Diotima asks what people are doing when they show the eagerness and heat called love, if love wants the good forever. Socrates says he would not have come if he already knew. She answers that the object is birth in beauty, of body or of soul. Everyone is bringing something to the birth. They want to procreate in beauty, not in deformity, because conception and generation are an immortal principle in a mortal creature. Beauty presides at the birth and makes the conceiving power ready. Ugliness makes it shrink, turn away, and refuse. Love, she says, is not only love of the beautiful. It is love of generation and of birth in beauty. For a creature that dies, generation is a sort of eternity. If love wants the good forever, it also wants immortality.
She presses the same point with animals. Birds and beasts take the infection of love, then fight the stronger, starve, and die for their young. People might explain that by reason. Animals cannot. The cause is that mortal nature seeks, as far as it can, to last. It cannot do that by staying the same. Generation leaves a new existence in the place of the old. Even one life is succession, not a fixed unity. Hair, flesh, bones, and blood change. So do habits, tempers, opinions, desires, and fears. Knowledge does too. Recollection is knowledge departing and being renewed, so that it looks the same while it is new. Mortal things last by substitution. The divine stays the same and is not replaced. That is why people love their offspring. The love is for immortality.
Socrates is astonished. Diotima points to ambition. People spend money, take risks, and die for a name that will last, more readily than they would for their children. Alcestis died for Admetus, Achilles died to avenge Patroclus, and Codrus died to preserve the kingdom for his sons, because they wanted the memory of their virtue to remain. Those pregnant only in the body turn to women and beget children, hoping for memory and a blessed future. Those more creative in soul than in body conceive wisdom and virtue. Poets and inventors are that kind of parent. The greatest wisdom of this sort orders states and families, and it is called temperance and justice. Such a person seeks a fair and noble soul, speaks of virtue, tries to educate, and brings forth what was conceived long before. Those children are fairer and more lasting than mortal children. Homer and Hesiod left poems that keep their glory. Lycurgus left laws that saved Lacedaemon and Hellas. Solon is honoured as the father of Athenian laws. Temples rise for children of that kind. They do not rise for anyone merely because of mortal children.
Coming Up in Chapter 10
Diotima will name the teaching just given as the lesser mysteries of love, and she will say she does not know whether Socrates can reach the greater ones. She will start him with a single beautiful form, then tell him to climb, using bodies and laws as steps towards a beauty that does not decay.
