Friends for the Whole of Life
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Phaedrus — οὐδὲ οἳ διαπραξάμενοι πρὸς τοὺς ἄλλους φιλοτιμήσονται, ἀλλʼ οἵτινες αἰσχυνόμενοι πρὸς ἅπαντας σιωπήσονται· οὐδὲ τοῖς ὀλίγον χρόνον σπουδάζουσιν, ἀλλὰ τοῖς ὁμοίως διὰ παντὸς τοῦ βίου φίλοις ἐσομένοις·
Lysias closes in full rhetorical flourish, one balanced pair after another. Not the man who, having got what he wanted, will brag about it — but the one who out of shame keeps quiet before everyone. Not the man whose zeal lasts a season — but the one who will still be your friend, steadily, through the whole of a life. Each antithesis tilts the same way: away from the impulsive lover, toward the discreet, durable non-lover. It is a beautifully built ending, and every beam of it points back at the speaker's own recommendation.
Lysias's speech builds to its close in a run of balanced antitheses: grant your favor not to the boastful but the discreet, not to the briefly eager but to those who will stay friends for a whole lifetime. The rhetoric is at its most polished here — and its most self-recommending, since the non-lover is always the answer.
This is the speech at its most artful, and Plato has Phaedrus read it aloud precisely so we can feel the craft — the marching oude…all', the symmetry, the cadences still ringing when Socrates rises to answer. Two of Lysias's best cards are on the table here. One is bios, a 'whole life' of friendship, set against the season-long heat of desire — a genuine and moving appeal. The other is quieter: the promise that the non-lover, unlike the boaster, will keep silent out of shame, aischynē — the very sense of disgrace Greek ethics leaned on to hold people to the good. Lysias has enlisted shame and lifelong loyalty on the side of the cool, prudent choice. When Socrates gives his own first speech, he will out-rhetoric this one on its own terms, granting that the lover is a menace — and only the palinode will reveal that the whole framework, Lysias's and Socrates's first alike, has mistaken the disease for the god. Here, at the end of the speech that sets everything in motion, the case for playing it safe has never sounded better.
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