He Would Pray Him Orphaned
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Socrates — τῶν φιλτάτων τε καὶ εὐνουστάτων καὶ θειοτάτων κτημάτων ὀρφανὸν πρὸ παντὸς εὔξαιτʼ ἂν εἶναι τὸν ἐρώμενον· πατρὸς γὰρ καὶ μητρὸς καὶ συγγενῶν καὶ φίλων στέρεσθαι ἂν αὐτὸν δέξαιτο,
Here the isolation the whole speech has traced reaches its endpoint, and Socrates names it without flinching. The lover, he says, would pray above everything to see the beloved orphaned — bereft of what Socrates pointedly calls his 'dearest, kindest, and most divine possessions,' the boy's own family. Father, mother, kin, friends: the lover would gladly see every one of them taken away. The logic is horribly consistent. A beloved surrounded by people who love him is a beloved with somewhere else to turn; strip them away and he is wholly, helplessly the lover's. What looks like devotion has become a wish to orphan the person one claims to love.
The isolation reaches its most chilling form. The lover, Socrates says, would pray above all to see the beloved stripped of his 'dearest, kindest, most divine possessions' — meaning his family. He would happily see the boy deprived of father, mother, kin, and friends, because a beloved with no one else belongs entirely to him.
The speech has been building toward this word, and it is the ugliest in it: the lover would pray his beloved orphanos, orphaned. Socrates twists the knife by calling the family the boy's 'most divine possessions,' theiotata ktēmata — the ties Greek piety held most sacred, parents above all — and then has the lover wish them all destroyed. This is where love-as-appetite arrives when followed to the end: not merely keeping the beloved weak and ignorant, but wishing him bereft of everyone who might love him rightly, so that the lover alone possesses him. It is the 'desert of friends' from Lysias's speech made total — love as the deliberate manufacture of an orphan. And the word 'divine' is the tell. The bonds the lover would sever are the sacred ones, and in severing them he commits a kind of impiety, cutting the beloved off from the relationships that connect a person to what is holy. Hold this against the palinode, which is coming soon: there the true lover does the exact opposite, wanting the beloved not orphaned but restored — given back not to a smaller world but to the god the two of them once followed together. The first speech shows love emptying the beloved's life of everyone. The second will show love filling it with heaven.
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