The Symposium

The Symposium recounts a drinking party in Athens around 416 BCE at which a group of friends — among them the playwright Aristophanes, the tragedian Agathon, and Socrates — agree to take turns delivering speeches in praise of Eros, the god of love. What follows is one of the most celebrated meditations on the nature of love ever written, ranging from the comic to the sublime.

Each speaker offers a different vision: love as a bridge between mortals and gods, love as the pursuit of the beautiful, and — in Aristophanes' famous myth — love as the search for our other half, the severed remnant of an original whole. Socrates then recounts the teaching of the priestess Diotima, who describes love as a ladder that ascends from desire for a single beautiful body to the contemplation of Beauty itself. The dialogue closes with the drunken arrival of Alcibiades and his intoxicated, admiring account of Socrates.

Compact, dramatic, and endlessly quoted, Plato's Symposium is both a foundational work of philosophy and a vivid portrait of Athenian intellectual life — a text that has shaped how the Western tradition thinks and talks about love.