Presently a band of revellers appears, who
introduce disorder into the feast; the sober part of the company,
Eryximachus, Phaedrus, and others, withdraw; and Aristodemus, the
follower of Socrates, sleeps during the whole of a long winter's night.
When he wakes at cockcrow the revellers are nearly all asleep. Only
Socrates, Aristophanes, and Agathon hold out; they are drinking from a
large goblet, which they pass round, and Socrates is explaining to the
two others, who are half-asleep, that the genius of tragedy is the same
as that of comedy, and that the writer of tragedy ought to be a writer
of comedy also. And first Aristophanes drops, and then, as the day is
dawning, Agathon. Socrates, having laid them to rest, takes a bath and
goes to his daily avocations until the evening. Aristodemus follows.

...

If it be true that there are more things in the Symposium of Plato than
any commentator has dreamed of, it is also true that many things have
been imagined which are not really to be found there. Some writings
hardly admit of a more distinct interpretation than a musical
composition; and every reader may form his own accompaniment of thought
or feeling to the strain which he hears. The Symposium of Plato is a
work of this character, and can with difficulty be rendered in any words
but the writer's own. There are so many half-lights and cross-lights,
so much of the colour of mythology, and of the manner of sophistry
adhering--rhetoric and poetry, the playful and the serious, are so
subtly intermingled in it, and vestiges of old philosophy so curiously
blend with germs of future knowledge, that agreement among interpreters
is not to be expected. The expression 'poema magis putandum quam
comicorum poetarum,' which has been applied to all the writings of
Plato, is especially applicable to the Symposium.

The power of love is represented in the Symposium as running through all
nature and all being: at one end descending to animals and plants, and
attaining to the highest vision of truth at the other. In an age
when man was seeking for an expression of the world around him, the
conception of love greatly affected him. One of the first distinctions
of language and of mythology was that of gender; and at a later period
the ancient physicist, anticipating modern science, saw, or thought
that he saw, a sex in plants; there were elective affinities among the
elements, marriages of earth and heaven. (Aesch. Frag. Dan.) Love beca