Eryximachus — love as cosmic harmony

Aristophanes was meant to speak next but a fit of hiccups has him at Eryximachus's mercy. Eryximachus offers two cures: hold your breath, or induce a sneeze with a feather. Aristophanes nods and the swap is made. Eryximachus rises in his place. He compliments Pausanias's distinction between Heavenly and Common Love but says it does not go far enough. The two Loves are not just two human attachments. They are two principles that operate everywhere there are opposites to be reconciled.

In medicine, Eryximachus says, the body is a mass of opposites — hot and cold, wet and dry, full and empty. The physician's whole art is to know which opposites in a given body need to be reconciled and how. That reconciliation is Heavenly Love at work. Common Love is the disordered version — the hot growing too hot, the body unbalanced into sickness. The doctor's job is to take Common Love and convert it, where possible, into Heavenly. So with music: the composer reconciles high and low, fast and slow; without that reconciliation, there is no music. So with the rhythms of the year — when winter and summer reconcile, the harvest comes; when Common Love prevails between them, plagues arrive.

He finishes by extending the theory into divination. Religion, Eryximachus says, is the science of preserving Heavenly Love between gods and men. When relations between humans and gods are healthy, the city flourishes; when they are diseased — when humans honor Common Love over Heavenly — the gods send signs of displeasure. The seer's whole work is reading those signs and prescribing remedies. The speech keeps expanding outward; one feels Eryximachus could go on. Eventually he sees Aristophanes signaling that the hiccups are gone. He yields the floor.