Remember, and Consider
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Phaedrus — σὺ οὖν τῶν τε εἰρημένων μέμνησο καὶ ἐκεῖνο ἐνθυμοῦ, ὅτι τοὺς μὲν ἐρῶντας οἱ φίλοι νουθετοῦσιν ὡς ὄντος κακοῦ τοῦ ἐπιτηδεύματος, τοῖς δὲ μὴ ἐρῶσιν οὐδεὶς πώποτε τῶν οἰκείων ἐμέμψατο.
Lysias ends where a good speech should, with a call to memory and one last clean contrast. Remember everything I've said, he tells the boy — and notice this too: a lover's own friends are forever warning him off, as though the whole pursuit were a bad business, while no relative has ever once reproached a non-lover for the arrangement. The verdict of everyone who cares about you, he implies, already leans his way. It is the speech's closing appeal — not to truth, but to what people will think.
Lysias signs off. Remember all this, he tells the boy, and note one more thing: friends are forever warning lovers off, treating the whole affair as a bad business — but no one's family has ever reproached a non-lover for the arrangement. Public opinion, he claims, is on the non-lover's side.
The speech closes on the word memnēso — 'remember' — and a Greek reader would have caught the small charge in it, because memory is where the Phaedrus is quietly headed. At the dialogue's end Socrates will indict writing as a drug that swaps living memory (mnēmē) for mere reminding, and the palinode makes the soul's recollection of the Forms the source of love itself. Lysias, of course, means nothing so deep: he wants the boy to keep his talking points straight and to weigh public opinion, which he claims runs against lovers and never against the discreet. That is the real foundation of the whole speech — not what love is, but what the neighbors will say. Socrates's first response will play the same game more skillfully; only the second speech refuses the game entirely and stakes everything on remembering what the soul once saw. Lysias asks the boy to remember an argument. The Phaedrus will ask him to remember heaven.
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