Seven Athenians at a dinner party take turns explaining love — and Aristophanes says we were once whole creatures, cut in two, forever searching for our other half.
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The Symposium is philosophy's most charming night out: wine, speeches, jokes, a gate-crashing drunk Alcibiades — and inside the comedy, the ladder of love that has shaped every conversation about desire since.
It is the natural companion to our Phaedrus: same author, same subject, same living Greek — and the lexicon built for one carries you into the other. Word by word, the wittiest book Plato wrote.
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