Enslaved to Pleasure
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Socrates — τῷ δὴ ὑπὸ ἐπιθυμίας ἀρχομένῳ δουλεύοντί τε ἡδονῇ ἀνάγκη που τὸν ἐρώμενον ὡς ἥδιστον ἑαυτῷ παρασκευάζειν· νοσοῦντι δὲ πᾶν ἡδὺ τὸ μὴ ἀντιτεῖνον κρεῖττον δὲ καὶ ἴσον ἐχθρόν.
Now the damage. A lover, on this definition, is a man enslaved to his own pleasure, and a slave to pleasure must remake the beloved into whatever gratifies him. Socrates draws the consequence with a clinical image: such a lover is like a sick man, for whom anything that doesn't fight back tastes sweet, while anything stronger — or even merely equal — is hateful. So the lover will want the boy inferior to him at every point: weaker, less capable, more dependent. The 'devotion' of the lover, followed down to its root in desire, turns out to be a program for keeping the beloved small.
Socrates turns to the harms the lover does. A man ruled by desire, a slave to his own pleasure, is bound to shape the beloved into whatever pleases him most. And like a sick man, he finds everything that yields to him sweet and everything stronger or even equal hateful — so he will want the boy weaker than himself in every way.
The load-bearing word is douleuonti — 'enslaved.' The lover, ruled by desire, is a slave to pleasure, and for Plato that is the decisive fact: a slave cannot be good for anyone, because he is not his own. The speech then turns the enslaved lover into a tyrant over the beloved, and the mechanism is the sick-man image. A sick man wants nothing around him that resists; he finds the compliant sweet and the strong hateful. So the lover, sick with desire, will systematically work to make the beloved weaker than himself — the harms Socrates is about to itemize all follow from this one need. It is a genuinely dark portrait, and mostly a true one about possessive love. What makes it a half-truth is the premise smuggled in at the start: that all love is enslavement to pleasure. The palinode will keep the vocabulary of being mastered, and even of madness, but flip its valence — the lover seized by the true erōs does not shrink the beloved to keep him safe; he wants the beloved to grow wings of his own. Here, though, love is slavery dressed as care, and the speech is exposing, accurately, what that particular love does to the one it claims to want.
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