The Wily Non-Lover
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Socrates — ἦν οὕτω δὴ παῖς μᾶλλον δὲ μειρακίσκος μάλα καλός· τούτῳ δὲ ἦσαν ἐρασταὶ πάνυ πολλοί· εἷς δέ τις αὐτῶν αἱμύλος ἦν ὃς οὐδενὸς ἧττον ἐρῶν ἐπεπείκει τὸν παῖδα ὡς οὐκ ἐρῴη·
Socrates opens not with an argument but with a story. There was a beautiful boy, he says — correcting himself, a lad, at just the age Greek desire idealized — with a swarm of lovers. One of them was a smooth operator who wanted the boy exactly as badly as the rest, but had persuaded him he wasn't a lover at all. This is the 'non-lover' whose speech we are about to hear. By framing him this way, Socrates gives the game away before the speech even starts: the man is in love and lying about it, and his cool detachment is a tactic.
Socrates frames his speech as a fable. There was a beautiful boy with a crowd of lovers, and one clever suitor who loved as fiercely as any of them — but had talked the boy into believing he felt nothing. This 'non-lover' is about to make his pitch, and Socrates lets us see the pose for what it is: a seduction.
The whole force of Socrates's setup rides on one storybook adjective: haimylos, 'wheedling.' It is the word Hesiod uses for the dangerous charm Pandora is given — haimyloi logoi, honeyed, beguiling words — and it turns Lysias's cool, prudent 'non-lover' into something older and shabbier: a smooth-tongued schemer who loves as hard as anyone and has simply talked his target into thinking otherwise. Where Lysias presented the non-lover as a model of rational restraint, Socrates re-frames him as a seducer running a con. The point is not yet spelled out, but it is doing quiet work. If the case for the non-lover is really the case for a lover who is pretending, then the whole speech to come — Socrates's own, delivered under the veil — is being marked in advance as a clever falsehood, exactly the kind haimylos names. He is telling us how to hear what he is about to say: as guile, not truth.
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