What a misunderstanding on love!
I pray the LORD leads more people to 1 Corinthians 13 and Romans 1 to actually see what this madness is really about. Plato was as wrong as we could be as humans.

wonderful, 2000 years ago everything already said about love, death, friendshiop or even the internet (via the discussion of writing)

Favorite speech: L’art du discours (the Art of Speech? I read this book in French)

Personal opinion, I think this is just another one of these books that makes me feel that we need to stop overly glamorizing Greek Philosophers and we need to start looking at Non-Western philosophy.

Pensum. Lest utdrag fra boken

Too much time has passed for this to be a text that can be evaluated in and of itself. It has acquired too much weight, too much seriousness.
I strongly suspect that Plato may have been going for that seriousness, even if Socrates himself was just enjoying himself with some conversation.
In this case, it's not perspective that's needed; it's a return to the original context.

I read The Symposium - awesome!

The Phaedrus would be awesome if they didn't talk about rhetoric for a million years at the end. Also, I know it was more than 2000 years ago, but it's hard to fully get over the old man / teenage boy dynamic going on. In my opinion, the book itself criticized this "norm" in many ways, but I'm not gonna write a paper on it in the goodreads comment section... Though, somewhat tempted to?

I last read The Symposium at university decades ago. James Romm’s ‘The Sacred Band’ sent me back to look at it again - and yes, Plato does indeed describe Athenian and Spartan attitudes to homosexuality as “complicated”, as opposed to the more free and easy attitudes of the Boeotians (a neighbouring Greek state to Athens, and a bitter foe to Sparta). Moreover, Plato suggests these more liberal attitudes were due to the Boeotians being unsophisticated country bumpkins, unlike the sophisticated Athenian metropolitan elites.

Romm himself situates the Boeotian happy and well-adjusted gay traditions in the context of the local mythology and religious and pilgrimage shrines of their nation (he suggests they observed gay marriage between equal partners) which may help in part to explain things, although Sparta’s premier religious festival was based on the Apollo+Hyacinth myth, which nevertheless failed to fully liberalise Sparta’s attitudes (which were, like Athens’s, “complicated”)

The Symposium contains the delightfully daft origin myth/metaphor for human sexual orientations - there were originally three sexes, and we were all cut in half by vengeful gods, so that we all perpetually seek out our other halves. Men seek men; women women, and hermaphrodites seek either men or women, depending on which half you originally were.

I can’t remember reading Phaedrus before. But it was very charming to read about unruly horses pulling charioteers adrift coincidentally on the same day as the unfortunate German Olympian was experiencing her own equine troubles. Plato also rails against writing in this text, and again whilst bonkers his thoughts are definitely stimulating.

On the Symposium:
First things first, the reason I found this translation so smooth and entertaining is the language, this is by far the easiest English book I've read.
In the Symposium, Agathon holds a supper with his friends (writers and philosophers) and they all decide to make their devotions and praises to the god Eros/Cupid (god of love). Phaedrus (an idealist) states that an army made up entirely of lovers would be the ultimate force against a state's foes, because a lover wouldn't dare to abandon his boyfriend in battle or even dare to show cowardliness, lest being unworthy of the love. Pausanias (a realist) says that there are two Aphrodites, heavenly and common. The one Heavenly is associated with the love of the soul and the common, the love of the body. He also adds that there "isn't one single form of love" and that "love is neither right not wrong in itself" and "It is wrong if you satisfy the wrong person". He defines the wrong person as the one who loves what isn't lasting, the body, rather than the mind. According to Pausanias, the right kind of love is to love the goodness in your lover in order to learn from him and his wisdom. Socrates defines Eros as the love of something you desire and obviously what you desire, you lack and that a wise man can't desire to be wise, since he is wise already and a foolish man can't desire what he doesn't value. So, it must be one of the intermediate class who desires something, because he is neither ignorant nor in possession of what he wants. He also says that man is capable of producing physical and mental offsprings. Physical offspring is ordinary children. Mental offspring is our achievements in life, and both are produced in pursuit of immortality. This was just a quick review of what happened on that splendid supper and I would happily read the Symposium again in the future.

On the Phaedrus:
A conversation between Socrates and his friend Phaedrus on love, speech-making, the soul, reincarnation and writing. Socrates despises desire as a form of excess and that it brings ruin to men in different aspects of life including love and food. Socrates' picture of the soul is a winged form in the heavens with a chariot and two horses following whatever a god it prefers, and that whenever a soul descends to the earth and posses a body it begins to imitate the god it has followed before its earthly birth. On the writing matter, Socrates doesn't approve of whatever is written because in his mind, writing produces forgetfulness and "disuse of memory" and that people would rely on what is written to acquire knowledge rather than experiencing things themselves. Finally, the scientific way of speaking or writing according to Socrates is to know the truth of what you say, to be able to define everything you say and to know whom to address this speech to.
I really find the Symposium to be more entertaining. The Phaedrus is just so rich with different topics and I guess I will have to read it again to ensure my full understanding.

El primer discurso raro en plan machista y el segundo se me ha hecho un poco chapa salvo el final.

my favorite speech is Aristophanes - where he tells the story of how Zeus spilt androgenous people in half, and we are looking for our other half, and finding that person is what love is...

Le banquet 4/5
Phèdre 2/5 (j'ai pas eu le courage de le finir tellement les arguments sont mauvais)