What Love Puts on Show
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Phaedrus — τοιαῦτα γὰρ ὁ ἔρως ἐπιδείκνυται·… ὥστε πολὺ μᾶλλον ἐλεεῖν τοῖς ἐρωμένοις ἢ ζηλοῦν αὐτοὺς προσήκει.
Lysias closes his indictment with a flourish. Look at what love actually does, he says: it makes its victims call things unbearable that would trouble no one else, and forces them to wring praise out of people for what merits none. A person caught in it is not enviable but pitiable. Far from admiring the lover's passion, you should feel sorry for anyone in its grip — and for the beloved most of all.
Lysias sums up the case against the lover. Love, he says, distorts everything it touches — magnifying trivial griefs, demanding praise for what deserves none. The fitting response to a person in its grip, then, is not envy but pity.
There is a small irony folded into the Greek. The verb for what love 'puts on display' is epideiknutai — the root of epideixis, the showpiece oration, which is exactly what Lysias's speech is: a written display-piece Phaedrus has been carrying around to admire. Lysias means that love exhibits its symptoms the way a disease does; Plato lets the word quietly implicate the clever speech itself as another kind of showing-off. The closing antithesis is textbook rhetoric too — pity (eleein, from eleos, the emotion tragedy trades in) set against envy (zēloun, from zēlos, the root of both 'zeal' and 'jealous'). It is a polished ending, and that polish is part of what Socrates will fault: the speech is built to be admired, not to be true. When the palinode comes, it will grant that love looks like affliction from the outside — and insist that this particular affliction is the soul beginning to remember what it once saw.
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