The Symposium

A drinking party in honour of a poet, and the most beautiful thing Plato ever wrote about love. Seven guests each rise to praise Eros: the lawyer, the doctor, the comedian Aristophanes with his myth of the divided halves forever seeking their other, the tragedian Agathon, and finally Socrates, who reports the teaching of the priestess Diotima — the ascent from a single beautiful body up the ladder of love to Beauty itself. Then a drunken Alcibiades crashes in and delivers the strangest praise of all: of Socrates. Read section by section beside the Greek, on the Stephanus grid scholars have cited for five centuries.