What Eros Is Of
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Agathon — πάνυ γε, φάναι.
Socrates — καὶ οὗτος ἄρα καὶ ἄλλος πᾶς ὁ ἐπιθυμῶν τοῦ μὴ ἑτοίμου ἐπιθυμεῖ καὶ τοῦ μὴ παρόντος, καὶ ὃ μὴ ἔχει καὶ ὃ μὴ ἔστιν αὐτὸς καὶ οὗ ἐνδεής ἐστι, τοιαῦτʼ ἄττα ἐστὶν ὧν ἡ ἐπιθυμία τε καὶ ὁ ἔρως ἐστίν;
Agathon — πάνυ γʼ, εἰπεῖν.
Socrates — ἴθι δή, φάναι τὸν Σωκράτη, ἀνομολογησώμεθα τὰ εἰρημένα. ἄλλο τι ἔστιν ὁ Ἔρως πρῶτον μὲν τινῶν, ἔπειτα τούτων ὧν ἂν ἔνδεια παρῇ αὐτῷ;
Certainly, he said. This one, then, and everyone who desires desires what is not at hand and not present, and what he does not have, and what he is not himself, and of which he is in want: such things are they of which desire and love are. Quite so, he said. Come now, said Socrates, let us agree on what has been said. Is Eros anything other than, first, of certain things, and then of those in which there is a want present to him?
The argument reaches its summary. Everyone who desires, Socrates says, desires what is not at hand, not present, not had, not already himself — the thing of which he is in want. Those are the things desire and love are of. Agathon agrees, and Socrates proposes they now fix in words what they have found: Eros is, first, of some things, and then of those things in which there is a want in him.
Socrates now proposes to anomologēsasthai, to settle by agreement, exactly what they have reached — the same careful sealing of each step that marks the whole elenchus. The definition is deliberately spare: Eros is love (first) of some object, and (then) of an object in which there is endeia, want, in the lover. Everything Diotima later builds — the ladder of beauty, the birth in the beautiful, the reach for immortality — grows from this small, hard root. Agathon's radiant self-complete god has become, by pure argument, a being defined by need. The refutation is finished; the rebuilding is about to begin.
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