symposium   

still continues, tickle your nose with something and sneeze; and if

you sneeze once or twice, even the most violent hiccough is sure to

go. I will do as you prescribe, said Aristophanes, and now get on.

Eryximachus spoke as follows: Seeing that Pausanias made a fair

beginning, and but a lame ending, I must endeavour to supply his

deficiency. I think that he has rightly distinguished two kinds of

love. But my art further informs me that the double love is not merely

an affection of the soul of man towards the fair, or towards anything,

but is to be found in the bodies of all animals and in productions

of the earth, and I may say in all that is; such is the conclusion

which I seem to have gathered from my own art of medicine, whence I

learn how great and wonderful and universal is the deity of love,

whose empire extends over all things, divine as well as human. And

from medicine I would begin that I may do honour to my art. There

are in the human body these two kinds of love, which are confessedly

different and unlike, and being unlike, they have loves and desires

which are unlike; and the desire of the healthy is one, and the desire

of the diseased is another; and as Pausanias was just now saying

that to indulge good men is honourable, and bad men

dishonourable:-so too in the body the good and healthy elements are to

be indulged, and the bad elements and the elements of disease are

not to be indulged, but discouraged. And this is what the physician

has to do, and in this the art of medicine consists: for medicine

may be regarded generally as the knowledge of the loves and desires of

the body, and how to satisfy them or not; and the best physician is he

who is able to separate fair love from foul, or to convert one into

the other; and he who knows how to eradicate and how to implant

love, whichever is required, and can reconcile the most hostile

elements in the constitution and make them loving friends, is

skilful practitioner. Now the: most hostile are the most opposite,

such as hot and cold, bitter and sweet, moist and dry, and the like.

And my ancestor, Asclepius, knowing how-to implant friendship and