Symposium
Benjamin Jowett (1871)
A dramatic dialogue set at a drinking party (symposium) in Athens around 416 BCE, where the playwright Agathon's guests—among them Aristophanes, the physician Eryximachus, and Socrates—each deliver a speech in praise of Eros, the god of love. The sequence culminates in Socrates relating the teaching of the priestess Diotima, who reframes love as a ladder ascending from beautiful bodies to the eternal Form of Beauty itself, before a drunken Alcibiades bursts in to praise Socrates. One of Plato's literary masterpieces, it is a foundational Western text on the nature of love, desire, and beauty.
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