Symposium

to educate him. For by touching the beautiful one, I think, and keeping company with him, he gives birth to and begets what he had long been pregnant with, remembering him both present and absent, and what has been begotten he rears in common together with him; so that such people have a far greater partnership with one another than that of children, and a firmer friendship, since they have been partners in more beautiful and more immortal children. And everyone would accept that such children had been born to him rather than the 209d human ones, looking to Homer and Hesiod and the other good poets, and emulating them for the offspring of themselves they leave behind, offspring that provide them with immortal fame and memory, being themselves of that kind; or, if you want,’ she said, ’such children as Lycurgus left behind in Lacedaemon, the saviours of Lacedaemon and, so to speak, of Greece. And honoured among you¹ is Solon too, for his begetting of the laws, and other 209e men elsewhere in many places, both among Greeks and among barbarians, who have brought to light many beautiful works and begotten virtue of every kind; to whom many shrines have already been raised because of such children,² but because of human ones, to no one yet.

“‘These matters of love, then, Socrates, perhaps even you might 210a be initiated into; but the perfect rites and those of the beholding, for the sake of which these too exist, if one goes about them rightly, I do not know whether you would be able.³ I shall tell you, then,’ she said, ‘and shall leave out nothing of eagerness; try to follow, if you are able. For he who goes rightly to this matter,’ she said, ’must begin, while young, by going to beautiful bodies; and first, if his guide guides him rightly, he must be in love with one body and there beget beautiful speeches; then he himself must understand that the beauty 210b on any body whatever is brother to the beauty on another body, and that, if one must pursue the beautiful in form, it is great senselessness not to