Today, we will closely read Eryximachus's take on Love:
MAC (Abridged):
"Well, in my opinion, since Pausanias made a fine start to his speech but did not adequately complete it, it is necessary for me to try to put a complete end to
the argument. Inasmuch as Eros is double, it is, in my opinion, a fine thing to
divide him; but that he presides not only over the souls of human beings in
regard to the beautiful but also in regard to many other things and in other
cases--the bodies of all the animals as well as those things that grow in the
earth, and just about all the things that are--that, in my opinion, I have come
to see from medicine, our art. For how great and wondrous the god is in his
comprehensive aims, both in terms of human things and in terms of.divine things! I shall begin my speech with medicine, so that we may venerate that art as well. The nature of bodies has this double Eros, for the health and the sickness of the body are by agreement different and..dissimilar; and the dissimilar desires and loves dissimilar things. Now, there is one love that presides over the healthy
state, and another over the sickly. Just as' Pausanias was saying, it is a fine
thing to gratify those who are good among human beings and disgraceful to gratify the intemperate, so too, in the case of men's bodies taken by themselves is it a fine and needful thing to gratify the good and healthy things of each body (this is what has the name 'the medical'); but it is shameful to gratify the bad and
sickly things, and one has to abstain from favoring them, if one is to be skilled. For the art of medicine is, to sum it up, the expert knowledge of the erotics
of the body in .regard to repletion and evacuation; and he who diagnostically
discriminates in these things between the noble and base love is the one most
skilled in medicine; while he who induces changes, so as.to bring about the
acquisition of one kind of love in place of the other, and who, in whatever things where there is no love but there needs must be, has the expert knowledge to
instill it, or to remove it from those things in which it is [but should not be], would be a good craftsman. For he must, in point of fact, be able to make the
things that are most at enmity in the body into friends and to make them love one another. The most opposite things are the most at enmity: cold and hot, bitter
and sweet, dry and moist, and anything of the sort. Our ancestor-Asklepios, who
had the expert knowledge to instill love and unanimity into these things--as the poets here assert and as I am convinced is so--put together our art. Not only
medicine, with moderation and justice, among us and among gods, this has the
greatest power and provides us with every kind of happiness, making us able to associate with one another and to be friends even with the gods who are stronger
than we are. Now, perhaps in praising Eros I too am omitting many things; but 1
have done that unwillingly. For if I did omit anything, it is your job,
Aristophanes, to fill it in; or if you intend to make a different eulogy of the
god, proceed to do so, since you have stopped hiccuping."
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