names; and the poet and the warrior are inspired by the hope of a fame which shall live for ever. And Diotima (continues Socrates) unfolded to me greater mysteries than these. He who has the instinct of true love, and can discern the relations of true beauty in every form, will go on from strength to strength until at last the vision is revealed to him of a single science, and he "will suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty—in the likeness of no human face or form, but absolute, simple, separate, and everlasting—not clogged with the pollutions of mortality, and all the colours and vanities of human life."
The murmur of applause with which this speech is greeted has hardly died away, when a loud knocking is heard at the outer gate, and the voice of Alcibiades shouting for Agathon. Presently he staggers in, at the head of a troop of revellers, flushed with wine, and crowned with a wreath of ivy-leaves and violets. Thought he is drunk already (as he tells the company), he orders one of the slaves to fill a huge wine-cooler "holding more than two quarts," which he drains, and then has it filled again for Socrates, who also empties it. "Why are they so silent and sober?" Alcibiades asks; and Agathon explains to him that they have all been making speeches in praise of Love, and that it will be his turn to speak next.
Alcibiades readily assents; but instead of taking Love as his topic, he gives an account of his intercourse with Socrates. His face (he says) is like those masks of Silenus, which conceal the image of a god: he is as ugly as the satyr Marsyas; but, like Marsyas, he charms
