Symposium.
Socrates.
is birth in beauty, whether of body or soul.' ' I do not understand you,' I said ; 'the oracle requires an explanation.' ' I will make my meaning clearer,' she replied. ' I mean to say, that all men are bringing to the birth in their bodies and in their souls. There is a certain age at which human nature is desirous of procreation— procreation which must be in beauty and not in deformity; and this procreation is the union of man and woman, and is a divine thing ; for concep- tion and generation are an immortal principle in the mortal creature, and in the inharmonious they can never be. But the deformed is always inharmonious with the divine, and the beautiful harmonious. Beauty, then, is the destiny or goddess of parturition who presides at birth, and therefore, when approaching beauty, the conceiving power is propitious, and diffusive, and benign, and begets and bears fruit : at the sight of ugliness she frowns and contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away, and shrivels up, and not without a pang re- frains from conception. And this is the reason why, when the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming nature is full, there is such a flutter and ecstacy about beauty whose ap- proach is the alleviation of the pain of travail. For love, is not the love of the beautiful only, but of birth in beauty. Socrates, is not, as you imagine, the love of the beautiful only,.' 'What then?' ' The love of generation and of birth in beauty.' 'Yes,' I said. 'Yes, indeed,' she replied. 'But why of generation?' 'Because to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality,' she replied; 'and if, as has been already admitted, love is of the everlasting possession 207 of the good, all men will necessarily desire immortality together with good : Wherefore love is of immortality.'
All this she taught me at various times when she spoke of love. And I remember her once saying to me, ' What is the cause, Socrates, of love, and the attendant desire ? See you Whence arises the great power of love in men and animals not how all animals, birds, as well as beasts, in their desire of procreation, are m agony when they take the infection of love, which begins with the desire of union; whereto is added the care of offspring, on whose behalf the weakest are ready to battle against the strongest even to the uttermost, and to die for them, and will let themselves be tormented with hunger or suffer anything in order to maintain their young. Man may be supposed to act thus from reason ; but why should animalsVOL. I. p p
