Plato

A dinner party in Athens, 416 BCE: Socrates, Aristophanes, Alcibiades, and others deliver speeches in praise of Love (Eros). Each speech offers a different theory; the climax is Socrates's account of what the priestess Diotima taught him — that Eros is the ascent from beautiful bodies to beauty itself.

Socrates and his interlocutors ask what justice is — and end up designing an ideal city, debating the nature of the soul, defining the philosopher-king, arguing for the immortality of the soul, banning poets from the ideal state, and constructing the allegory of the cave. The most influential philosophical text in the Western tradition.