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The 8 key ideas

1. Key idea 1 · free to read

   Love teaches shame and courage

   The dialogue opens years later on the road to Athens. A friend asks Apollodorus to retell the speeches given at Agathon's dinner. He repeats what Aristodemus, a barefoot admirer of Socrates, told him.

   The night begins oddly. Socrates brings Aristodemus along uninvited, then stops in a neighbor's porch, lost in thought. The physician Eryximachus proposes speeches in praise of Love, going from left to right. Phaedrus starts, because he complains that poets sing of every god but Love.

   Phaedrus says Love is the eldest of the gods, but his real point is what love does to people. A lover caught in a cowardly act would rather be seen by anyone than by his beloved. Imagine an army of lovers, he says. None could bear to abandon his post under the other's eyes, and even a coward would become a hero.

   Alcestis dies in place of her husband, and the gods let her return alive. Achilles chooses early death to avenge Patroclus. Ask yourself whom you would hate to disappoint, and you hear his point.

   Love at its best makes people ashamed of meanness and ready to be brave.

2. 2

   Judge love by its purpose, not its name

   Pausanias objects that Phaedrus praised Love without saying which Love.

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3. 3

   Love is the harmony that holds everything together

   Aristophanes has the hiccups, so the physician Eryximachus speaks in his place.

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4. 4

   We are halves searching for our other half

   Aristophanes, the comic playwright, says people have never grasped Love's power, or they would have built him grand temples.

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5. 5

   Love desires what it lacks, so it lacks beauty

   Agathon speaks next.

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6. 6

   Love is a needy spirit that desires immortality

   Socrates now repeats a lesson from Diotima, a wise woman of Mantinea.

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7. 7

   Climb from one body to beauty itself

   Diotima calls what she has said the lesser mysteries.

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8. 8

   A drunken guest shows Socrates living his words

   Loud knocking breaks in.

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