Ambition Versus Self-Command
Read the full text in our reader
Phaedrus — τοὺς μὲν ἐρῶντας… ἐπαρθῆναι τῷ λέγειν καὶ φιλοτιμουμένους ἐπιδείκνυσθαι πρὸς ἅπαντας…· τοὺς δὲ μὴ ἐρῶντας, κρείττους αὑτῶν ὄντας, τὸ βέλτιστον ἀντὶ τῆς δόξης τῆς παρὰ τῶν ἀνθρώπων αἱρεῖσθαι
The lovers, carried away into talk and hungry for admiration, parade their devotion before everyone; but the non-lovers, being masters of themselves, choose what is genuinely best instead of a good name in the eyes of men.
Lysias presses his paradox with a psychological claim: lovers, needing to be admired, cannot keep quiet about their conquests — while the loveless, who answer only to themselves, quietly choose what is actually best.
Lysias's argument is shrewder than it first looks, and its keywords give it away. The lover, he says, is <em>epartheis</em> — 'lifted up, carried away' — and <em>philotimoúmenos</em>, driven by <em>philotimía</em>, the love of honor: he needs an audience, so he cannot resist broadcasting his conquest, and thereby exposes and endangers the beloved. The non-lover, by contrast, is <em>kreíttōn heautoû</em> — 'stronger than himself,' master of his own desires — and so 'chooses (<em>haireîtai</em>) the best instead of reputation.' It is a genuinely clever inversion: Lysias claims the calculating man is the <em>freer</em> one, precisely because he is not enslaved to being seen.<br><br>But Plato has planted the seeds of the reply inside Lysias's own vocabulary, and will harvest them for the rest of the dialogue. 'Master of oneself' (<em>kreíttōn heautoû</em>) is the very phrase the palinode turns into the charioteer and his horses — Lysias uses it as a flat boast, Plato as the whole drama of a divided soul. And <em>philotimía</em>, love of honor, is not simply a vice: in the palinode's chariot the <em>good</em> horse is precisely 'a lover of honor joined with temperance' (253d). The difference is everything the second half of the dialogue is about — not whether to master oneself, but by what and toward what. Lysias offers self-command in the service of safety and advantage; Socrates will offer it in the service of a beauty worth being mastered by. The cold prudence that sounds like freedom here will be exposed, at 256e, as the <em>aneleuthería</em>, the unfreedom, that the crowd mistakes for virtue.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 232a 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 232a — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/232a/