Each Desire a Tyrant
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Socrates — γαστριμαργία τε καὶ τὸν ἔχοντα ταὐτὸν τοῦτο κεκλημένον παρέξεται· περὶ δʼ αὖ μέθας τυραννεύσασα τὸν κεκτημένον ταύτῃ ἄγουσα δῆλον οὗ τεύξεται προσρήματος·
Socrates works out a little logic of names. A desire that takes command, he says, stamps its own name on the person it commands. Let appetite for food win, and you are called a glutton; let drink seize the throne, and you get the obvious title; and the same goes for the whole family of related cravings — each is named for the desire that rules it. The verb he keeps reaching for is tyrannize. Every runaway appetite is a small tyranny, one urge holding despotic power over a soul. He is building a definition machine, and in a moment he will feed love into it: erōs, he will say, is simply the tyrant-desire for the pleasure of beauty.
Socrates lays out a naming rule. Whatever desire seizes control gives its own name to the person it rules: overpowering appetite for food makes you a 'glutton,' domination by drink makes you a 'drunkard,' and so on down the line. Each craving, when it wins, plays the tyrant — a pattern about to define erōs itself.
The word doing the heavy lifting is tyranneusasa — a desire that 'plays the tyrant.' For Plato this is no dead metaphor. Tyranny is the worst condition a soul or a city can fall into: the state in which one lawless craving seizes absolute, unaccountable power and everything else is enslaved to serve it. The Republic will crown the tyrant the unhappiest of all human beings for exactly this reason. So when Socrates catalogues gluttony and drunkenness as tyrannies of appetite, he is assembling the frame into which his speech will drop love — erōs as the supreme tyrant-desire, the craving for beautiful bodies that overthrows reason and rules by force. The logic is airtight and the conclusion is false, and Plato means us to feel both. This is the definition-machine working perfectly toward the wrong answer, because it has quietly assumed that every overmastering is a tyranny. The palinode's whole labor will be to break that assumption: to show that being seized by love can be not the soul enslaved but the soul set free — not a tyrant on the throne but a god at the reins.
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