Seven men at a drinking party in 416 BCE agree to give speeches in praise of love instead of getting drunk, mostly because they are all still hungover from the night before.

Then Alcibiades arrives, extremely drunk, and gives a speech about Socrates instead.

What it is like to read

About 20,000 words, and it is funny before it is profound, which is unusual for philosophy and is why it is the most enjoyable thing Plato wrote. The physician's speech is pompous. Aristophanes gets hiccups and has to be treated for them, which delays the proceedings. The comic playwright delivers the most beautiful myth in the book and the tragedian delivers the emptiest speech.

Narrated at two removes — Apollodorus telling a friend what Aristodemus told him, years later — and Plato flags the unreliability of the chain more than once.

The speeches, ascending

They are arranged so that each corrects the one before.

Phaedrus: love is the oldest god and makes people brave.

Pausanias: there are two kinds, Heavenly and Common, one aimed at the soul and one at the body. A defense of Athenian conventions with a philosophical frame on it.

Eryximachus, a doctor: love is the principle of harmony between opposites, operating in medicine, music and astronomy alike. Systematizing, and thin.

Aristophanes: the famous one. Human beings were originally spherical, with four arms and four legs and two faces, and were split in half by Zeus for their arrogance. Love is the search for your other half, and the longing is for a wholeness that existed and was lost. It is the only account in the book that explains why love feels like recognition, and Plato gives it to a comic poet.

Agathon, the host and a tragedian: elaborate, rhetorically polished, and says nothing.

Socrates dismantles Agathon in a minute of questioning — love is of something, and you desire what you lack, so love is not beautiful but wants beauty — then reports what he was told by Diotima, a priestess of Mantinea. Her account is the ascent: from one beautiful body, to bodies in general, to beautiful souls, to laws and institutions, to knowledge, and finally to Beauty itself. Love is the desire for immortality, pursued by those who can only get it through having children, and by others through works and ideas.

Alcibiades then wrecks the shape of the thing. Instead of praising love he praises Socrates: ugly as a satyr statuette on the outside and full of gold within, impossible to seduce, the only man who ever made him ashamed of himself. He describes trying to sleep with Socrates and being gently refused.

The placement is the point. An argument has just ascended from bodies to the Form of Beauty, and a beautiful man walks in to say that he loved a particular, difficult, ugly person and could not get past him.

Key passages

  • 189c–193d — Aristophanes' myth of the original spherical beings.
  • 199c–201d — Socrates refuting Agathon: love lacks what it loves.
  • 201d–209e — Diotima on love as the desire for immortality.
  • 210a–212a — the ascent to the Form of Beauty.
  • 215a–222b — Alcibiades on Socrates.
  • 223d — Socrates still arguing at dawn, then leaving for the Lyceum.

What is contested

Whether the ascent is the doctrine of the dialogue or one more speech.

Read one way, Diotima gives the answer and the rest is scaffolding. Read another, the fact that Plato surrounds the ascent with a myth that contradicts it and an erotic testimony that undercuts it means he is doing something less tidy — showing what the philosophical account of love leaves out, by letting somebody who loved a person arrive and say so.

Readers expecting a doctrine of love tend to find the first reading. The dialogue supports both, and the discomfort is probably intended.