Slipping Through the Soul
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Agathon — εἶναι. νεώτατος μὲν δή ἐστι καὶ ἁπαλώτατος, πρὸς δὲ τούτοις ὑγρὸς τὸ εἶδος. οὐ γὰρ ἂν οἷός τʼ ἦν πάντῃ περιπτύσσεσθαι οὐδὲ διὰ πάσης ψυχῆς καὶ εἰσιὼν τὸ πρῶτον λανθάνειν καὶ ἐξιών, εἰ σκληρὸς ἦν. συμμέτρου δὲ καὶ ὑγρᾶς ἰδέας μέγα τεκμήριον ἡ εὐσχημοσύνη, ὃ δὴ διαφερόντως ἐκ πάντων ὁμολογουμένως Ἔρως ἔχει. ἀσχημοσύνῃ γὰρ καὶ Ἔρωτι πρὸς ἀλλήλους ἀεὶ πόλεμος. χρόας δὲ κάλλος ἡ κατʼ ἄνθη δίαιτα τοῦ θεοῦ σημαίνει. ἀνανθεῖ γὰρ
must be. He is, then, the youngest and most tender; and besides these, fluid in form. For he would not have been able to wrap around on every side, nor pass unnoticed through a whole soul— entering at first, and also leaving— if he were hard. And a great proof of a well-proportioned and fluid form is gracefulness, which, remarkably beyond all others, by common consent, Eros possesses. For there is always war between ungracefulness and Eros. And the beauty of complexion is shown by the god's way of life among the flowers; for what has no bloom—
Agathon continues proving Eros tender: because the god enters and leaves every soul unnoticed, he cannot be hard; his graceful form wars constantly with ungracefulness; and his beautiful complexion is signified by his life among the flowers.
Agathon's proof from suppleness gets concrete here: the god slips into and out of a soul without being noticed, and the verb for that, lanthanō, sits on the same root as alētheia, the Greek word for truth — literally, 'un-hiddenness.' Truth is the negation of the very hiddenness this Eros specializes in. Agathon almost certainly does not intend the irony, but it will matter later: when Diotima takes over the argument through Socrates, real erôs turns out to require examining desire in the light, climbing step by step toward the Form of Beauty, not letting a god work on the soul the way this one does — entering and leaving before the soul knows what has happened to it.
The proof also shifts ground without announcing it, moving from a physical claim (Eros is soft, so he fits into any soul) to an aesthetic one: gracefulness, euschēmosynē, is offered as further proof of that same softness, with its opposite, aschēmosynē, permanently at war with the god. Agathon studied under Gorgias, and euschēmosynē — good form, correct shape, elegance of presentation — is exactly the virtue his own speech is built to display; he is proving Eros graceful inside a passage that is itself a small showpiece of rhetorical grace. Plato's own Gorgias takes aim at precisely this style of persuasion, language arranged to please without checking whether any of it is true, and Socrates's later complaint about the whole run of speeches at this party — that they have praised Eros through beautiful language rather than through argument — lands squarely on this maneuver.
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