Alcibiades: An Ancient Greek Soap Opera.

The 5 most important things that Diotima tried to teach Socrates about love were that:

1. Socrates was wrong in saying that if Love desired x, Love must not have x. For example, if Love desires beauty, Love cannot be beautiful. Rather, Diotima says that desire of something does not necessarily mean complete lack of that thing. She posits that Love is the mean between 2 extremes, such as the mean between wisdom and ignorance, and explains this through the story of its birth. In this way, Love can both be beautiful and yet desire beauty.
2. Love means wanting to possess the good forever, and that is why we pursue Love with such eagerness and zeal.
3. The true kind of Love is achieved through pursuing the good, but there is a slight perversion of Love that occurs when people pursue happiness through indirect means, such as money or fame.
4. Love gives birth to beauty. In a way, reproduction leads to immortality, and in the act of reproduction/pregnancy, the parents become more joyful and more beautiful - more good. So, reproduction is the act that allows Love to possess the good forever.
5. Love must desire immortality.

Throughout his speech about Socrates, Alcibiades mentions many things about their relationship that are characteristic of the way Love has been described throughout the evening. For example, Alcibiades talks about how Socrates is so beautiful and wonderful that it makes him feel shame, which is one of the characteristics of love that Phaedrus mentioned. He also mentioned that Socrates tends to Love beautiful boys, which shows that Love is the pursuit of beauty, as Diotima said. Most importantly, he talks about how willing he was to surrender all he was to Socrates so that Socrates might make him good. This means that he recognizes, at least in some small way, that Love is pursuance of the good, and would make him more beautiful and more wise. I think this is why he wishes to consummate the relationship with Socrates, perhaps because he understands that the act of consummation is the act that would allow their Love to become cemented in the pursuit of the good forever.

I think that Alcibiades is only pretending to be drunk, because it seems to be his primary goal to get Socrates drunk. I don't really know what their relationship is at this point, but perhaps he thinks if Socrates is drunk, he will be more loose with Alcibiades, though he mentions bitterly that no matter how much he drinks, Socrates will not become drunk. I've never been drunk before, so I can't say for sure, but it seems to me that he is wayyyyyy too articulate to be drunk as well. That factor aside, I think other things point to his sobriety as well - perhaps he is only pretending to be drunk so that they will let him into the party in an attempt to calm him down. He seems to be angry about Socrates sitting next to Agathon, so it seems possible that he came to break up the Love party and make sure that Socrates was being faithful to him, and just used the guise of being drunk to be allowed in.