Symposium

A dinner party at the house of the tragic poet Agathon, celebrating his victory, where the guests agree to go easy on the wine and give speeches in praise of Eros, the god of love. Phaedrus praises love for making lovers brave, Pausanias separates noble from common love, the doctor Eryximachus treats love as a force running through the whole of nature, and Aristophanes tells the comic myth of humans split in half and searching for their other part. After Agathon's polished speech, Socrates reports what the priestess Diotima taught him: love is neither beautiful nor good but in between, a desire to possess the good forever, and it can climb from love of one beautiful body to love of beautiful souls, laws and knowledge, and finally to Beauty itself. Then a drunk Alcibiades bursts in and praises Socrates instead, in a portrait both admiring and bitter.

It is the founding text of the philosophy of love, and its mix of comedy, argument and myth shows how much a dialogue can do that a treatise cannot.