Summary: Symposium

Socrates and Aristodemus go to a banquet at Agathon's, in the company of Aristophanes, Apollodorus, Pausanias and Eryximachus. The guests decide not to get drunk, but to drink lightly and pass the evening in discourse.

The proposed theme of the discussion is love. More specifically, it is to pronounce a eulogy of love, going from left to right, the most beautiful eulogy possible ¹.

Phaedrus begins. For him, the greatest good for a man is to have a lover. Love is the best guide in life, because it makes us shun ugly deeds and perform only beautiful ones. An army made up of lovers would be invincible because none of the men would be cowards and bad warriors, so as not to bring themselves into disrepute in the eyes of their lover.

He notes that lovers do exceptional things for love. For example, Alceste who dies for her husband and, rewarded by the gods, is resurrected.

Pausanias takes his turn to speak. For him, the problem was badly posed. He is being asked to sing about love as if it were one and the same thing, whereas there are several types of love. We need to find out which type of love is worthy of praise.

Any action is neither beautiful nor evil in itself; beautiful or ugly is our way of doing it. For example, drinking in excess is an action that disfigures us, whereas drinking sensibly honours us.

The same is true of love: It is evil to yield to a wretched man and in a wretched way; it is beautiful to yield in a beautiful way to a man of worth ². Pausanias praises "celestial Aphrodite ", which is practised between men, which is love of both body and mind, as opposed to " popular Aphrodite", which is practised between people of opposite sexes for merely sexual purposes.

Love of the body is inferior to love of the spirit, because the former is ephemeral: As soon as the flower of that body he loved has withered, he flies away with wings, betraying all his speeches and promises. Whereas he who loves the soul remains its lover all his life, because he adheres to something constant ³.

After this speech, Eryximachus announces that he is going to consider love from a much more general point of view. This does not only concern man, but characterises the relationships of all beings, animate as well as inanimate.

Medicine, for example, has discovered that illness can result from the presence in the body of two opposing, and therefore hostile, principles. Healing means injecting love and harmony into these conflicts.

Similarly, music seeks harmony (for example, between high and low notes); music is therefore a kind of love: Music is also, for harmony and rhythm, a science of amorous movements ⁴.

Even natural disasters (floods, frosts, epidemics...) stem from a disturbance in the amorous movements that link all these elements ⁵.

Thus, thanks to Eryximachus, we see the appearance of the multiple, immense or rather universal power of Love, the universal unifier ⁶.

Aristophanes, for his part, examines the origin of love: where does it come from that we love? Where does this feeling that drives us to unite with someone else come from? To answer this question, he uses a myth that has become famous as the "myth of Aristophanes".

Originally, men were androgynous: they were both male and female. They were shaped like a sphere, which moved by tumbling over itself. Their ambition led them to want to become equal to the gods. Zeus punished them for their temerity not by killing them, but by weakening them: he cut each of them into two halves, one male and one female.

But each, regretting the original unity, sought his half and wanted to join it:

Embracing, entwined with each other, burning to be one, they died of hunger and inaction, for they no longer wanted to do anything without each other ⁷.

¹ 177d
² 183d
³ 183e
⁴ 187c
⁵ 188b
⁶ 188d
⁷ 191a