Symposium

would have died for Admetus, or Achilles have died after Patroclus, or your Codrus have died first for the kingship of his children,¹ if they did not think that there would be an immortal memory of themselves for their virtue, the memory we now have? Far from it,’ she said; ‘but I think it is for immortal virtue and for glorious repute of this kind that all do everything, and the better 208e they are, the more so; for it is the immortal that they are in love with. Now those who are pregnant in their bodies,’ she said, ‘turn rather to women, and are given to love in this way, procuring for themselves through the begetting of children immortality and memory and happiness, as they think, for all time to come; but those in respect of the 209a soul — for there are in fact,’ she said, ‘those who are pregnant in their souls still more than in their bodies, with what it befits a soul both to conceive and to give birth to;² and what, then, befits it? Intelligence and the rest of virtue; of these all the poets too are begetters, and those of the craftsmen who are said to be inventive; but by far the greatest,’ she said, ’and most beautiful kind of intelligence is the ordering of the affairs of cities and households,³ whose name is temperance and justice — of these, again, when someone 209b is pregnant in his soul from youth, being unwed,⁴ and when the age has come desires at last to give birth and to beget, then he too, I think, goes about seeking the beautiful in which he may beget; for in the ugly he will never beget. So he welcomes beautiful bodies rather than ugly ones, since he is pregnant; and if he meets with a soul that is beautiful and noble and of good nature, then he welcomes the two together very much indeed, and in this person’s company he at once has resource in speeches about virtue, and about what kind 209c the good man must be and what his ways of life must be; and he undertakes