Describe how Plato, Sappho, and/or Catullus conceive of love (and/or friendship). You can choose to only discuss one of the three works or compare two or three of them. You can also choose to compare their views on love with The Odyssey. You can also choose to focus more specifically on either the lover or the beloved if you like.

In his work, Plato describes love in various ways. He starts off by giving a vague meaning of love but as the conversation progresses, love found a new meaning with each speaker. The first speaker Phaedrus describes love as either being “Heavenly” or “Common”. Heavenly love takes place between two people overlooking the sexual pleasures and Common love is only being attracted to a persons body. The description of love that stood out for me was the description given by Aristophanes. He starts off by saying that there were three genders: male, female and androgynous. They were cut in half by Zeus. To them love is finding their other half. This description is creepy yet interesting. Eryximachus compares love to body parts. He says that, the correlation between different body parts is love.