In Plato’s Symposium, Diotima is credited with teaching Socrates that Ἔρως is a quest for immortality, through the generation of λόγοι. Diotima concludes her praise of Ἔρως with a famous metaphor: the steps that take a lover, from beautiful bodies to beautiful souls, to the form of Beauty. This ascent of desire from the embodied beauty of boys to its paradigmatic and unalloyed version, has attracted considerable scholarly attention. I argue that Ἔρως is not a mystical energy. It is an experience that occurs in a particular erotic culture, that of Athens and its sophisticated practice of παιδεραστεῖν. Athenian young men live in that culture and share that experience. They know about love, and how they live it through language. These amorously inclined youth, ἐρωτικοί, are the potential philosophers Socrates is interested in. For having grown used to that kind of Ἔρως ‒ talkative and libertine, flattering and unfaithful ‒ an Athenian ἐρωτικὸς is the best candidate for philosophical improvement. Socrates will take him from there. But it takes a woman to articulate this profoundly ironic understanding of Ἔρως: the more promiscuous, the more promising.