Main ideas
- A sequence of speeches on love, desire, beauty and immortality.
- Diotima’s ladder from bodily attraction toward intelligible beauty.
- Socrates presented through conversation, comedy and interruption rather than doctrine alone.
Important themes
LoveBeautyAscent
Reading context
A drinking party at which each guest speaks in praise of love, written around 385 BCE and set some thirty years earlier. The comic and the serious are deliberately mixed, and Alcibiades arrives drunk to spoil the pattern.
How to approach it
Read the whole thing, since the speeches answer one another. Diotima's ladder, reported by Socrates, is the philosophical centre, and Alcibiades' speech is the sting in the tail.