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Updated: July 1, 2025
When the turn of Socrates comes round he cannot be allowed to disturb the arrangement made at first. But his speech is really the narrative of a dialogue between himself and Diotima.
Accordingly, by sinking deep into the particular, one most easily avoids the danger of becoming narrow. Diotima.... These are the lesser mysteries of love, into which even you, Socrates, may enter; to the greater and more hidden ones which are the crown of these, and to which, if you pursue them in a right spirit, they will lead, I know not whether you will be able to attain.
Oh divinest prophetess, said she how new & to me how strange are your lessons If such be the end of our being how wayward a course did I pursue on earth Diotima you know not how torn affections & misery incalculable misery withers up the soul. Is it as a trial?
Agathon colours his account with a touch of tragic diction. At last it is Socrates' turn. He tells what he heard from a priestess called Diotima.
It is such an alternation as this, ceaseless, rhythmic, which constitutes the upward life of the soul: that life of which the wise woman of Mantineia told Socrates that it might be learned through faithful and strenuous search for ever widening kinds of beauty, the "life above all," in the words of Diotima, "which a man should live."
"Oh, voices, voices," cried the child, "what you say I know not, but I give back love for love. Father, what is it they tell me? They enfold me in light, and I am far away even though I hold your hand." "The gods are about us. Heaven mingles with the earth," said Admetus, trembling. "Let us go to Diotima. She has grown wise brooding for many a year where the great caves lead to the underworld.
Thus we are apt to think, and to take the words of Diotima as merely so much lovely rhetoric. But as my previous chapters must have led you to expect I think we are so far mistaken.
She seemed to follow my eyes, and guess from them the workings of my heart; for now, in a low, half-abstracted voice, as Diotima may have talked of old, she began to speak of rest and labour, of death and life; of a labour which is perfect rest of a daily death, which is but daily birth of weakness, which is the strength of God; and so she wandered on in her speech to Him who died for us.
She said to me: 'And do you expect ever to become a master in the art of love, if you do not know this? 'But I have told you already, Diotima, that my ignorance is the reason why I come to you; for I am conscious that I want a teacher; tell me then the cause of this and of the other mysteries of love. 'Marvel not, she said, 'if you believe that love is of the immortal, as we have several times acknowledged; for here again, and on the same principle too, the mortal nature is seeking as far as is possible to be everlasting and immortal: and this is only to be attained by generation, because generation always leaves behind a new existence in the place of the old.
Such are the æsthetics of Plato, put into the mouth of that mysterious Diotima, who was a wise woman in many branches of knowledge. As we read them nowadays we are apt to smile with incredulity not unmixed with bitterness. Is all this not mere talk, charming and momentarily elating us like so much music; itself mere beauty which, because we like it, we half voluntarily confuse with truth?
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