Plato was an innovator of the written dialogue and dialectic forms in philosophy. He raised problems for what became all the major areas of both theoretical philosophy and practical philosophy. His most famous contribution is the theory of forms (or ideas), which has been interpreted as advancing a solution to what is now known as the problem of universals. He is the namesake of Platonic love and the Platonic solids. His own most decisive philosophical influences are usually thought to have been, along with Socrates, the pre-Socratics Pythagoras, Heraclitus, and Parmenides, although few of his predecessors' works remain extant and much of what we know about these figures today derives from Plato himself. The Symposium is a dialogue that was written by Plato in the 4th century BCE. In it, a man tells a story he heard from another man about a symposium (which translates to "drinks party") at which Socrates, Aristophanes, and other eminent Athenians were invited to make speeches in praise of the god of Love. Plato's further retelling of this repeated tale puts us among the famous and famously loquacious party-goers try to verbally out-do each other.