composition of the Dialogue will probably fall between 384 and
369. Whether the recollection of the event is more likely to have been
renewed at the destruction or restoration of the city, rather than at
some intermediate period, is a consideration not worth raising.

The Symposium is connected with the Phaedrus both in style and subject;
they are the only Dialogues of Plato in which the theme of love is
discussed at length. In both of them philosophy is regarded as a sort of
enthusiasm or madness; Socrates is himself 'a prophet new inspired' with
Bacchanalian revelry, which, like his philosophy, he characteristically
pretends to have derived not from himself but from others. The Phaedo
also presents some points of comparison with the Symposium. For there,
too, philosophy might be described as 'dying for love;' and there are
not wanting many touches of humour and fancy, which remind us of the
Symposium. But while the Phaedo and Phaedrus look backwards and forwards
to past and future states of existence, in the Symposium there is no
break between this world and another; and we rise from one to the other
by a regular series of steps or stages, proceeding from the particulars
of sense to the universal of reason, and from one universal to many,
which are finally reunited in a single science (compare Rep.). At first
immortality means only the succession of existences; even knowledge
comes and goes. Then follows, in the language of the mysteries, a higher
and a higher degree of initiation; at last we arrive at the perfect
vision of beauty, not relative or changing, but eternal and absolute;
not bounded by this world, or in or out of this world, but an aspect of
the divine, extending over all things, and having no limit of space or
time: this is the highest knowledge of which the human mind is capable.
Plato does not go on to ask whether the individual is absorbed in the
sea of light and beauty or retains his personality. Enough for him to
have attained the true beauty or good, without enquiring precisely into
the relation in which human beings stood to it. That the soul has such
a reach of thought, and is capable of partaking of the eternal nature,
seems to imply that she too is eternal (compare Phaedrus). But Plato
does not distinguish the eternal in man from the eternal in the world or
in God. He is willing to rest in the contemplation of the idea, which
to him is the cause of all things (Rep.), and has no strength to go
fu