INTRODUCTION.

His notion of love may be summed up as the harmony of man with himself in soul as well as body, and of all things in heaven and earth with one another.

Aristophanes is ready to laugh and make others laugh before he opens his mouth, just as Socrates, true to his character, is ready to argue before he begins to speak. He expresses the very genius of the old comedy, its coarse and forcible imagery, and the license of its language in speaking about the gods. He has no sophistical notions about love, which he brings back to its common-sense meaning of love between intelligent beings. His account of the origin of the sexes has the greatest (comic) probability and verisimilitude. Nothing in Aristophanes is more truly Aristophanic than the description of the human monster whirling round on four arms and four legs, eight in all, with incredible rapidity. Yet there is a mixture of earnestness in this jest; three serious principles seem to be insinuated: first, that man cannot exist in isolation and must be reunited if he is to be perfected; second, that love is the mediator and reconciler of poor, divided human nature; and third, that the loves of this world are an indistinct anticipation of an ideal union which is not yet realized.

The speech of Agathon is conceived in a higher strain and receives the real, if half-ironical, approval of Socrates. It is the speech of the tragic poet and a sort of poem, moving among the gods of Olympus and not among the elder or Orphic deities. In the idea of the antiquity of love he cannot agree; love is not of the olden time, but present and youthful ever. The speech may be compared with the speech of Socrates in the Phaedrus, in which he describes himself as talking dithyrambs An ancient Greek hymn sung in honor of Dionysus; often used here to mean impassioned, wild poetry. It is at once a preparation for Socrates and a foil to him. The rhetoric of Agathon elevates the soul to "sunlit heights," but at the same time contrasts with the natural and necessary eloquence of Socrates. Agathon contributes the distinction between love and the works of love, and also hints incidentally that love is always of beauty, which Socrates afterwards raises into a principle. While the consciousness of discord is stronger in the comic poet Aristophanes, Agathon, the tragic poet, has a deeper sense of harmony and reconciliation, and speaks of Love as the creator and artist.

All the earlier speeches embody common opinions colored with a tinge of philosophy. They furnish the material out of which Socrates proceeds to form his discourse, starting, as in other places, from...