Unmarried, Childless, Homeless
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Socrates — ἔτι τοίνυν ἄγαμον ἄπαιδα ἄοικον ὅτι πλεῖστον χρόνον παιδικὰ ἐραστὴς εὔξαιτʼ ἂν γενέσθαι, τὸ αὑτοῦ γλυκὺ ὡς πλεῖστον χρόνον καρποῦσθαι ἐπιθυμῶν.
Socrates delivers the property-harm's climax as a wish so bald it condemns itself. The lover would pray the beloved to remain unmarried, childless, and homeless — agamos, apais, aoikos — for as long as humanly possible. Marriage, children, a household of his own: these are exactly what would give the young man an independent life, and exactly what the lover cannot allow, because his aim is to go on 'reaping' his own sweet pleasure as long as he can. The three privatives land like hammer-blows. Everything that would let the beloved grow into a full adult is precisely what the lover, in the name of love, wishes away.
The lover's possessiveness turns against the beloved's whole future. He would pray, Socrates says, that the boy stay unmarried, childless, and homeless for as long as possible — barred from every tie that would give him a life of his own — so that the lover can go on harvesting his own pleasure undisturbed.
The decisive word is the last one: karpousthai, 'to reap the fruit.' The lover keeps the beloved unmarried, childless, and homeless so that he can go on harvesting the boy's sweetness, and the verb turns a person into a crop. This is the whole first speech distilled to a single image — love-as-appetite as agriculture, the beloved a field valued only for what it yields, kept barren of any fruit of his own so the harvest stays exclusive. Notice what the three privatives strip away: gamos (marriage), the child, and the oikos (household) — the pillars of a Greek adult life, the very structures through which a person becomes a full member of the world, continues a family, and honors the gods. The lover wishes all of them undone. Here the speech's real subject surfaces one last time before Socrates breaks off: this is not love but consumption, desire that must keep its object diminished, dependent, and unripe forever so that it can be eaten. The palinode will answer with the same natural imagery reversed — there, love makes the soul itself put out wings and grow, and the lover's whole desire is for the beloved to flourish and bear fruit, not to be harvested. Growth against consumption: that is the axis the two speeches turn on.
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