How does the $Symposium$ (not) hang together? The overwhelmingly popular answer is that the $Symposium$ has a teleological structure, culminating in Socrates'/Diotima's speech, which variously incorporates or dismisses noteworthy claims about $erōs$ made in the preceding speeches. Whatever endures from a non-philosophical source does so not in anything like its original form, but rather by virtue of having undergone Platonic alchemy, as she translates, reworks and refines ordinary opinions into high-powered philosophical theory. This paper proposes a radical alternative. It argues that we should systematically reverse Eryximachus' reductive judgements concerning Heraclitus on harmonisation, and apply the results to the $Symposium$ itself. There is discordant harmony which a complex, polyphonic $logos$ embodies. Such a $logos$ thrives on dissension, since its very existence as a unified whole depends on the maintained, unweakened opposition between elements agreeing to differ. The $Symposium$ is many voices unified, but untrammeled. The paper concludes that, to avoid fundamental question-begging, the $Symposium$ endorses a sort of epistemological contextualism anathema in other Platonic contexts. And that it is not a dialogue.