The Symposium: Plato on Love

The Symposium is Plato's most beloved dialogue and one of the most influential treatments of love in any literature. Written around 385 BCE, it presents seven speeches in praise of Eros, the god of love, given by men gathered at a drinking party in Athens. The speeches range from the bawdy to the metaphysical. The cumulative effect is one of the most extraordinary movements in philosophy: from love understood as physical attraction to love understood as the soul's ascent toward the eternal.

Along the way, the dialogue gives us the speech of Aristophanes — the original story of soulmates — and Diotima's ladder, the centrepiece of what later came to be called Platonic love.

The Setting

The dramatic date is 416 BCE, the night after the playwright Agathon won first prize at the Lenaea festival. Agathon hosts a celebratory drinking party at his house. The guests, hung over from the previous night, agree to drink lightly and entertain themselves with speeches in praise of Eros instead. The speakers, in order, are Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates, and finally Alcibiades, who bursts in drunk and gives a speech in praise of Socrates rather than Eros.

The frame is more than scene-setting. Plato writes the dialogue from a triple remove: the events are reported by Apollodorus to an unnamed friend, having heard them from Aristodemus, who was actually there. We are reading a memory of a memory of a story. Plato is asking us to notice how love itself works through report and recollection.

The Seven Speeches

1. Phaedrus: Eros as oldest of the gods

Phaedrus opens by arguing that Eros is the oldest god and the greatest source of human virtue. Lovers are willing to die for each other — he gives the example of Alcestis — and an army composed of pairs of lovers would be invincible. This is love as a moral motivator: the desire to be admired by the beloved produces excellence.

2. Pausanias: Two kinds of love

Pausanias distinguishes two Aphrodites and so two kinds of Eros: the "common" love, which is purely physical and indiscriminate, and the "heavenly" love, which is directed at the soul and seeks moral and intellectual development. He uses this distinction to defend a particular Athenian convention — pederastic relationships oriented toward education — but the underlying point survives the cultural particulars: love can be base or noble depending on what it actually pursues.

3. Eryximachus: Love as cosmic principle

The doctor Eryximachus extends Pausanias's two-fold love to the entire cosmos. Health, music, weather, and divination all depend on the right harmony between opposites — and the principle that brings opposites into harmony is Eros. The speech is technical and somewhat pompous, but it makes love into something larger than human attraction: a universal force of attunement.

4. Aristophanes: The original soulmate myth

The comedian Aristophanes gives the dialogue's most famous speech. Originally, he says, human beings were round, with four arms, four legs, and two faces. Some had two male halves, some two female, some one of each. They were so powerful that they tried to storm Olympus, and Zeus split them in two as punishment. Each of us is now a half, longing for our other half. When we meet our match, we feel a love that "no one could possibly think to be the mere desire of sexual intercourse." It is the longing to be whole.

This is where the modern idea of "soulmates" originates. The speech is comic in tone but emotionally serious; Plato treats it as a real account that needs to be answered, not dismissed.

5. Agathon: Love as the youngest and most beautiful

The host gives a polished, rhetorically dazzling speech arguing that Eros is the youngest of the gods, the most beautiful, the most virtuous, the source of every good. It is essentially a hymn. Socrates, when his turn comes, will demolish it without even raising his voice.

6. Socrates: Love as longing for what one lacks

Socrates begins by interrogating Agathon. Eros is love of something. Love of beauty is, by definition, the love of what one does not yet have. So Eros cannot itself be beautiful. Eros is a lover, not a beloved. With this point established, Socrates retells what he learned from a wise woman from Mantinea named Diotima.

7. Alcibiades: Love as Socrates

The dialogue's final speech is given by the brilliant, dissolute, soon-to-be-traitorous general Alcibiades, who bursts in drunk and crowned with ribbons. Asked to praise Eros, he refuses and instead delivers a speech in praise of Socrates. He describes trying, and failing, to seduce Socrates — and he describes the strange, unsettling power Socrates has over him: the only person who has ever made him feel ashamed. The speech is both a love letter and a warning. The philosopher, Plato is suggesting, becomes a kind of object of love himself.

Diotima's Ladder

The metaphysical heart of the dialogue is Socrates' report of what Diotima taught him. Eros, she says, is not a god but a great daimon — a being between mortal and divine. He is the son of Resource and Poverty, always lacking and always seeking. The object of love is not beauty as such, but to "give birth in beauty" — to produce something lasting in the presence of beauty.

The ascent then proceeds in stages. The would-be lover begins with the right kind of education and:

1. Is first attracted to one beautiful body.
2. Recognises the beauty of all beautiful bodies as essentially the same, and his attachment to a single body loosens.
3. Comes to value beauty of soul more than beauty of body.
4. Sees the beauty of laws and institutions — the orderly arrangements of human life.
5. Sees the beauty of knowledge in all its branches.
6. Finally glimpses Beauty itself — eternal, unchanging, the source of all the previous beauties.

This is "Platonic love" properly understood. It is not the absence of physical desire but the use of desire as a starting point for an ascent. The lover does not stop loving the body; he comes to see what the body partook of, and follows it upward. The trajectory is identical to the journey out of the cave in the Republic: from particular instances to the Form itself.

What Plato Means by "Platonic Love"

The term "platonic love" today usually means a relationship without sex. That is a degenerate version of what Plato meant. For Plato, love directed only at one body is incomplete — not because sex is bad, but because the body is not the deepest object of the longing. The same impulse that draws you to a particular face is the impulse that, if developed, would draw you to the truth.

Read this way, "platonic love" is not the absence of desire. It is desire with its eyes open.

How to Read It

The Symposium is one of the easiest Platonic dialogues to start with. It is short, vivid, narratively driven, and full of distinctive characters. Read it straight through in a single sitting if possible; the cumulative arc of speeches is part of the argument.

The Hackett edition translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff is excellent for first readers. For deeper engagement, Stanley Rosen's Plato's Symposium remains a classic philosophical commentary. See our resources page for further recommendations.