Symposium

At a dinner party in Athens to celebrate the poet Agathon's victory in a drama contest, the guests agree to drink lightly and instead give speeches in praise of Love. The doctor, the poet and the comic playwright Aristophanes, with his myth of humans split in two and searching for their other halves, all speak before Socrates, who repeats what a wise woman named Diotima taught him about love as a ladder rising toward beauty itself.

Then the drunk Alcibiades bursts in and gives a wild, funny, painful speech about Socrates himself. The dialogue gave us the idea of Platonic love and is the most dramatic and best-loved of Plato's works; read it with Phaedrus, his other great dialogue on love.

Plato (c. 428–348 BC) was born into an aristocratic family in Athens and became the devoted student of Socrates. After his teacher's trial and execution in 399 BC, he travelled, returned to Athens and founded the Academy, a school that lasted for centuries and counted Aristotle among its students.

Almost all his writings are dialogues in which Socrates questions his fellow citizens about justice, love, knowledge and the soul, from the Apology to the Symposium and the Republic. Known to Arab philosophers as Aflatun, he was read closely by al-Farabi and Ibn Rushd, and Western philosophy has been called a series of footnotes to him.