Choose any two of the speeches about love and discuss how the dynamic between the lover and the loved is acted out. One should be Aristophanes....

Plato's Symposium is a dialogue that uses a comic setting
of a dinner party to introduce a serious discussion of the question of love. It first
should be noted that the prototypical model of love in the Platonic dialogues is
homsexual rather than heterosexual. The erastes, or lover, was
typically an older man and the eromenos, or beloved, was a young
man, normally described as having very fine facial hair but not a full beard, i.e. an
adolescent. In this relationship, the erastes was the "active" and eromenos the
"passive" partner. Passive homosexuality was regarded as effeminate for an adult man. In
general, this relationship was considered more masculine than heterosexual associations,
because it involved social relationships with men rather than women. It involved an
educational compenent, where the older erastes introduced the younger eromenos to the
social and political life of the Athenian gentleman.

The
interlocutors in the dialogue include the poet Agathon, the famous comic poet
Aristophanes, the extremely handsome and dissolute Alcibiades who appears drunk,
Phaedrus, and the physician Eryximachus. Aristophanes speech is intended primarily for
comic relief, intended to make fun of various creation myths by portraying early humans
as descended from duplex creaturesconsisting of pairs of people attached to each other,
who became separated, and whose sexual desires are for reunion with their previously
conjoined halfs. In this portrait, Plato satirizes the notion that we should understand
love as purely physical.

The speech Socrates attributes to
Diotima, by contrast, portarys love as primarily spiritual, and acting anagogically to
lead the sould from love of external human beauty to love of the beautiful human soul
and from there to love of the divine.