Memorials of Friendship to Come
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Phaedrus — τοῖς δὲ μὴ ἐρῶσιν, οἳ καὶ πρότερον ἀλλήλοις φίλοι ὄντες ταῦτα ἔπραξαν, οὐκ εὖ πάθωσι ταῦτα εἰκὸς ἐλάττω τὴν φιλίαν ποιῆσαι, ἀλλὰ ταῦτα μνημεῖα καταλειφθῆναι τῶν μελλόντων ἔσεσθαι.
But with the non-lovers — who were friends with one another even before, and acted on that footing — the benefits they receive are not likely to make their friendship less; rather, these are left behind as memorials of the friendship still to come.
Lysias's non-lover presses his case: because his bond rests on prior friendship rather than on the fever of desire, the favors exchanged will not diminish it but build toward something lasting.
Lysias's non-lover keeps building his case for the calm relationship over the passionate one, and the argument is genuinely appealing: a bond that rests on prior friendship, not on the fever of desire, will only be strengthened by the kindnesses exchanged, which become 'memorials (<em>mnēmeîa</em>) of the friendship to come.' It is the case for the sensible marriage over the grand passion, and Plato lets it sound as reasonable as it is. But the whole speech turns on one small, loaded word that Socrates will later put on trial: <em>eikós</em> — 'it is not <em>likely</em>.' Lysias argues throughout from probability, not truth: what is plausible about lovers, what stands to reason about the non-lover's steadiness.<br><br>That word <em>eikós</em>, 'the probable,' was the beating heart of the rhetoric Plato most distrusted. Since a jury cannot witness the past, the sophists Tisias and Gorgias had taught pleaders to argue from what is <em>likely</em> rather than what is <em>so</em> — and Socrates will name and skewer the doctrine at 273b: the speaker who chases the probable in place of the true has traded knowledge for a persuasive shadow. Lysias's entire speech, this reasonable-sounding line included, is a demonstration of the art of <em>eikós</em>: plausible, elegant, and unmoored from any real knowledge of what love or friendship actually <em>is</em>. That is why it can be answered, then out-argued, then recanted altogether — the palinode will replace Lysias's <em>likely</em> story about safe affection with a <em>true</em> (however mythic) account of what the soul is really doing when it loves. The gap between the plausible and the real is the whole distance the dialogue travels.
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