Symposium

The Symposium stages a drinking party at which each guest, including Aristophanes and the tragedian Agathon, praises Eros, building toward Socrates's speech, attributed to Diotima, who taught him that erotic love, rightly pursued, ascends a ladder from one beautiful body, to bodies generally, to beautiful souls, laws, and knowledge, and finally to Beauty itself, an eternal Form underlying every particular beautiful thing. Aristophanes's own contribution, the comic myth that humans were once round, four-armed beings split in two by Zeus and now search for their lost half, offers a different account of love as the pursuit of wholeness rather than ascent toward abstraction. Alcibiades's drunken, unrequited tribute to Socrates at the end dramatizes the gap between erotic theory and experience. As with most Platonic dialogues, the decade given rests on stylometric inference, not external record.