symposium   

and best? And he is the fairest: for, in the first place, he is the

youngest, and of his youth he is himself the witness, fleeing out of

the way of age, who is swift enough, swifter truly than most of us

like:-Love hates him and will not come near him; but youth and love

live and move together-like to like, as the proverb says. Many

things were said by Phaedrus about Love in which I agree with him; but

I cannot agree that he is older than Iapetus and Kronos:-not so; I

maintain him to be the youngest of the gods, and youthful ever. The

ancient doings among the gods of which Hesiod and Parmenides spoke, if

the tradition of them be true, were done of Necessity and not Love;

had Love been in those days, there would have been no chaining or

mutilation of the gods, or other violence, but peace and sweetness, as

there is now in heaven, since the rule of Love began.

Love is young and also tender; he ought to have a poet like Homer to

describe his tenderness, as Homer says of Ate, that she is a goddess

and tender:



Her feet are tender, for she sets her steps,

Not on the ground but on the heads of men:



herein is an excellent proof of her tenderness that,-she walks not

upon the hard but upon the soft. Let us adduce a similar proof of

the tenderness of Love; for he walks not upon the earth, nor yet

upon skulls of men, which are not so very soft, but in the hearts

and souls of both god, and men, which are of all things the softest:

in them he walks and dwells and makes his home. Not in every soul

without exception, for Where there is hardness he departs, where there

is softness there he dwells; and nestling always with his feet and

in all manner of ways in the softest of soft places, how can he be

other than the softest of all things? Of a truth he is the tenderest

as well as the youngest, and also he is of flexile form; for if he

were hard and without flexure he could not enfold all things, or