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." "Well," she said, "I will
teach you: love is only birth in beauty, whether of body or soul."
"The oracle requires an explanation," I said; "I don't understand
you." "I will make my meaning clearer," she replied. "I mean to say
that which all men are bringing to the birth of their bodies and their
souls. There is a certain age at which human nature is desirous of
procreation; and this procreation must be in beauty and not in
deformity; and this is the mystery of man and woman, which is a divine
thing, for conception and generation are a principle of immortality in
the mortal creature. And in the inharmonical they can never be. But
the deformed is always inharmonical with the divine, and the beautiful
harmonious. Beauty, then, is the destiny or goddess of parturition who
presides a birth, and therefore, when approaching beauty the
conceiving power is propitious, and diffuse, and benign, and begets
and bears fruit; on the appearance of foulness she frowns and
contracts in pain, and is averted and morose, and shrinks up, and not
without a pang refrains from conception. And this is the reason why,
when the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming nature is full,
there is such a flutter and ecstasy about beauty whose approach is the
alleviation of pain. For love, Socrates, is not, as you imagine, the
love of the beautiful only." "What then?" "The love of generation and
birth in beauty." "Yes," I said. "Yes, indeed," she replied. "But why
of birth?" I said. "Because to the mortal, birth is a sort of eternity
and immortality," she replied; "and as has been already admitted, all
men will necessarily desire immortality together with good if love is
of the everlasting possession of the good."

All this she taught me at various times when she spoke of love. And on
another occasion she said to me: "What is the reason, Socrates, of
this love, and the attendant desire? See you not how all animals,
birds as well as beasts, in their desire of procreation, are in agony
when they take the infection of love; this begins with the desire of
union, to which is added the care of offspring, in behalf of whom the
weakest are ready to battle against the strongest even to the
uttermost, and to die for them, and will let themselves be tormented
with hunger or suffer anything in order to maintain their
offspring.... M