Youngest of the Gods
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Agathon — φημι νεώτατον αὐτὸν εἶναι θεῶν καὶ ἀεὶ νέον, τὰ δὲ παλαιὰ πράγματα περὶ θεούς, ἃ Ἡσίοδος καὶ Παρμενίδης λέγουσιν, Ἀνάγκῃ καὶ οὐκ Ἔρωτι γεγονέναι, εἰ ἐκεῖνοι ἀληθῆ ἔλεγον. οὐ γὰρ ἂν ἐκτομαὶ οὐδὲ δεσμοὶ ἀλλήλων ἐγίγνοντο καὶ ἄλλα πολλὰ καὶ βίαια, εἰ Ἔρως ἐν αὐτοῖς ἦν, ἀλλὰ φιλία καὶ εἰρήνη, ὥσπερ νῦν, ἐξ οὗ Ἔρως τῶν θεῶν βασιλεύει. νέος μὲν οὖν ἐστι, πρὸς δὲ τῷ νέῳ ἁπαλός, ποιητοῦ δʼ ἔστιν
I say that he is youngest of the gods, and ever young; and as for the ancient affairs concerning the gods which Hesiod and Parmenides tell — those happened by Necessity and not by Eros, if those men were speaking the truth. For there would have been no castrations nor bindings of one another, nor many other violent deeds, if Eros had been among them — but friendship and peace, just as now, ever since Eros has reigned over the gods. He is young, then; and besides his youth, tender. And it takes a poet's—
Agathon has just promised to praise the god's own nature before his gifts. He opens with the god's age, setting Eros against the violent old stories of Hesiod and Parmenides.
Agathon proves the god's age by rewriting the mythical record. Hesiod's Theogony tells of Ouranos mutilated by his own son Cronus, and Cronus's children in turn bound and swallowed — the ἐκτομαί and δεσμοί Agathon names outright. Pausanias had already used this same violent material back at 180d–e to distinguish a coarse, older Aphrodite (born from the severed genitals) from a nobler one. Agathon's move is bolder: he does not reinterpret the myths, he disowns them. If Eros had been present among the gods at that time, none of it could have happened, therefore Eros was not yet born, therefore Eros is young. The argument runs entirely backward from the conclusion he wants — a poet's proof rather than a philosopher's — and Socrates will spend a good part of his own turn making exactly that point.
The claim that peace has reigned ever since Eros took the throne is also a quiet piece of theology-building: earlier speakers made Eros old (Phaedrus, citing Hesiod and Parmenides at 178b, called him among the very first gods to exist, with no parent at all), and Agathon simply asserts the reverse without troubling to refute their citations of the same two authorities. It is the kind of confident inversion a display speech can get away with that a real argument cannot, and it sets up the tenderness he is about to prove with a much stranger piece of evidence: Homer's picture of Atē walking on the heads of men.
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