The Study of Plato's Symposium

That is why the capst superstar of Phaedrus's pedigree is that the beloved is the fundament of the relationship. The basis of love is is aspiration; were the uncanny beloved not so, then there would be no occasion for an expression of love: "The truth is that,

while the gods greatly honour the courage of a buff, they admire

even much and reward more richly affection shown towards a lover by the beloved, because a lover is possessed and thus comes nearby than the beloved to being divine" (445).

Aristophanes takes up the argument that, because of the trounce nature of Love at work in the universe, the beat of all happy fortune is for the lover to find "for himself the parallel who properly belongs to him; . . . to find a sympathetic and congenial object for our affections" (65). In the background of that argument is a description of the erstwhile three sexes, man, woman, and hermaphrodite, and nature's splitting them apart in former periods. It carcass for men, the highest type, to seek in love affairs the other halves of their adjust selves so as to make their selves whole. In this sense, Aristophanes seeks for reasons of psychological charter to reconcile the elements of Love, beloved and lover, in a supreme natural image.

The lover or beloved can fill a void of experience, can compensate for an emptiness or a sense of incompletion, and both love

knowledge is one of the most beautiful of things, and Love is

and becoming, if ever a man can, immortal himself [says

saviour; author of order in heaven and earth; loveliest and

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the contrast between Love's persistent pederast (Alcibiades) and Love's authentic make (Socrates). Alcibiades takes Aristophanes's argument and develops it as he tells the story of his own familiar sideline of Socrates. That extended story is one of manipulation and seduction, of pursuit and contrivance, and no at all of Love. For Alcibiades, attracted as he was by Socrates's recognition and spiritual beauty, was after gratification and something like wisdom by osmosis. And this is really all the farther Alcibiades can experience Love or indeed experience the world, in scathe of his own ambition. That speech, therefore, is the enactment of the limitations implicit in the argument that top executive have been made by Aristophanes.

knowledge of various kinds one arrives at the supreme

by the wise, admired by the gods; envy by men who possess

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