Heavenly love is directed toward older boys who are beginning to develop intelligence. Common love is felt by inferior people and directed toward women and unintelligent boys. Pausanius, Agathon’s older lover, argues that it’s important to distinguish between Common love and Heavenly love. He also says that Love gives lovers and boyfriends the courage to die for another, which can be useful to society, especially in war. Such relationships instill both pride and shame, which are important for living a good life. He says that Love is an old god who gives great benefits, such as the relationship between a lover and his boyfriend. Phaedrus, a young student of rhetoric, gives the first speech.

At the symposium (a Greek ritual banquet that includes libations to the gods, hymns, and drinking wine), Eryximachus, a doctor, proposes that they take turns giving speeches in praise (also called eulogies) of Love, or the god Eros. One day, Aristodemus says, he came upon Socrates, who invited him to a dinner party, or symposium, at tragic poet Agathon’s house. Apollodorus wasn’t at the party, but an acquaintance named Aristodemus, also Socrates’s disciple, was there, and he told Apollodorus all about what he saw and heard there. He tells his friend the story of a recent conversation with another friend, Glaucon, in which he told the story of a dinner party that had taken place more than a decade ago in Athens. A young man named Apollodorus, a disciple of Socrates, is walking along with an unnamed companion.

Plato the book