I Come Knowing I Need Teachers
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Diotima — διατίθεσθαι; ἔχεις λέγειν;
Socrates — καὶ ἐγὼ αὖ ἔλεγον ὅτι οὐκ εἰδείην· ἣ δʼ εἶπεν, Διανοῇ οὖν δεινός ποτε γενήσεσθαι τὰ ἐρωτικά, ἐὰν ταῦτα μὴ ἐννοῇς;
Socrates — ἀλλὰ διὰ ταῦτά τοι, ὦ Διοτίμα, ὅπερ νυνδὴ εἶπον, παρὰ σὲ ἥκω, γνοὺς ὅτι διδασκάλων δέομαι. ἀλλά μοι λέγε καὶ τούτων τὴν αἰτίαν καὶ τῶν ἄλλων τῶν περὶ τὰ ἐρωτικά.
Diotima — εἰ τοίνυν, ἔφη, πιστεύεις ἐκείνου εἶναι φύσει τὸν ἔρωτα, οὗ πολλάκις ὡμολογήκαμεν, μὴ θαύμαζε. ἐνταῦθα γὰρ
to be affected? Can you say? And I again said that I did not know. And she said: Do you expect ever to become skilled in love's matters, if you do not understand these? But it is for this, you see, Diotima, the very thing I just now said, that I have come to you, recognizing that I need teachers. But tell me both the cause of these and of the others concerning love's matters. If then, she said, you believe love is by nature of that which we have often agreed, do not wonder. For here
Diotima asks whether the beasts too act from calculation, and whether Socrates can name the cause. He says again that he does not know. She teases: do you expect ever to become skilled in love's matters if you don't understand these things? That, he replies, is exactly why he comes to her — knowing he needs teachers. Tell me the cause, he says, of these and the other matters of love. Diotima: if you believe love is by nature of what we have often agreed, do not wonder. Continued in 207d.
Diotima's answer points back to the definition already secured — love is of the good's being one's own forever, hence of immortality — and promises that the animals' behaviour and everything else about love follow from it once that is believed. "Do not wonder" (mē thaumaze) is the standard turn from puzzlement to explanation: the seemingly mysterious drive is the predictable consequence of mortal nature reaching for the eternal. The sentence breaks off at entautha gar, "for here," opening (207d) the explanation of how a mortal partakes of immortality — not by remaining the same, but by constant replacement, the old giving way to new, so that a living thing is called 'the same' though nothing in it stays. That analysis of identity-through-change is one of the most striking passages in Plato, and it is about to begin.
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