The Symposium

One evening in Athens in 416 BC, a group of the city’s most brilliant men gather after dinner and agree to a game: each will deliver, in turn, the best speech in praise of Eros, the god of love, that he can manage. What follows is one of the most extraordinary conversations in the history of human thought — and one of the most beautiful things Plato ever wrote.

The speeches move from the conventional to the extraordinary: from Phaedrus’s celebration of love as a moral force to Aristophanes’s immortal myth of the original round humans split in two by the gods and forever searching for their other halves. Then Socrates speaks — not his own speech, but the teaching of a mysterious woman named Diotima, who revealed to him that erotic love is not simply desire for a person but the soul’s longing for the eternal, the beautiful, and the true.

The dialogue concludes with the drunken arrival of Alcibiades, who delivers the most honest speech of all — not about Eros but about Socrates himself. A masterpiece of world literature in Christopher Gill’s acclaimed translation. Published by Penguin Classics.