Symposium

are many and of all kinds, and Love too is one of them.’

“‘And who,’ I said, ‘is his father, and who his mother?’

203b“‘It is rather long to tell,’ she said; ’but all the same I shall tell you. When Aphrodite was born, the gods were feasting, Resource the son of Metis among the rest.¹ And when they had dined, Poverty came to beg, as one would when there is good cheer, and she was at the doors. Now Resource, drunk with nectar — for there was no wine yet — went into the garden of Zeus and, weighed down, slept. So Poverty, plotting, because of her own want of resource, to get a child from Resource, lies down 203c beside him and conceived Love. That is why Love has become Aphrodite’s follower and attendant, since he was begotten at her birthday feast, and is at the same time by nature a lover concerned with the beautiful, and Aphrodite being beautiful. Since, then, he is the son of Resource and Poverty, Love is set in a fortune like this. First, he is always poor, and far from being tender and beautiful, as the many think, but is hard 203d and squalid and barefoot and homeless, always lying on the ground and without bedding, sleeping in doorways and on the roads under the open sky,² having his mother’s nature, always a housemate of lack. But after his father, again, he lays plots for the beautiful and the good, being courageous and bold and intense, a formidable hunter, always weaving some devices, a desirer of intelligence and resourceful, loving wisdom through all his life, a formidable sorcerer and poisoner and sophist; and he 203e is by nature neither immortal nor mortal, but on the same day now he flourishes and lives, when he has resource, and now dies,