They'll Come to Your Doors
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Phaedrus — ἐκεῖνοι γὰρ καὶ ἀγαπήσουσιν καὶ ἀκολουθήσουσιν καὶ ἐπὶ τὰς θύρας ἥξουσι καὶ μάλιστα ἡσθήσονται καὶ οὐκ ἐλαχίστην χάριν εἴσονται καὶ πολλὰ ἀγαθὰ αὐτοῖς εὔξονται.
Lysias reaches for an analogy, and it is a telling one. If what you want is gratitude, he says, don't spend your money feasting your friends — feast the beggars and the perpetually hungry instead. They are the ones who will adore you, trail after you, turn up at your door, be over the moon, feel no small gratitude, and call down blessings on you. Applied to love, the point is cold: the neediest attachment is the most dependable, because need can be fed and gratitude can be bought.
Lysias pushes his logic to its edge with an analogy: if gratitude is what you're after, don't lay on a feast for friends — feed beggars and the hungry. They will fawn, follow, show up at your door, and thank you most of all. The implied lesson: the neediest attachment is the most reliable, because it is bought.
Everything in this stretch of the speech circles a single word: charis — which means favor, gratitude, and grace all at once, and, not incidentally, the sexual 'favor' a beloved grants. Lysias treats charis as a commodity: give to whoever repays you most in it, the way you would feast beggars for their fawning thanks. The analogy is deliberately unlovely, and Plato means it to be — this is the accountant's view of grace, gratitude reckoned as return on investment. Socrates will later swear his palinode precisely to win back charis in its other register: not the favor extracted by calculation but the grace that passes between a soul and what it loves, and between the soul and the god. Here Lysias has drained the word down to its ledger value, and the reader is meant to feel the loss — to notice that a speech this clever about who deserves 'gratitude' has quietly stopped being able to say what gratitude is for.
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