Symposium

“If, then, Love lacks beautiful things, and good things are beautiful, he would lack good things too.”

“I, Socrates,” he said, “would not be able to contradict you, but let it be as you say.”

“No, it is the truth, my loved Agathon,” he said, “that you cannot contradict, since Socrates, at least, is not at all hard to contradict.¹

201d“And you I shall now let be. But the speech about Love which I once heard from a woman of Mantinea, Diotima,² who was wise in these things and in many others — and once, when the Athenians had sacrificed before the plague, she brought about a ten years’ postponement of the sickness; she it was who taught me too the matters of love — the speech, then, that she used to give I shall try to go through for you, starting from what Agathon and I have agreed, by myself, as best I can. One must, then, Agathon, as you told us, go through 201e him first, who Love is and of what kind, and then his works. It seems to me easiest, then, to go through it the way the stranger once went through it, questioning me. For I too said to her other things much like those Agathon was saying to me just now: that Love was a great god, and that he was of beautiful things; and she refuted me, then, with these same arguments with which I refuted him, that by my own account he was neither beautiful nor good.

“And I said, ‘How do you mean, Diotima? Is Love, then, ugly and bad?’

“And she said, ‘Hush!³ Or do you think that whatever is not beautiful must necessarily be ugly?’

202a“‘Very much so.’

“‘And whatever is not wise, ignorant? Or have you not perceived that there is something between wisdom and ignorance?’

“‘What is this?’