Symposium

right: first to tell which Love we must praise, and then to praise him worthily of the god. For we all know that there is no Aphrodite without Love. Now if she were one, Love would be one; but since there are indeed two, there must also be two Loves. And how are the goddesses not two? One, I take it, is older and motherless, the daughter of Heaven, whom we also name Heavenly; the other is younger, the daughter of Zeus and Dione, 180e whom we call Common.¹ It must be, then, that Love too, the one who works with the one goddess, is rightly called Common, and the other Heavenly. Now we must praise all gods, but at any rate we must try to tell what each of these two has received as his lot. For every action is like this: done of itself, on its own, it is neither beautiful nor shameful. 181a For example, what we are doing now, drinking or singing or conversing: none of these is beautiful in itself, but in the action, as it is done, so it turns out; for done well and rightly it becomes beautiful, and not rightly, shameful. So too with being in love, and with Love: not every Love is beautiful, nor worthy to have an encomium made of him, but the one who urges us to be in love well.

“Now the Love of Common Aphrodite 181b is in truth common, and does whatever comes his way; and this is the love with which the paltry sort of human beings are in love. Such men are in love, first, with women no less than with boys; then, with the bodies of those they are in love with rather than their souls; then with the most senseless they can find, looking only to getting it done, and heedless whether it is done well or not; and so it turns out that they do whatever comes their way, good and its opposite alike. For he also comes from the goddess who 181c is much younger than the other and has a share, in her birth,