When Love Comes to the Gadfly

Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher | Armand D’Angour | Bloomsbury

By Matthew Bianco

Two seemingly independent questions have been asked for centuries.

The first question—“what is love”—has been asked by nearly everybody since the first woman was wooed by the first man. The second question, which is more specific, has been asked by philosophers (and other readers of Plato) for the last twenty-four centuries: “How did th…