In this text, Plato imagines a high-society dinner-party in Athens in 416 BC at which the guests, including the poet Aristophanes and Plato's mentor, Socrates, each deliver a short speech in praise of love. The sequence of short speeches ends with Socrates' account of the views of Diotima, a propetess who taught him that love is man's means of trying to attain goodness. And then into the party bursts the drunken Alcibiades, the most popular and notorious Athenian of the time, who insists on praising Socrates himself rather than love, and gives a sketch of Socrates' own enigmatic character. Robin Waterfield is the translator of Plato's Philebus, Theaetus, Early Socratic Dialogues and The Republic, as well as Plutarch's Essays.