SYMPOSIUM.

(185 D; compare Protagoras 337). Of course, he is "playing both sides of the game," as in the Phaedrus; but it is not necessary for understanding him that we should discuss the fairness of his procedure. The love of Pausanias for Agathon has already been touched upon in the Protagoras (315 D) and is alluded to by Aristophanes (193 B). Hence, he is naturally the upholder of male loves, which, like all the other affections or actions of men, he regards as varying according to the manner of their performance. Like the sophists and like Plato himself—though in a different sense—he begins his discussion by an appeal to mythology and distinguishes between the elder and younger love. The value he attributes to such loves as motives to virtue and philosophy is greatly at variance with modern and Christian notions, but is in accordance with Hellenic sentiment. For it is impossible to deny that some of the best and greatest of the Greeks indulged in attachments that Plato, in the Laws, no less than the universal opinion of Christendom, has stigmatized as unnatural. Pausanias is very earnest in insisting on the innocence of such loves; he speaks of them as generally approved among Hellenes and disapproved by "barbarians" Ancient Greeks used this term to describe anyone not Greek. His speech is "more words than matter," and might have been composed by a pupil of Lysias or Prodicus, although there is no hint that Plato is designing to parody them. As Eryximachus says, "he makes a fair beginning, but a lame ending."

Plato transposes the two next speeches, as in the Republic he would transpose the virtues (iv. 430 D) and the mathematical sciences (vii. 528 A). This is done partly to avoid monotony, partly to make Aristophanes "the cause of wit in others," and also to bring the comic and tragic poet into juxtaposition, as if by accident. A suitable expectation of Aristophanes is raised by the ludicrous circumstance of his having the hiccoughs, which is appropriately cured by his substitute, the physician Eryximachus. To Eryximachus, Love is the good physician; he sees everything as an intelligent physicist and, like many professors of his art in modern times, attempts to reduce the moral to the physical; he recognizes one law of love which pervades them both. There are loves and strifes of the body as well as of the mind. Like Hippocrates the Asclepiad, he is a disciple of Heracleitus, whose conception of the harmony of opposites he explains in a new way as the harmony after discord; to his common sense, as to that of many moderns as well as ancients, the identity of contradictories is an absurdity.