A Desert of Friends
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Phaedrus — πείσαντες μὲν οὖν ἀπεχθέσθαι σε τούτοις εἰς ἐρημίαν φίλων καθιστᾶσιν, ἐὰν δὲ τὸ σεαυτοῦ σκοπῶν ἄμεινον ἐκείνων φρονῇς, ἥξεις αὐτοῖς εἰς διαφοράν;
Follow the lover's logic to its end, says Lysias, and you are cornered. First he sets you at odds with everyone else, until you stand in a 'desert of friends' — stripped of every other tie. And then the trap shuts: if you dare to look after your own interest and judge more wisely than he does, you quarrel with him as well. The devoted lover ends by leaving you with no one — himself included.
The isolation reaches its end. Once the lover has turned everyone else against you, Lysias says, you are left friendless — and even then you are not safe: look after your own interest, judge more shrewdly than he does, and you fall out with him too.
Lysias reaches for a stark image here — eremia philōn, a 'desert of friends,' from the same root that gives us 'hermit.' The lover does not merely compete with rivals; he manufactures a wasteland around the beloved and calls it devotion. It is a genuinely sharp piece of observation, and Plato lets it stand: possessive love really does isolate. What the speech cannot imagine is any other kind. For Lysias the only options are total dependence or open conflict — either you defer to the lover or you fight him. The Phaedrus will propose a third thing entirely: a love in which two souls grow more themselves rather than less, and the circle of friendship widens instead of closing. Here the reader is meant to feel the desert as real before being shown the garden that answers it.
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