To Practices, Laws, and the Sciences
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Diotima — ἔχῃ, ἐξαρκεῖν αὐτῷ καὶ ἐρᾶν καὶ κήδεσθαι καὶ τίκτειν λόγους τοιούτους καὶ ζητεῖν, οἵτινες ποιήσουσι βελτίους τοὺς νέους, ἵνα ἀναγκασθῇ αὖ θεάσασθαι τὸ ἐν τοῖς ἐπιτηδεύμασι καὶ τοῖς νόμοις καλὸν καὶ τοῦτʼ ἰδεῖν ὅτι πᾶν αὐτὸ αὑτῷ συγγενές ἐστιν, ἵνα τὸ περὶ τὸ σῶμα καλὸν σμικρόν τι ἡγήσηται εἶναι· μετὰ δὲ τὰ ἐπιτηδεύματα ἐπὶ τὰς ἐπιστήμας ἀγαγεῖν, ἵνα ἴδῃ αὖ ἐπιστημῶν κάλλος, καὶ βλέπων πρὸς
has, it suffices him both to love and to care for it and to beget such speeches and to seek those that will make the young better, so that he be compelled in turn to behold the beauty in practices and laws, and to see that all this is akin to itself, so that he may hold bodily beauty a small thing; and after the practices to lead him to the sciences, so that he may see in turn the beauty of the sciences, and, looking toward
The ladder continues. A decent soul, even in a slight body, suffices the lover to love, to care for, and to beget in it such speeches as make the young better — so that he is compelled to behold the beauty in practices and laws, and to see that all of it is akin to itself, and so to hold bodily beauty a small thing. After practices, he is led on to the sciences, to see in turn the beauty of the sciences, and, looking toward — the sentence opens into 210d and the great sea of beauty.
The final ascent before the vision is to the epistēmai, the sciences or branches of knowledge, whose beauty is more abstract and more enduring than that of any law or custom. The pattern is consistent: at each stage the object grows less particular, less perishable, more universal, and the lover's love follows it upward, generalizing and cooling toward every lower instance while intensifying toward the whole. What began as desire for one body has become the love of beauty as such wherever it appears — in bodies, souls, institutions, knowledge. The next lines (210d) will describe the lover turned, no longer a slave to any single beautiful thing, toward 'the great sea of beauty' (to poly pelagos tou kalou), begetting many beautiful discourses and thoughts — the immediate threshold of the sudden vision of Beauty itself (210e–211a), the goal of the whole initiation.
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