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; he must be reunited if he is to
be perfected: secondly, that love is the mediator and reconciler of poor,
divided human nature: thirdly, 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, like tragedy, 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 that speech of
Socrates in the Phaedrus in which he describes himself as talking
dithyrambs. 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 coloured with a tinge of
philosophy. They furnish the material out of which Socrates proceeds to
form his discourse, starting, as in other places, from mythology and the
opinions of men. From Phaedrus he takes the thought that love is stronger
than death; from Pausanias, that the true love is akin to intellect and