Symposium

In Symposium, the comic playwright Aristophanes delivers a famous speech explaining love through the myth of the split halves—originally humans were spherical beings with two heads, four arms, and four legs, and were split in two by the gods. Love, in his account, is the lifelong search for one's missing half, making it one of the most quoted passages in the dialogue.

In Symposium, Socrates recounts that the priestess Diotima taught him about the 'ladder of love'—a progression from attraction to individual bodies, to beautiful souls, to beautiful ideas, and ultimately to the form of beauty itself. This ascent from physical desire to philosophical contemplation is central to Plato's concept of eros.

The participants in the banquet include historical figures such as the tragedian Agathon, the comic poet Aristophanes, the physician Eryximachus, the military leader Alcibiades, and Socrates himself. Each guest delivers a speech on the nature of love, creating a multi-perspective exploration of eros that is likely composed between 385 and 370 BCE.

Alcibiades arrives late to the banquet, drunk, and disrupts the orderly sequence of speeches by delivering an encomium to Socrates rather than to love itself. His vivid description of Socrates' personal magnetism and physical endurance—comparing him to the satyr Marsyas—provides one of the most memorable character portraits in the dialogue.