The Characteristics Of Agathon And Aristophane's Speech On Love

Love is a very controversial topic. Everyone in the Symposium has different views about Love and what Love is. Agathon and Phaedrus believe love is a god. Eryximachus believes love is a bodily response. Pausanias believes there are two kinds of love, common love from Common Aphrodite and Heavenly love from Aphrodite, Daughter of Uranus. Aristophane believes love developed from a myth and that love can work against us. From each of these speeches the personalities and characteristics of each person are revealed. From Agathon’s speech, it is evident that Agathon is narcissistic and careless. Agathon seems narcissistic from his speech in the Symposium because he talks about Love’s characteristics in favor of his own characteristics. He first explains some of the characteristics of love and says, “Love is the happiest among them since he is most beautiful and best… Love by nature hates old age”(27). From the introduction of Agathon’s character we know he is considered beautiful and young. Agathon shows narcissism because he believes Love has the same characteristics as him and that love favors people like him, young and beautiful. This narcissistic view makes his argument seem invalid because how do the others …show more content…
Agathon talks about Love’s characteristics but these characteristics seem like Agathon’s own. This almost makes it seem as if he were talking about him self and not Love. Agathon also makes mistakes throughout his speech. He does not clearly justify his arguments and he uses love in the wrong context. This makes him seem very careless because he tried to make the argument sound correct and strong but it was neither. This is the reason Socrates decides to refute the argument because he knew it seemed incorrect. To defend Agathon’s argument, Love is a hard subject to talk about and there is not one concrete definition. Also, he was drunk so his thoughts may not have been