In War, a Liability
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Socrates — τὸ γὰρ τοιοῦτον σῶμα ἐν πολέμῳ τε καὶ ἄλλαις χρείαις ὅσαι μεγάλαι οἱ μὲν ἐχθροὶ θαρροῦσιν οἱ δὲ φίλοι καὶ αὐτοὶ οἱ ἐρασταὶ φοβοῦνται.
Socrates sums up the physical harm with a soldier's test. Take the soft, shade-grown body the lover has cultivated and put it where bodies are tested — in war, or any grave emergency — and the verdict is instant. The enemy takes heart at the sight of such a beloved; his own friends, and even the lovers who shaped him this way, are afraid for him. A body groomed for a lover's pleasure is worse than useless when survival is at stake. The pampering that looked like devotion has left the beloved unable to stand where it counts.
Socrates draws the summary point about the softened body. Put such a beloved into war or any real emergency, and the effect is unmistakable: the enemy is emboldened at the sight of him, while his own friends — and even his lovers — are afraid on his behalf. The lover's idea of a desirable body is a danger on the day it matters.
The measure here is the battlefield, and it is not incidental. For the Greeks, war was the ultimate proving-ground of andreia, courage — the virtue the earlier list already accused the lover of stunting — and a city's freedom rested on the hardness of its young men's bodies. So when Socrates says a soft beloved makes enemies bold and friends afraid, he is convicting possessive love of a civic crime, not just a private one: it produces men who cannot defend the polis or themselves. There is a quiet sting in the last phrase, too — 'even the lovers themselves' fear for the boy they made soft. The lover's desire has worked against the lover's own interest, ruining the very thing he wanted to keep. This completes the first speech's case against love-as-appetite: it corrupts the beloved's mind, isolates him, keeps him from wisdom, softens his body, and endangers his life, all so the lover can enjoy a pliant possession. Everything true in the indictment the palinode will preserve — and then show that it is an indictment of a counterfeit, not of love itself. Real love, the second speech will say, wants the beloved strong enough to stand in the sun and on the field, because it wants him to become fully himself.
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