Summary
Apollodorus agrees to repeat an account he recently told Glaucon. He learned it from Aristodemus, who attended Agathon’s banquet, and checked parts with Socrates. The layered narration emphasises that the speeches reach the audience through memory.
Aristodemus meets Socrates unusually bathed and wearing sandals. Socrates invites him to Agathon’s celebration. On the way Socrates falls behind and stops in thought, leaving Aristodemus to enter without his host.
When Socrates eventually arrives, Agathon invites him to share his couch and jokingly hopes wisdom will pass between them. Socrates replies that wisdom does not flow from fuller to emptier people like water through wool.
After dinner, the guests decide against heavy drinking. Eryximachus proposes dismissing the flute-player and making speeches in praise of Love, a god neglected by poets. Each person will speak in order.
Phaedrus calls Love one of the oldest gods. Love creates shame before dishonour and ambition for noble conduct. Alcestis dies for Admetus, and Achilles chooses death to avenge Patroclus. Love is praised as a source of courage and virtue.
Pausanias argues that there are two Loves. Common Love seeks bodies and immediate gratification without regard for goodness. Heavenly Love values character and supports an enduring relationship directed towards education and virtue. Customs should be judged by whether they make lover and beloved better.
Aristophanes develops hiccups, so Eryximachus speaks next. As a physician, he finds love in healthy and unhealthy bodily desires. Medicine, music, seasons, agriculture and sacrifice all require a knowledgeable harmony of opposing tendencies.
Aristophanes then offers a myth. Original humans were spherical double beings of three kinds: male, female and androgynous. Zeus split them after their rebellion. Each half now searches for reunion with its other half, and Love attempts to heal the wound in human nature.
The halves initially embraced without attending to survival, so Zeus rearranged their bodies to permit sexual union and temporary satisfaction. Yet people joined by love want something deeper than physical contact. Their unspoken desire is to become one and recover wholeness.
Agathon praises Love as the youngest, most beautiful and delicate god. Love dwells in gentle souls, avoids violence and possesses justice, temperance, courage and wisdom. His elaborate speech ends with a rhythmic celebration and receives enthusiastic applause.
Socrates says he misunderstood the task: the others have attributed every beautiful quality to Love without asking whether it is true. He questions Agathon. Love must be love of something and desire what it lacks. Since Love desires beauty and goodness, Love cannot already possess them completely.
Socrates recounts instruction from Diotima. She taught him that what is not beautiful need not be ugly and what is not wise need not be ignorant. Correct opinion stands between knowledge and ignorance. Love likewise occupies an intermediate position.
Diotima describes Eros as a daimon between mortal and immortal. At Aphrodite’s birth, Poverty conceived him by Resource. He is needy, rough and homeless like his mother, but inventive, bold and acquisitive like his father. He repeatedly gains and loses what he pursues.
Love is therefore a philosopher: wisdom is beautiful, and the lover of wisdom stands between knowledge and ignorance. The wise do not seek wisdom because they possess it, while the wholly ignorant do not recognise their lack.
Diotima asks what lovers of beautiful and good things want. They want the good to become their own and to remain theirs. Love can therefore be described as the desire for perpetual possession of the good.
Mortals seek continuity through generation. Bodily pregnancy produces children; pregnancy of soul produces poems, laws, virtues and education. Creation allows mortal beings to participate in immortality through succession, memory and enduring influence.
Diotima outlines an ascent. A learner begins by loving one beautiful body, then recognises bodily beauty in many. The learner turns towards beautiful souls, practices and laws, and then towards the beauty found in different forms of knowledge.
Finally the learner may behold Beauty itself: eternal, unchanging and not dependent upon a face, body, custom or particular thought. Contact with this reality makes possible the production of true virtue rather than mere images of virtue.
When Socrates finishes, Alcibiades arrives drunk and crowned with ivy and violets. After discovering Socrates beside Agathon, he alternates between jealousy, affection and theatrical complaint. He agrees to praise Socrates instead of Love.
Alcibiades compares Socrates to Silenus statues containing divine images and to Marsyas, whose music enchants. Socrates uses words alone to expose listeners’ lives. Alcibiades feels shame because he knows he neglects himself while pursuing political honour.
He recounts trying to seduce Socrates in the hope of exchanging physical attractiveness for wisdom. Socrates warns that Alcibiades may be offering apparent beauty for something real and that wisdom cannot be transferred so easily. They sleep beneath the same cloak, but Socrates remains self-controlled.
Alcibiades also praises Socrates’ endurance during military service. He tolerates cold, hunger and wine, remains composed during retreat and saves Alcibiades after he is wounded. His outward oddity conceals courage and seriousness.
He warns Agathon that Socrates reverses the expected relation: apparent admirers become those who pursue him. Socrates exposes Alcibiades’ speech as an attempt to separate Socrates from Agathon.
More revellers enter and the ordered banquet collapses. Most guests leave or sleep. At dawn Socrates is still arguing that the true dramatist should understand both comedy and tragedy. After Agathon and Aristophanes fall asleep, Socrates leaves, bathes and continues his day as usual.