Reared in the Shade
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Socrates — ὀφθήσεται δὴ μαλθακόν τινα καὶ οὐ στερεὸν διώκων οὐδʼ ἐν ἡλίῳ καθαρῷ τεθραμμένον ἀλλὰ ὑπὸ συμμιγεῖ σκιᾷ, πόνων μὲν ἀνδρείων καὶ ἱδρώτων ξηρῶν ἄπειρον·
Having stunted the beloved's mind, the lover turns to his body — and wants it soft. Socrates draws the anti-athletic portrait with relish: the lover pursues someone tender rather than firm, reared not in honest sunlight but in dappled shade, a stranger to hard exercise and 'dry sweats,' schooled instead in a delicate, sheltered way of living. In a culture that built free men in the gymnasium and the sun, this is a portrait of deliberate softening. The lover doesn't want a strong companion; he wants a pampered possession, physically as dependent and unhardened as he has already made him in mind.
From the beloved's mind Socrates moves to his body. The lover, chasing his own pleasure, will want a soft, unhardened boy — one raised in shade rather than clean sunlight, a stranger to the sweat and toil that make a man, and at home instead in a pampered, sheltered life.
The physical catalogue is vivid on its own — a soft boy, not firm; shade, not sun; no honest sweat — but two of its words carry the whole weight of Plato's philosophy just beneath the surface. The lover wants the beloved reared not in clean hēlios, sunlight, but under skia, shade. To a Greek ear those words cannot stay merely physical. Hēlios, the sun, is Plato's own great image for the Good, the source that makes both seeing and being-seen possible; and skia, shadow, is the word for what the prisoners in the Republic's cave mistake for reality, the realm of semblance set against the sunlit truth. So the soft, shade-grown body the lover wants is, in miniature, a soul kept in the dark — raised among shadows, never led up into the light where things are seen as they are. The speech means only to say the lover pampers the boy's body. But Plato has chosen the words so that we hear the deeper harm underneath: possessive love wants its beloved comfortable, shaded, and unfree — and the palinode's answer will be, precisely, an ascent, the soul led up out of the shadow toward the sun.
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