What is love? What does it feel like to fall in love or to be in love or to love somebody? These questions are pondered by many people for many centuries. There are obviously many types of love, the love that a person has for his or her parents, siblings, relatives, and pets, would be different than the love for his or her country, which would also be different than the love towards the opposite sex. In "The Symposium", Plato presented definitions of what love is in the opinions of Phaedrus, Pausanias, Eryximachus, Aristophanes, and Socrates. But what is the point that Plato is trying to get across when presenting these definitions? Is he saying of all the definitions, only one is correct in defining love? Or maybe that the definition of love is a composition of all the stated definitions or maybe none at all. An examination of each sophist in "The Symposium" and their definitions on love was evaluated for clarity and possibly answered the numerous questioned arise.
             The conversation regarding love begins with Phaedrus proclaiming, "...that Love is the eldest and noblest and mightiest of the gods, and the chiefest author and giver of happiness and virtue, in life and after death." (327) While, Pausanias argued that there are two kinds of love rather than just one. "Evil is the vulgar lover who loves the body rather than the soul, and who is inconstant because he is a lover of the inconstant, and therefore when the bloom of youth which he was desiring is over, he takes wings and flies away, inspite of all his words and promises; whereas the love of the noble mind which is in union with the unchangeable, is everlasting." (330) Eryximachus criticized Pausanias of a "lame ending" in his definition of love and thus added its deficiency using medicine and art as metaphors, "...the good physician is he who is able to separate fair love from foul, or to convert one into the othe...