place anyone can be bitten -- struck and bitten in the heart”
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It is a dialogue set at a dinner party in Athens where guests take turns giving speeches praising the god of Love (Eros). The speeches build toward Socrates' account of a teaching by the priestess Diotima, describing love as an ascent from desire for physical beauty to contemplation of Beauty itself, and the dialogue ends with Alcibiades' drunken speech praising Socrates as the living embodiment of that love.
Diotima of Mantinea is a priestess Socrates says once instructed him on the nature of love. Through her, Socrates presents love as the desire for what one lacks, aimed ultimately at possessing the good and achieving a kind of immortality, culminating in the vision of Beauty itself, unchanging and separate from any particular beautiful body or thing.
Aristophanes tells a myth in which humans were originally round, four-armed, four-legged beings of three sexes who attacked the gods; Zeus split each one in two as punishment, and ever since, each half wanders in search of its other half. This is his explanation for why love feels like a search for a lost, original wholeness.
Socrates argues that love cannot itself be beautiful or good, because desire is always desire for something one lacks -- if Love already possessed beauty, he would not desire it. He then reports Diotima's teaching that love, properly pursued, rises from bodies to souls to laws and knowledge and finally to Beauty itself.
Alcibiades is a young, famous Athenian statesman who arrives drunk near the end of the party and, instead of praising Love, praises Socrates directly. He compares Socrates to a Silenus figure hiding golden images inside, describes his indifference to physical beauty and hardship, and recounts his own failed attempts to seduce Socrates.
It gives the fullest ancient account of eros as a philosophical drive rather than mere appetite, linking erotic desire to the pursuit of knowledge and the contemplation of an eternal, unchanging Beauty. Its 'ladder of love' image has shaped later Western thinking about desire, education, and the ascent toward transcendent truth.
Alcibiades 1 · Alcibiades 2 · Apology · Charmides · Cleitophon · Cratylus · Critias · Crito · Epinomis · Euthydemus · Euthyphro · Gorgias