The Symposium recounts a banquet at which guests praise Eros in turn. Socrates reports the teaching of Diotima, that love leads the soul up from beautiful bodies to Beauty itself; then the drunken Alcibiades bursts in to praise Socrates. It is among the founding texts of Western mysticism.
Symposium
Plato’s dialogue on love, in which speeches at a drinking party culminate in Diotima’s ladder of beauty.