"Because of the centrality and power of love in human experience, men
and women throughout the ages have felt the compulsion to sing songs, to write
verse, and to tell stories about this ineffable and mysterious force which leads
them to the peaks of felicity, and to the depths of despair. Love indeed is an
ultimate, if not the ultimate, human concern. It is the universal principle
undergirding all human activity, the object of all human striving, resulting,
naturally, in the need to examine and discuss it carefully. Platoís Symposium is
one such example.1 The venerable author in this ancient treatise records the
speeches of some six prominent Athenians who employ both story and verse to
convey a variety of myths and motifs about the nature and function of love (eros)."
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