Symposium

to that ugly, nor beautiful here and ugly there, as being beautiful to some and ugly to others; nor again will the beautiful appear to him like some face, or hands, or anything else in which body shares, nor like any account or any knowledge, nor as being anywhere in something else, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, 211b or in anything else; but itself by itself, with itself, single in form, always being, and all the other beautiful things sharing in it in some such way that, while the others come to be and perish, it becomes neither anything more nor less, nor suffers anything at all. So whenever someone, going up from these things here through being a pederast rightly, begins to catch sight of that beautiful, he would almost touch the end. For this is what it is 211c to go rightly to matters of love, or to be led by another: beginning from these beautiful things here, for the sake of that beautiful, always to go up, as if using steps, from one to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, and from beautiful bodies to beautiful ways of life, and from ways of life to beautiful studies, and from the studies to end at that study which is the study of nothing other than that beautiful itself, and that at the end he may know that very thing, what 211d beautiful is.¹ At that point of life, my friend Socrates,’ said the stranger from Mantinea, ‘if anywhere, life is worth living for a human being, as he beholds the beautiful itself. If you ever see it, it will not seem to you to be on a level with gold and clothing and the beautiful boys and young men at the sight of whom you are now struck, and are ready, you and many others, seeing your darlings and being always with them, if it were somehow possible, neither to eat nor to drink, but only to behold them and be with them. What then,’ she said, ’do we think, if it should befall someone 211e to see the beautiful itself, pure, clean, unmixed, but