Named From Force
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Socrates — ἐπὶ σωμάτων κάλλος… νικήσασα ἀγωγῇ ἀπʼ αὐτῆς τῆς ῥώμης ἐπωνυμίαν λαβοῦσα ἔρως ἐκλήθη.
Here is the payoff Socrates has been building toward. Love, on this account, is a desire dragged toward the pleasure of beauty, reinforced by all its kindred cravings, that overpowers reason and drives at the beauty of bodies — and because it wins by sheer force, rhōmē, it is 'called erōs,' named for the strength with which it conquers. The etymology is a party trick, force-fitting the word to the theory; Plato knows it, and lets Socrates land it with a flourish. By this definition love is exactly the tyrant-appetite the earlier catalogue prepared, no different in kind from gluttony or drink — only stronger. The whole speech has been engineered to reach this reduction: erōs as mere overmastering desire, aimed at a body.
The definition-machine delivers its verdict. Desire drawn toward the pleasure of beauty, overpowering reason and driving at the beauty of bodies, prevails by sheer force — and from that force, rhōmē, it takes its name: erōs. It is a clever derivation, and a false one, reducing love to the strength of an appetite.
The joke is the etymology. Socrates derives erōs from rhōmē, 'force,' as though love were simply the strongest of the appetites, the one that overpowers everything else — and the fit is too neat to be honest. Plato loves a serious pun, and this is a mock one: a definition dressed as a discovery, drawing the name from exactly the feature the argument needs. By it, love is nothing but an especially violent hunger for a beautiful body, a larger tyranny in the same family as gluttony. That is the speech's achievement and its lie at once. The reduction is airtight given its premise — that love is a species of appetite — and false because the premise is. Watch what comes next, though: no sooner has Socrates nailed the definition than he complains of a 'divine experience,' a strange fluency carrying him away, and starts to break off. His own body is telling him the account is wrong even as his argument perfects it. The god he is slandering is already rising in him; in a page he will stop, refuse to finish, and be sent back to say the true thing. Here, at its cleverest, the false speech is at its emptiest — love reduced to force, just before force of a wholly different kind interrupts.
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