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Updated: July 1, 2025
Among other things, he seems to have been much impressed by Plato's notion that the genus homo was one before it broke up into male and female, and that sexual attraction is a desire to restore the lost unity. In a very learned essay On Diotima, published in 1797 Diotima is the woman of whose relation to Socrates we get a glimpse in Plato's Symposium there is much that foreshadows Lucinda.
This desire for good, Diotima assured Socrates, is our fundamental desire, of which fundamental desire every impulse in us is only some one particular form. And therefore this fundamental desire it is, I suppose, this desire in men that good should be forever present to them, which acts in us when we feel the impulse for relating our knowledge to our sense for conduct and to our sense for beauty.
In an instant it vanished, and over the zenith broke a wonderful light. "See now," cried Diotima, "the Ancient Beauty! Look how its petals expand, and what comes forth from its heart!" A vast and glowing breath, mutable and opalescent, spread itself between heaven and earth, and out of it slowly descended a radiant form like a god's. It drew nigh, radiating lights, pure, beautiful, and star-like.
Doris and her husband, and Pollux and Arsinoe, Diotima and Teuker, decked with garlands, reclined round the amphora which was wreathed with roses, drinking to pleasure and joy, to art and love, and to all the gifts of the present. The sweet bride's long hair was once more plaited with handsome blue ribbons. Three weeks after these events Hadrian was again in Alexandria.
In F of F A this account of her plans is addressed to Diotima, and Mathilda's excuse for not detailing them is that they are too trivial to interest spirits no longer on earth; this is the only intrusion of the framework into Mathilda's narrative in The Fields of Fancy.
The spirit loses itself in its clear depth and finds itself again, like Narcissus, as a flower. Love is higher than winsomeness, and how soon would the flower of Beauty wither without the complementary birth of requited love. This moment the kiss of Amor and Psyche is the rose of life. The inspired Diotima revealed to Socrates only a half of love.
Protagoras, from whom this dialog gets its name, was one of the Greek sophists, born about 481 B.C., and exiled from Athens on a charge of atheism, his work entitled "On the Gods" being publicly burned. And now I will take my leave of you, and rehearse the tale of love which I heard once upon a time from Diotima, of Mantinea, who was a wise woman in this and many other branches of knowledge.
Women write the best letters, and get the best letters written to them: but it is doubtful whether Greek women, save persons of a certain class and other exceptions in different ways like Sappho and Diotima, ever wrote at all.
This is the law of life that Diotima knew, by which flower and tree, animal and man, fulfil the end of their creation; and man in nothing more surely proves his lordship than by his many-handed hold upon posterity.
"That is most true," I said. "Then if this be the nature of love, can you tell me further," she said, "what is the manner of the pursuit? What are they doing who show all this eagerness and heat which is called love? Answer me that." "Nay, Diotima," I said, "if I had known I should not have wondered at your wisdom or have come to you to learn."
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