Symposium

love; and this is the beautiful one, the heavenly, the 187e Love of the Heavenly Muse; but the common one is Polyhymnia’s,¹ which one must apply with caution to those to whom one applies it, so that one may reap its pleasure but implant no licentiousness, just as in our craft it is a great work to use well the desires that concern the craft of cookery, so as to reap the pleasure without disease. So in music and in medicine and in all the others, both human and divine, so far as it allows,² each Love must be guarded; 188a for both are present in them. For the composition of the seasons of the year, too, is full of both of these, and whenever the things I spoke of a moment ago, the hot and the cold and dry and wet, meet with the orderly love toward one another, and receive a temperate harmony and blend, they come bringing good seasons and health to human beings and to the other animals and plants, and do no wrong; but whenever the Love that goes with insolence gains the upper hand over the seasons of the year, he destroys many things and does wrong. 188b For plagues tend to arise from such things, and many other unlike diseases, both in beasts and in plants; for frosts and hails and blights arise from the greed and disorder of such matters of love toward one another, the knowledge of which, concerning the motions of the stars and the seasons of the years, is called astronomy. Further, all the sacrifices too, and the things over which divination presides — that is, the 188c partnership of gods and human beings with one another — are concerned with nothing else than the guarding and healing of Love. For all impiety tends to arise if one does not