Symposium

she made talk; and once she asked, ‘What do you think, Socrates, is the cause of this love and this desire? Or do you not perceive how dreadfully all the beasts are disposed whenever they desire to beget, both those that walk and those that fly, sick 207b all of them and disposed by love, first about mingling with one another, then about the rearing of what is born; and how for these the weakest are ready both to fight it out with the strongest and to die for them, being themselves racked with hunger so as to rear them, and doing everything else? For human beings,’ she said, ‘one might think do this from reasoning; but the beasts — what is the cause of their being so 207c disposed by love? Can you tell?’

“And I said again¹ that I did not know; and she said, ‘Do you then intend ever to become formidable in matters of love, if you do not consider these things?’

“‘Why, it is for this very reason, Diotima, as I said just now, that I have come to you, knowing that I am in need of teachers. But tell me the cause of these things too, and of the others concerned with matters of love.’

“‘If, then,’ she said, ’you trust that love is by nature of what we have often agreed, do not marvel. For here, 207d by the same account as there, mortal nature seeks, so far as it can, to be always and immortal. And it can do so only in this way, by birth: that it always leaves behind another, new, in place of the old; since even during the time in which each single animal is called living and the same — as a man is said to be the same from a little boy until he becomes an old man: this man, however, though he never has the same things in himself, is nonetheless called the same, but he is always becoming new and losing other things, in hair and flesh and bones and 207e blood and the whole body. And not only in the body, but in the soul too: ways, characters, opinions, desires,