The Non-Lover Keeps No Accounts
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Phaedrus — τοῖς δὲ μὴ ἐρῶσιν οὔτε τὴν τῶν οἰκείων ἀμέλειαν διὰ τοῦτο ἔστιν προφασίζεσθαι, οὔτε τοὺς παρεληλυθότας πόνους ὑπολογίζεσθαι, οὔτε τὰς πρὸς τοὺς προσήκοντας διαφορὰς αἰτιάσασθαι.
But the non-lovers can neither plead the neglect of their own affairs on this account, nor reckon up the toils they have spent, nor blame their quarrels with relatives. So, with all these grievances taken away, nothing is left but to do gladly whatever they think will please.
Lysias presses the case for the loveless bond: the lover, once his passion cools, resents every sacrifice he made — but the non-lover has no such grievances to hold over the beloved.
Lysias's argument grinds forward through a machinery of grievance, and the vocabulary gives away what kind of love he is really describing: an <em>account</em>. The lover, once his desire cools, has a ledger of complaints to hold over the beloved — he can 'plead the neglect of his own affairs' (<em>oikeíōn améleian prophasízesthai</em>), 'reckon up' his past toils (<em>pónous hypologízesthai</em> — literally to enter them in the books, from <em>lógos</em>, an account), and 'blame' the quarrels with his family that the affair caused. Every one of these is a debt he feels owed, and resentment is the interest. The non-lover, by contrast, has no such entries: he made no ruinous sacrifices, kept no accounts, so he has nothing to reproach you with when the warmth fades. It is a genuinely shrewd point, and a cold one.<br><br>What makes it revealing is that Lysias's whole conception of a relationship is <em>transactional</em>, and Plato has salted the speech with the vocabulary to prove it. <em>Hypologízesthai</em>, 'to reckon up,' belongs with the other accounting-words the speech runs on — <em>sympheírein</em> (to be advantageous, 231a), and, in Socrates's answering verdict at 256e, <em>oikonomeîn</em>, 'to do the household bookkeeping,' the birth of the word 'economy.' Lysias offers love as a well-audited ledger with no bad debts: choose the partner who never overspends on you, and he will never come collecting. And the deep reply the whole dialogue mounts is not that this is <em>false</em> — a loveless bond may well be more stable — but that it is <em>small</em>. A love that keeps no accounts because it risks nothing, sacrifices nothing, is spared resentment only because it was never large enough to be wounded. The palinode's lover, by contrast, is ruined, grieved, driven mad — and grows wings. Lysias's beloved is safe from grievance the way a man with no friends is safe from betrayal. The absence of a debt is not the same as the presence of a gift.
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