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Diotima — τοιοῦδε. πειρῶ δέ μοι, ἔφη, τὸν νοῦν προσέχειν ὡς οἷόν τε μάλιστα. ὃς γὰρ ἂν μέχρι ἐνταῦθα πρὸς τὰ ἐρωτικὰ παιδαγωγηθῇ, θεώμενος ἐφεξῆς τε καὶ ὀρθῶς τὰ καλά, πρὸς τέλος ἤδη ἰὼν τῶν ἐρωτικῶν ἐξαίφνης κατόψεταί τι θαυμαστὸν τὴν φύσιν καλόν, τοῦτο ἐκεῖνο, ὦ Σώκρατες, οὗ δὴ ἕνεκεν καὶ οἱ ἔμπροσθεν πάντες πόνοι ἦσαν, πρῶτον μὲν
Of this kind. Try, she said, for my sake, to apply your mind as closely as possible. For whoever has been led this far in matters of love, gazing on beautiful things in order and rightly, by now going toward the completion of love's mysteries, all at once will catch sight of something wondrous in its nature, beautiful. This, Socrates, is that for the sake of which even all the earlier labours were — first,
The summit of Diotima's ladder, as Socrates reports her. The unit opens on the last word of the previous sentence — τοιοῦδε, "of this kind", finishing 210d's "a single knowledge, which is of beauty of this kind" — and then she stops to ask for Socrates' whole attention before describing what the one who has climbed correctly will suddenly see.
This is why she interrupts herself to ask for Socrates' whole attention: what is coming cannot be handed over as a conclusion. Note also the verb she uses for the climb — paidagōgēthēi, from the paidagōgos, the household slave who walked an Athenian boy to school and back. The philosopher who has come this far did not walk himself; he was taken by the hand like a child. The Phaedrus, this dialogue's companion, tells the same moment from the other side: at 250b–d the soul that meets a beautiful face is jolted into remembering what it once stood before, and Plato calls that vision by the initiate's word, epopteia. And the thing seen is not called lovely but thaumaston tēn physin, wondrous in its very nature — wonder being where Socrates says philosophy begins (Theaetetus 155d). At the top of the ladder it is also where philosophy arrives.
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