The Great Sea of Beauty
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Diotima — πολὺ ἤδη τὸ καλὸν μηκέτι τὸ παρʼ ἑνί, ὥσπερ οἰκέτης, ἀγαπῶν παιδαρίου κάλλος ἢ ἀνθρώπου τινὸς ἢ ἐπιτηδεύματος ἑνός, δουλεύων φαῦλος ᾖ καὶ σμικρολόγος, ἀλλʼ ἐπὶ τὸ πολὺ πέλαγος τετραμμένος τοῦ καλοῦ καὶ θεωρῶν πολλοὺς καὶ καλοὺς λόγους καὶ μεγαλοπρεπεῖς τίκτῃ καὶ διανοήματα ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ ἀφθόνῳ, ἕως ἂν ἐνταῦθα ῥωσθεὶς καὶ αὐξηθεὶς κατίδῃ τινὰ ἐπιστήμην μίαν τοιαύτην, ἥ ἐστι καλοῦ
the beautiful now no longer in one thing, like a house-slave, content with the beauty of a boy or of some person or of one practice, enslaved, be paltry and small-minded, but turned toward the great sea of the beautiful, and contemplating, he begets many beautiful and magnificent speeches and thoughts in ungrudging philosophy, until, strengthened there and grown, he descries a certain single knowledge of such a kind, which is of a beauty
The lover, no longer a slave to the beauty of one boy or one person or one practice — paltry and small-minded, like a house-servant — turns instead toward the great sea of beauty. Contemplating it, he begets many beautiful and magnificent speeches and thoughts in ungrudging love of wisdom, until, strengthened and grown there, he descries a single knowledge of the following kind: a knowledge of a beauty — the sentence opens into 210e and the vision.
The movement completes the ascent's inner logic. Slavery to the particular is exchanged for the freedom of the universal; possessiveness for generosity (aphthonos, 'unstinting,' is the opposite of the jealous grasping love the lower rungs risk). And the lover grows even as he contemplates — rhōstheis kai auxētheis, strengthened and enlarged — until he 'descries' (katidēi, a verb of catching sight from a height) a single science whose object is a single Beauty. That knowledge and its object are the goal of the whole initiation. 210e will describe the moment of vision: the one rightly led through erotic things, beholding beautiful things in order, will exaiphnēs — suddenly — glimpse something wondrous, beautiful in its nature; and 211a will spell out what it is: Beauty itself, eternal, neither coming to be nor perishing, not beautiful in one way and ugly in another, not a face or hands or any body, not a speech or a knowledge, not in anything else — the pure Form, the vision for whose sake all the earlier toils were undergone.
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