On to the Next Beloved
Read the full text in our reader
Phaedrus — ῥᾴδιον γνῶναι, εἰ ἀληθῆ λέγουσιν, ὅτι ὅσων ἂν ὕστερον ἐρασθῶσιν, ἐκείνους αὐτῶν περὶ πλείονος ποιήσονται, καὶ δῆλον ὅτι, ἐὰν ἐκείνοις δοκῇ, καὶ τούτους κακῶς ποιήσουσιν.
It is easy to see, if they are telling the truth — that they love most the ones they are in love with, and are ready in word and deed to please them even at the cost of everyone's hatred — that whomever they later fall in love with, they will value more than the present ones; and clearly, if the new ones wish it, they will even do the old ones harm.
Lysias turns the lover's greatest boast — his intense, all-sacrificing devotion — into an indictment. That very intensity, he argues, is precisely what makes the lover unreliable.
Lysias performs a neat and cruel inversion: he takes the lover's proudest claim — the sheer <em>intensity</em> of his devotion, his readiness to please the beloved 'in word and deed' (<em>lógōi kaì érgōi</em>, the great Greek pairing of promise and performance) even at the price of everyone else's hatred — and turns it into the very reason not to trust him. If a man loves <em>most</em> whoever he happens to be in love with <em>now</em>, then the logic is inexorable: when he falls in love next, that new beloved will get the same total devotion, valued 'more' (<em>perì pleíonos</em>) than the present one — and the present one will be discarded, even harmed, if the new favorite wishes it. The lover's greatness is exactly his fickleness. The more absolute his passion, the more absolutely it will transfer. Devotion this fierce is not loyalty; it is a spotlight that will swing to the next face.<br><br>The argument is genuinely sharp, and it exposes something real about the psychology of desire the earlier speeches keep circling: <em>érōs</em> attaches to the beautiful <em>object</em>, and beauty is everywhere and always renewing itself in new faces. A love fixed on the beloved's <em>beauty</em> must, by its own nature, chase beauty wherever it next appears. This is the germ of truth Lysias has hold of — and it is precisely the problem the palinode will solve, not deny. Socrates's answer will not be that the lover is faithful after all; it will be that the truest lover is not finally in love with the <em>face</em> but with the <em>Beauty itself</em> glimpsed through it (250d), and so his devotion, rightly educated, need not scatter across a hundred beloveds but can gather upward toward the one Form that every beautiful thing reflects. Lysias sees only the horizontal chase — beloved to beloved, spotlight swinging. The palinode adds the vertical: the same intensity, turned upward, becomes the wing. Lysias's fickle lover and the palinode's winged one are the same erotic energy under two different governors — and which one you get depends entirely on whether the lover ever learns what he was really looking at.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 231c in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Phaedrus — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Phaedrus 231c — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/231c/