Nobody Suspects the Company
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Phaedrus — τοὺς δὲ μὴ ἐρῶντας οὐδʼ αἰτιᾶσθαι διὰ τὴν συνουσίαν ἐπιχειροῦσιν, εἰδότες ὅτι ἀναγκαῖόν ἐστιν ἢ διὰ φιλίαν τῳ διαλέγεσθαι ἢ διʼ ἄλλην τινὰ ἡδονήν.
Lysias points to the gossip that trails a love-affair. Let two lovers fall out, and everyone assumes the desire between them was the cause. The non-lover is spared all of that: no one bothers to blame his company, because company is exactly what needs no explaining — people spend time together out of friendship or for some ordinary pleasure, and there the matter rests. So the discreet arrangement carries none of the reputational risk of the visible one.
Lysias's ledger continues. When lovers quarrel, onlookers pin the trouble on the affair itself; but the non-lover's company draws no such suspicion, since spending time with someone is assumed to rest on friendship or some ordinary pleasure — nothing that needs explaining.
The load-bearing word is synousia — a 'being-together' that runs the whole way from sitting and talking to sleeping together, and Lysias needs every inch of that range. He lets the innocent sense (keeping company) cover for the loaded one (the affair): since companionship 'must' rest on friendship or pleasure, the non-lover's synousia looks like nothing to remark on. Notice, too, that he grants conversing — dialegesthai, the very word for the philosophical talk this whole dialogue is made of — only an instrumental worth, a means to friendship or pleasure. Socrates will spend the rest of the Phaedrus insisting that talking-together is not a cover for desire but the shape desire should take once it turns toward truth. Lysias cannot hear that difference, and the deafness is precisely what the speech is built to expose.
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