The Established Custom
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Phaedrus — πλείων ἐλπὶς ἐν τοῖς πολλοῖς ὄντα τυχεῖν τὸν ἄξιον τῆς σῆς φιλίας. εἰ τοίνυν τὸν νόμον τὸν καθεστηκότα δέδοικας, μὴ πυθομένων τῶν ἀνθρώπων ὄνειδός σοι γένηται
Lysias is still counting. Lovers are few, non-lovers many; so if you want the best odds of finding someone genuinely worth your friendship, you should draw from the larger pool. Then comes the practical clincher: a love-affair is conspicuous and sets tongues wagging, but an arrangement with someone who isn't in love can be kept quiet. If what you really fear is the established custom — the disgrace that lands when people find out — the non-lover is simply the safer bet.
Lysias closes his case. With non-lovers so many, the odds of finding someone truly worth your friendship are better among them — and if what you dread is custom and the disgrace of being found out, the discreet non-lover is the safer choice than the conspicuous lover.
The whole speech runs on this accountant's logic, and Plato lets it hang itself. Lysias reduces nomos — a word that holds law, custom, and the deep weight of convention all at once — to mere fear of being seen. Love turns into a transaction to be hidden from the neighbors, and the 'worthy' partner is whoever survives a cost-benefit screen. Socrates's palinode will answer this line by line: the madness Lysias urges you to avoid is exactly the divine gift that grows the soul its wings, and the concealment he recommends is the reverse of the shameless, sky-facing love the myth will celebrate. Here, though, we hear only the case for playing it safe — worth remembering when the second speech soars, because Plato wants us to have felt the pull of the cautious argument before it is overturned.
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