Cutting the Beloved Off
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Phaedrus — διόπερ καὶ τὰς πρὸς τοὺς ἄλλους τῶν ἐρωμένων συνουσίας ἀποτρέπουσιν, φοβούμενοι τοὺς μὲν οὐσίαν κεκτημένους μὴ χρήμασιν αὐτοὺς ὑπερβάλωνται, τοὺς δὲ πεπαιδευμένους μὴ συνέσει κρείττους γένωνται;
Now Lysias turns to the lover's jealousy. Because the lover counts every other friendship of the beloved as a threat to himself, he works to cut them off — keeping the young man away from anyone who might rival him. The rich are dangerous because they can outspend him; the educated because they can outthink him. So the beloved ends up isolated, not for his own good but to guard the lover's monopoly.
The indictment sharpens. The lover, Lysias says, serves his own interest at every turn — so he isolates the beloved, steering him away from everyone else, dreading that a richer man will outbid him or a better-educated one outshine him.
Two of Plato's weightiest words sit inside this cynical calculation, and the placement is deliberate. The lover fears a rival's ousia — a word that means 'property' here but is also Plato's term for 'being, essence,' the reality the philosopher pursues — and fears the man of paideia, 'education,' the very formation of soul the Phaedrus exists to describe. Lysias flattens both into competitive assets: wealth to be outspent, learning to be outmatched. He cannot picture substance or education as anything but chips in a contest over possession. That is the deeper charge the dialogue is quietly filing against him — that a soul which sees only rivalry where others see the good has already lost the thing worth having. Isolation, jealousy, the shrinking of a person to what he owns: this is where the case for the calculating non-lover leads, and Socrates's palinode will set against it a love that wants the beloved to grow rather than to be fenced in.
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