Socrates is among the guests. Usually, he's disheveled, but he's all spiffed up for this occasion. And he's excited about the topic, too, because he says if there's one thing he knows about, it's love.
The first to speak on love is Phaedrus, an aristocrat who in his later life would flee his native Athens in order to avoid the death penalty following an indictment he received from the courts on charges of impiety. Supposedly, he was one of the people who went around defiling statues of the gods.
Love on Phaedrus' account is, first of all, edifying. It's a way for the lover to guide his beloved aright. Phaedrus laments the fact that armies are not made up of lovers and their beloved, for with the bound of love, who could break the strength of the city if their armies are so united? Love is, according to Phaedrus, the very height of virtue.
The next speaker is Pausanias. Recall that this house party is hosted by Agathon, a pretentious tragic playwright. He is also a young chap, and the occasion for the house party is that his guests have gathered to celebrate Agathon's win in a tragedy contest. Pausanias is Agathon's wealthy elder lover.
According to Pausanias, there are two kinds of love, a baser kind that is too oriented toward the physical relationship and which often trades in dishonesty, or at the very least selfishness, and then there is the higher type of love, similar to what Phaedrus had mentioned, where the lover wants only the best for his beloved. Pausanias says that the beloved ought to seek out this higher kind of love, and this is what the lover ought to want to have for the beloved, a kind that makes the beloved more virtuous. Nevertheless, sometimes the beloved fails to be guided aright in the love relationship, but nevertheless that is the risk one ought to take in love, says, Pausanias.
Funny enough, Pausanias' relationship with Agathon would not last. He would, at a future point, abandon his beloved.
Next up for speaking is supposed to be Aristophanes, but he has an awful case of the hiccups. But really this is just a cover for the fact that he thinks Pausanias a dope. He bides his time to prepare a good encomium, an assault on Pausanias' selfish speech.
Speaking in Aristophanes' stead is the next person in the circle, Eryximachus. He is an older man and a doctor, and he views love through the lens of medicine and healing.
On Eryximachus' account, love is extremely natural, and it is infused in all things. It is what makes plants grow, bodies grow, bodies heal, music sweet. Like Pausanias before him, he accepts the fact that there are two kinds of love. The bad kind of love is what would make a plant or body decay, a mind irrational, music sour, and so on. Eryximachus says it is our task in all our walks of life to cultivate the good kind of life that leads towards goodness across every domain.
Having recovered from his 'hiccups' (laughing spell, really), it is Artistophanes' turn. Note that Aristophanes is a comic playwright, a quite famous one, and famously he skewered Socrates in a comic play called The Clouds, wherein he betrays Socrates as a man who has his head in the clouds, quite literally, trying to discover what makes thunder. The Socrates in the play concludes it's the gods' flatulence.
Aristophanes' account cannot fail to be comical, and we cannot know to what extent he intended his encomium to be an elaborate joke, but in any case, it is the most famous perspective on love the Western world knows, for better or for worse.
Once upon a time, says Aristophanes, humans were quite powerful, so powerful that they threatened the gods. In the beginning, humans had two heads, four arms, four feet, and so on. They were very much like how two humans might appear if they were infused together. The gods, fearing humans but still wanting human around for their worship, decided to split us in half. This created all kinds of confusion, and with the diffusion of humans, the two halves developed along different paths, leading to all the chaos we know today. Since that time, we go around looking for our literal other half, and love just is that desire we have to find our other half.
Following Aristophanes, the speaker is our very own man of the hour, Agathon. He says love is a god that possesses only beautiful, delicate people (much like himself) and fills these better people with all the virtue and skill imaginable. When Agathon concludes his arousing speech, the guests break out in thunderous applause.
The final speaker is Socrates, Athens' wisest man, the inaugurator of Western philosopher. Supremely ironic, Socrates says he doesn't know how he's going to top Agathon's speech, because it was so eloquent, and meanwhile Socrates only knows how to speak the truth. As a matter of fact, he says he doesn't know how he's going to make an intervention at all, since not one of the guests has said a truthful thing about love.
Socrates says he too needed educating on this matter, once upon a time. As a young man, he met the priestess Diotima, who gave him the true account of love. According to Socrates, citing Diotima, love is not an old god or a young god. In fact, love is not a god at all; it is a spirit, a spirit that is capable of possessing anyone and everyone and leaving at any time. This spirit is neither beautiful nor ugly, great nor base, but something in between. Naturally, though, it seeks out good things, beautiful things, truthful things. But given that Love was born from Father Poverty and Mother Resource, Love always has a wily nature, which must be cultivated by the soul who is inhabited by Love.
According to Socrates, the path to true love begins with the appreciation of sights and sounds but then moves toward the love of mind until it arrives at the love and appreciation of beauty, goodness, and truth themselves, wanting to cultivate those forever after. As such, love seeks immortality. Love is wanting for another person to be eternally good, true, beautiful, and to help that person in this way.
Just as Socrates concludes his speech, a drunken Alcibiades crashes the party. Alcibiades was a very notable courageous and handsome Athenian, outwardly the model of a Greek hero. However, later in his life, he would betray his democratic Athens and side with the enemy and be known among his peers and forebears as a traitor. But at the time of this house party, he knew no such ill reputation.
Alcibiades can barely stand, let alone walk, and yet he makes his drunken way to Agathon to present him with a wreath. While in the process of wooing Agathon, Alcibiades resets his blurry eyes and recognizes Socrates among the guests. He grows indignant.
He then recounts a story, an encomium to Socrates. He tells how despite the fact that Socrates looks like an ugly satyr, with his bulging eyes and lips, his snub nose, his round belly, Socrates has a hidden treasure inside him. He is the very model of virtue. Alcibiades often invited Socrates to his to drink and try to get him to stay late to seduce him. But Alcibiades great looks and fame made no difference. Socrates would not make Alcibiades his beloved. And yet he seemed to tease that he would, but ultimately his goal was not physical love but to cultivate virtue in Alcibiades. He would try to talk to Alcibiades to encourage him to be a better person.
Socrates therefore shines as a living example of someone who prioritized practicing what he preached, making love a matter of wanting good things, beautiful things, and true things for the one you love, forever.
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