Plato’s Symposium: Part 1 of 2

Plato's Symposium presents a series of speeches, each devoted to praising Eros, the Greek god of love and desire. Each account is beautiful but also deeply revealing, as each speaker interprets the nature of love through their own principled lens.

What lies at the heart of our highest praise for love? Why does Eros inspire such profound admiration across human experience?

In this two-part series, we explore the dialogue's speeches in order, beginning today with the first four.
Part 1: The Early Speeches We cover:

• Phaedrus — Love as the oldest god, inspiring courage and virtue.
• Pausanias — The distinction between Heavenly (noble, intellectual) and Common (base, bodily) love.
• Eryximachus — Love as a universal force of harmony, balancing opposites in nature, medicine, and the cosmos.
• Aristophanes — The famous myth of humans split in half, longing for wholeness and reunion.

Part 2 (forthcoming) will address the culminating speeches: Agathon's poetic praise, Socrates' account (via Diotima) of love as a ladder to the divine, and the dramatic intrusion of Alcibiades.

Required Reading For the full text, see this public-domain translation: Plato's Symposium (Project Gutenberg). There are many others online including audiobooks (I prefer the one from Ray Childs).

Optional: Leo Strauss has a helpful book on this dialogue that I definitely recommend.