ABSTRACT
Diotima is an itinerant mystic who, having taught Socrates 'the ways of love' – a phrase that Robin Waterfield cites for its 'delicious ambiguity' – then inspires his speech on love's proper object and value. By the time of 'Was Diotima Right?' Strachey had distanced himself from his earlier uncertainty about the relative value of action and aesthetic contemplation; he had come fully to embrace the latter as the best mode of apprehending 'the concentrated essence of the meaning of life'. To 'really live', he thought, 'In the light of real being' was also to witness an ideological, even metaphysical spectacle in which 'the old deities in whom we trusted shrivel into ghosts'. He confesses utter ignorance as to whether Diotima was right, but affirms the supreme reality of a quasi-mystical condition attendant upon the experience of beauty.
