Plato's dialogue on the nature of love — in which Socrates, Aristophanes, Alcibiades, and others give competing speeches on Eros at a drinking party — culminating in Socrates's account of Diotima's teaching on love as ascent from particular beauty to the Form of Beauty itself.
Creates the Platonic theory of love as intellectual ascent — the Symposium's ladder of love (from physical beauty of a particular body to all beautiful bodies to the beauty of souls to the Form of Beauty itself) is the most influential account of erotic love in Western philosophy and the origin of the term 'Platonic love.'
No recorded contemporaries.
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