"'I shall proceed with the discourse upon Love which I heard one day
from a Mantinean woman named Diotima: in this subject she was skilled
and in many others too.
'All men,' she said 'are pregnant, Socrates, both in body and soul: on
reaching a certain age our nature yearns to beget. This it cannot do
upon an ugly person, but only on the beautiful: the conjunction of man
and woman is a begetting for both. It is a divine affair, this
engendering and bringing to birth, an immortal element in the creature
that is mortal; and it cannot occur in the discordant. The ugly is
discordant with whatever is divine, whereas the beautiful is accordant.
Thus beauty presides over birth as Fate and Lady of Travail; and hence
it is that when the pregnant approaches the beautiful it becomes not
only gracious, but so exhilarated, that it flows over with begetting and
bringing forth; though when it meets the ugly it coils itself close in a
sullen dismay: rebuffed and repressed, it brings not forth but goes in
labour with the burden of its young.
Therefore when a person is big and teeming-ripe, he feels himself in a
sore flutter for the beautiful, because its possession can relieve him
of its heavy pangs. For you are wrong, Socrates, in supposing that Love
is of the beautiful. What then is it? It is of engendering and begetting
upon the beautiful.'(...);'
Plato, Symposium 206c-e (Loeb edition)
