The nature of love and the role of myth in Plato’s dialogues are, to put it mildly, highly contested issues. Platonic love has been characterized in many ways: as the spiritual love of ideal forms, far removed from mundane concerns;1 as a kind of Freudian sublimation of physical drives;2 as a search for wholeness in our divided constitution, much as Aristophanes represents this in the Symposium;3 as characterized by Diotima-Socrates’ speech in the Symposium, particularly in terms of the “greater mysteries” or ladder of ascent;4 or, again, as represented by Socrates’ second speech in the Phaedrus, namely, the great myth of the soul that has captured the imaginations of so many different generations over nearly two and a half thousand years, or as represented in parts of that speech, love as divine madness, for instance;5 or, yet again, as manifesting something like Pausanias’ distinction between a heavenly and a vulgar love, according to which the heavenly lover strives for wisdom and virtue at all costs, an aspiration that seems to resemble the Platonic thirst for spiritual wisdom.6 I will return to this question and to the vocabulary of love after establishing some basis for understanding the logos-myth distinction.