Plato's "Feast" is a central work for world culture, interpreting love not only as a natural, but also as a social and creative principle. Many customs of falling in love and love relationships, as well as ideas about the value of a creative person, also go back to the "Feast". The vivid and embossed images of Socrates' interlocutors, heightened drama, playing with a variety of poetic and prose styles, even now make The Feast an inexhaustible resource for the "novel" style of thinking. In a sense, The Feast is not just a project of the novel as a literary work, but of the novel as a social institution. The meaning of Plato's complex dialogue is far from being reduced to the chanting of idealized love, which is involuntarily suggested by outdated translations and interpretations. The text of the "Feast" is given in the translation of the professor of the Russian State Humanitarian University Alexander Markov, taking into account the latest philosophical and philological interpretations of the central work of Plato.