In Plato’s dialogue Symposium, seven varied speeches are made on the meaning of love at an all-male drinking party set in ancient Athens in 416 BCE. One of the participants is the philosopher Socrates, and when it comes to his turn to speak, he is made to say something surprising: he proposes to ‘tell the truth’ about love. It’s surprising because in other Platonic dialogues, where Socrates address­es questions such as ‘What is knowledge?’, ‘What is excellence?’, and ‘What is courage?’, he has no positive answers to give about these central areas of human thought and experience: in fact, Socrates was well known for having laid no claim to know­ledge, and for asserting that ‘the only thing I know is that I do not know’. How is it, then, that Socrates can claim to know the truth about something as fundamental and potentially all-encomp­assing as love?

The answer is that, in the Symposium, Socrates claims to know the truth only because he learned it from someone else. He describes his teacher of love as a ‘clever non-Athenian woman who had knowledge of this and many other things’ (my translations throughout). He gives her name as Diotima of Mantinea, and appears to endorse unquestioningly the account of love that he learned from her, which he now proposes to present to his audience.

It is generally supposed that this instructor is a Platonic fiction: the figure of Diotima is often called a ‘priestess’ thanks to the wisdom and authority with which she speaks (though no such designation is given by Plato). But what is at stake for our understanding of Socrates’ thought if we accept as true his claim that he learned about love from a woman? And what might we learn about the meaning of love?

Here I will first outline the ‘truth about love’ imparted by Diotima to Socrates. I will then explain why we might suppose that Diotima was based on a real person, Aspasia of Miletus, and suggest what this might mean for our understanding of Socrates’ thought and philosophical procedure. In accept­ing that Plato has sought to connec­t Diotima to an exceptional and well-known historical figure, we can gain new insights into a neglected biographical influence on Socrates, and into how his method of definitional enquiry devel­oped. That method was to provide the crucial foundation for Plato’s approach not just to under­standing love, but to creating his metaphysical theory about of the transcendent nature of truth and reality.

The doctrine Socrates attributes to Diotima in the Symposium is that love – or, more precisely, the divine spirit Eros – operates on various levels. At the lowest level, love engenders erotic feelings towards the body of someone to whom one is attracted. However, what attracts us about that body is, Diotima says, a quality that we call its ‘beauty’, which in turn leads to a recognition that many other bodies possess this quality and are equally capable of inspiring erotic feelings. By recognising the presence of beauty in many bodies, one comes to understand that what is attractive to us is not the bodies themselves, but the abstract quality of beauty of which the bodies partake.

This leads to the further insight that things other than bodies possess beauty: we are attracted to non-corporeal things such as, most importantly, ‘wisdom, laws and institutions’ – the features of a community or city that command a citizen’s love and loyalty. In this way, according to Diotima, the commonplace erotic desire that we feel towards a person we consider to be beautiful can lead us up the ‘ladder’ of love, rung by rung, ascending from the particular object of desire to a general appreciation of the abstract quality of beauty and, beyond that, to moral goodness. What begins as physical lust is ennobled by the way it encourages the lover to mount upwards to the highest goodness imaginable, the abstract ‘form of the good’.

Aristophanes spins a brilliant fantasy about love being the force that drives one to seek one’s ‘other half’

This notion of the transcendent aim of love seems strange and mysterious even to Socrates, we are told. Diotima explicitly characterises love as a ‘mystery’ into which listeners have to be initiated, just as initiands were initiated into the Mysteries (the arcane cult observances of Greek gods such as Dionysus). How­ever, the rungs of the ladder that represent the stages of the lover’s ascent are prefigured in the dialogue by the five speakers who precede Socrates. Each of them describes a commonly acknowledged aspect of love (at least, commonly acknowledged in their time). But each of them offers only an incomplete underst­and­ing: as in the story of the blind men trying to describe an elephant – one feels the trunk, and says an elephant is like a snake; another touches the flank, and says it’s like a wall – each of the partygoers gives only a partial account of what will add up, by the end of the dialogue, to a more complete picture.

The first of the speakers, a young aristocrat called Phaedrus, takes physical relationships for granted in arguing that Eros gives lovers the urge to act nobly, to the point of even........

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