1 BEAUTY OF THE BODY, NOBILITY OF SOUL: THE PURSUIT OF LOVE IN PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM 1 Alexander Nehamas Princeton University I The last part of Socrates’s speech on erōs in Plato’s Symposium opens with a strikingly enthusiastic declaration: ‘Only in the contemplation of Beauty is human life worth living’ – a declaration made more striking by its similarities to the words Socrates uses in his Apology to express what was perhaps his deepest conviction: ‘The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being’. 2 In fact, it should be even more striking because of its similarities to another famous declaration – this one by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics : ‘What is done virtuously is noble and it is done for the sake of the noble’. But no one without a knowledge of the language and culture of fifth- and fourth-century Greece can know how close Aristotle’s sober and systematic treatment of virtue is to Plato’s inspired hymn to the power of love. For no one without such knowledge can know that both the nobility that makes action virtuous and the beauty that makes human life worth living – two ideas apparently irrelevant to each other – are denoted by the very same Greek term: the word kalon . 3 Those who work regularly with classical texts may find it difficult to remember how surprising, jarring and confusing it was to find out for the first time that a single word applies not