Lysias's Non-Lover Begins
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περὶ μὲν τῶν ἐμῶν πραγμάτων ἐπίστασαι, καὶ ὡς νομίζω συμφέρειν ἡμῖν γενομένων τούτων ἀκήκοας· ἀξιῶ δὲ μὴ διὰ τοῦτο ἀτυχῆσαι ὧν δέομαι, ὅτι οὐκ ἐραστὴς ὤν σου τυγχάνω
You already know my situation, and you have heard why I think an arrangement between us would be to our mutual advantage. So I claim I ought not to be turned down for one reason alone: that I do not happen to be in love with you.
Phaedrus reads out the speech he has been hiding — Lysias's clever paradox, a seducer's argument that a boy should yield to a man who does NOT love him. (The speech actually begins in the last line of 230e; it opens in the cool, transactional voice of someone weighing advantage.)
Hear the register. Lysias's non-lover opens not with feeling but with a balance sheet: 'my affairs' (<em>prágmata</em>), 'benefit' (<em>sympheírein</em>), 'I claim' (<em>axiô</em>, the language of desert and entitlement). This is the vocabulary of the assembly and the marketplace — what is useful, what one is owed — deployed as seduction. The <em>sympheron</em>, 'the advantageous,' is the keyword of the whole speech, and Plato has planted it deliberately: the entire dialogue will become a contest between this ledger of advantage and the god-sent madness of the palinode to come.<br><br>The paradox lands on one word: <em>erastḗs</em>, lover. Greek courtship named its roles exactly — the <em>erastḗs</em> (the desirer, the active older man) and the <em>erṓmenos</em> (the desired youth). Lysias's whole conceit is to subtract the <em>erastḗs</em> from the equation: a suitor who insists his very lovelessness is the selling point, since a non-lover brings none of love's jealousy, indiscretion, or ruin. It is a genuinely clever argument — and Socrates will first out-argue it on its own cold terms, then recant everything and defend the madness Lysias so reasonably wants to avoid.
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