Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Extract: The first comprehensive discussion of love in Western literature was provided by Plato, who using the Greek word eros, left us a book called the Symposium, which featured a number of speakers at a drinking party, each of whom gave a speech about the nature of love. Plato seems to say that love starts as a sexual passion and that it gradually transforms itself into a union in beauty, or to quote him in “ the vast ocean of the beautiful". The term Platonic Love was never used by him, but was coined by a Platonist almost 2000 years …