another the evil. For there is nothing which men love but
the good. Is there anything?' 'Certainly, I should say, that there is
nothing.' 'Then,' she said, 'the simple truth is, that men love the
good.' 'Yes,' I said. 'To which must be added that they love the
possession of the good?' 'Yes, that must be added.' 'And not only the
possession, but the everlasting possession of the good?' 'That must be
added too.' 'Then love,' she said, 'may be described generally as the
love of the everlasting possession of the good?' 'That is most true.'

'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? and what is the object
which they have in view? Answer me.' 'Nay, Diotima,' I replied, 'if I
had known, I should not have wondered at your wisdom, neither should I
have come to learn from you about this very matter.' 'Well,' she said,
'I will teach you:--The object which they have in view is birth in
beauty, whether of body or soul.' 'I do not understand you,' I said;
'the oracle requires an explanation.' 'I will make my meaning clearer,'
she replied. 'I mean to say, that all men are bringing to the birth in
their bodies and in their souls. There is a certain age at which human
nature is desirous of procreation--procreation which must be in beauty
and not in deformity; and this procreation is the union of man and
woman, and is a divine thing; for conception and generation are an
immortal principle in the mortal creature, and in the inharmonious they
can never be. But the deformed is always inharmonious with the divine,
and the beautiful harmonious. Beauty, then, is the destiny or goddess
of parturition who presides at birth, and therefore, when approaching
beauty, the conceiving power is propitious, and diffusive, and benign,
and begets and bears fruit: at the sight of ugliness she frowns and
contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away, and shrivels 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 the pain of travail. For love, Socrates, is not, as you
imagine, the love of the beautiful only.' 'What then?' 'The love of
generation and of birth in beauty.' 'Yes,' I said. 'Yes, indeed,' she
replied. 'But why of genera