 Diotima describes the poet’s task as the begetting of wisdom and other virtues (209a). Ultimately desiring what is beautiful the poet produces works of verse. And who would not envy Homer or Hesiod (209d)? But aside from these passages the Symposium seems prepared to treat anything but a poem as an exemplar of beauty. In a similar spirit the Philebus’s examples of pure sensory beauty exclude pictures (51b–d).