Eryximachus Treats Love as Harmony — Symposium

Pausanias stops. Aristophanes should speak next, but the hiccough, from too much food or some other cause, forces a swap. He asks Eryximachus to cure him or to speak in his place. The doctor does both. Hold the breath, gargle, then sneeze. Aristophanes agrees to try.

Eryximachus says Pausanias began fairly and ended lame. The two loves are real, but not only a feeling of the soul toward the fair. Medicine finds them in bodies, in the earth's produce, and in all that is. Healthy desire and diseased desire are unlike. The best physician separates fair love from foul and makes hostile pairs into friends. Music is the same art in another material. High and low cannot make harmony while they still disagree. Rhythm joins short and long the same way. In songs and education the split returns: keep the heavenly love, take the intemperate only so they become temperate, and use the vulgar love so pleasure does not become excess.

The seasons carry both loves. Temperance brings health and plenty. Wanton love in the year brings frost, blight, and pestilence. Sacrifice and divination watch the same pair between gods and men. The love of the good, with temperance and justice, makes people friends with the gods and with one another. He hands the turn back. The hiccough is gone, but only after the sneeze. Aristophanes wonders whether the body loves such noises. Eryximachus warns him not to joke, and may let it pass if he remembers he will be called to account.