Guests recline at an Athenian banquet and take turns praising Eros, and with each speech love grows stranger, more dangerous, more divine. A doctor describes it as cosmic harmony, a comedian as the desperate search for our lost other half. Then Socrates speaks, and love becomes not possession but a ladder, each rung of beauty leading upward from a single body to all bodies, from bodies to souls, from souls to the Form of Beauty itself. Plato composed this dialogue around 385 BCE with the narrative skill of a dramatist. The final scene belongs to Alcibiades, drunk and crowned with violets, who crashes the party to confess his obsession with Socrates. Philosophy and desire prove inseparable, twin children of the same restless want.