Sons, Parents, Friends
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Phaedrus — ἐνθυμεῖσθαι χρὴ ὅτι οὔτʼ ἂν τοὺς ὑεῖς περὶ πολλοῦ ἐποιούμεθα οὔτʼ ἂν τοὺς πατέρας καὶ τὰς μητέρας, οὔτʼ ἂν πιστοὺς φίλους ἐκεκτήμεθα, οἳ οὐκ ἐξ ἐπιθυμίας τοιαύτης γεγόνασιν ἀλλʼ ἐξ ἑτέρων ἐπιτηδευμάτων.
Lysias widens the lens to all of human attachment. Consider, he urges, the people you actually prize most — your sons, your father and mother, the friends you genuinely trust. Not one of those bonds was born of erotic desire; every one of them grew from other things — kinship, shared pursuits, the ordinary practices of a life. If the relationships that matter most owe nothing to erōs, why treat the lover's desire as the gateway to anything worth having?
Lysias broadens the case. Think, he says, of the relationships you value most — your children, your parents, your truest friends. None of them grew out of erotic desire; they came from other bonds entirely. Proof, he argues, that desire is not the source of what lasts.
It is a genuinely clever move, and Plato marks it. Lysias enlists the whole architecture of Greek attachment — sons, fathers and mothers, pistoi philoi, 'trusted friends' — to argue that desire is beside the point; these bonds come, he says, from epitēdeumata, the 'pursuits' and shared business of a life, not from erōs. The reasoning works only if erōs means exactly what Lysias needs it to mean: bodily appetite, and nothing more. The Symposium and the Phaedrus both refuse that narrowing. In Socrates's palinode, erōs is not one attachment among many but the wing-growing force that reaches through every beautiful thing toward the source of beauty itself — nearer to what binds a soul to wisdom than to any passing hunger. So Lysias is right that appetite does not build a family, and wrong about what erōs is. Plato lets the good observation stand so that the redefinition, when it comes, will feel like a discovery rather than a trick.
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