For Love brings the soul
through the body to truth and the region of truth, where pure and
guileless beauty is to be found, kindly befriending its votaries like an
initiator at the mysteries. And it associates with the soul only through
the body. And as geometricians, in the case of boys who cannot yet be
initiated into the perception of incorporeal and impassive substance,
convey their ideas through the medium of spheres, cubes, and
dodecahedrons, so celestial Love has contrived beautiful mirrors of
beautiful things, and exhibits them to us glittering in the shapes
colours and appearances of youths in all their flower, and calmly stirs
the memory which is inflamed first by these. Consequently some, through
the stupidity of their friends and intimates, who have endeavoured by
force and against reason to extinguish the flame, have got no advantage
from it, but filled themselves with smoke and confusion, or have rushed
into secret and lawless pleasures and ingloriously wasted their prime.
But as many as by sober reason and modesty have abated the extravagance
of the passion, and left in the soul only a bright glow--not exciting a
tornado of passion, but a wonderful and productive diffusion, as in a
growing plant, opening the pores of complaisance and friendliness--these
in no long time cease to regard the personal charms of those they love,
and study their inward characters, and gaze at one another with
unveiled eyes, and associate with one another in words and actions, if
they find in their minds any fragment or image of the beautiful; and if
not they bid them farewell and turn to others, like bees that only go to
those flowers from which they can get honey. But wherever they find any
trace or emanation or pleasing resemblance of the divine, in an ecstasy
of pleasure and delight they indulge their memory, and revive to
whatever is truly lovely and felicitous and admired by everybody."

Sec. XX. "The poets indeed seem for the most part to have written and sung
about Love in a playful and merry manner, but have sometimes spoken
seriously about him, whether out of their own mind, or the god helping
them to truth. Among these are the lines about his birth,
'Well-sandalled Iris bare the most powerful of the gods to golden-haired
Zephyr.'[126] But perhaps the learned have persuaded you that these
lines are only a fanciful illustration of the variety and beauty of
love." "Certainly," said Daphnaeus, "what else could they mean?"