Master of Myself
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Phaedrus — οὐχ ὑπʼ ἔρωτος ἡττώμενος ἀλλʼ ἐμαυτοῦ κρατῶν,… ταῦτα γάρ ἐστι φιλίας πολὺν χρόνον ἐσομένης τεκμήρια.
Now Lysias makes the pitch for himself. Choose the non-lover, he says, and you get someone not overcome by love but in command of himself — not flaring into violent enmity over trifles, but slow and sparing with anger even when the stakes are real. That steadiness, he argues, is the true evidence of a friendship that will hold up over time, whereas the lover's passion is evidence only of its own instability.
Lysias turns to what he offers instead. Where the lover is 'overcome' by passion, the non-lover stays in command of himself — slow to anger, forgiving of honest mistakes, steady over the long haul. These, he says, are the marks of a friendship built to last.
The whole self-portrait turns on a single opposition Greek ethics lived by: kratein against hēttasthai — to have the upper hand over yourself, or to come off 'the lesser,' overpowered. Lysias claims the winning side: self-mastery, sōphrosynē in all but name, set against the lover who is 'defeated' by his own desire. And he clinches it with a courtroom word — tekmēria, 'proofs,' the conclusive evidence a rhetorician lays before a jury, as if a friendship could be demonstrated like a case. Both moves are exactly what Socrates's second speech will overturn. There, being 'overcome' by love is not defeat but the best thing that can befall a soul — a god-sent madness worth more than any sober self-possession — and the truth about love is not something you prove to a jury but something you remember. Here, though, the cool, self-governing man still sounds like wisdom itself, and Plato wants us to grant him that before it is taken back.
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