mmon goddess. To you, Phaedrus, I offer this
my contribution in praise of love, which is as good as I could make
extempore.

Pausanias came to a pause--this is the balanced way in which I have
been taught by the wise to speak; and Aristodemus said that the turn of
Aristophanes was next, but either he had eaten too much, or from some
other cause he had the hiccough, and was obliged to change turns with
Eryximachus the physician, who was reclining on the couch below him.
Eryximachus, he said, you ought either to stop my hiccough, or to speak
in my turn until I have left off.

I will do both, said Eryximachus: I will speak in your turn, and do you
speak in mine; and while I am speaking let me recommend you to hold your
breath, and if after you have done so for some time the hiccough is
no better, then gargle with a little water; and if it still continues,
tickle your nose with something and sneeze; and if you sneeze once or
twice, even the most violent hiccough is sure to go. I will do as you
prescribe, said Aristophanes, and now get on.

Eryximachus spoke as follows: Seeing that Pausanias made a fair
beginning, and but a lame ending, I must endeavour to supply his
deficiency. I think that he has rightly distinguished two kinds of love.
But my art further informs me that the double love is not merely an
affection of the soul of man towards the fair, or towards anything, but
is to be found in the bodies of all animals and in productions of the
earth, and I may say in all that is; such is the conclusion which I seem
to have gathered from my own art of medicine, whence I learn how great
and wonderful and universal is the deity of love, whose empire extends
over all things, divine as well as human. And from medicine I will begin
that I may do honour to my art. There are in the human body these two
kinds of love, which are confessedly different and unlike, and being
unlike, they have loves and desires which are unlike; and the desire of
the healthy is one, and the desire of the diseased is another; and as
Pausanias was just now saying that to indulge good men is honourable,
and bad men dishonourable:--so too in the body the good and healthy
elements are to be indulged, and the bad elements and the elements of
disease are not to be indulged, but discouraged. And this is what the
physician has to do, and in this the art of medicine consists: for
medicine may be regarded generally as the knowledge of the loves and
desires of th