The Flatterer, a Terrible Beast
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Socrates — οἷον κόλακι δεινῷ θηρίῳ καὶ βλάβῃ μεγάλῃ, ὅμως ἐπέμειξεν ἡ φύσις ἡδονήν τινα οὐκ ἄμουσον,
Before the last blow, Socrates steps back to make a comparison. Most harmful things, he notes, come with at least a dab of pleasure — nature has seen to that. Even the flatterer, whom he calls 'a terrible beast and a great harm,' carries a certain charm, a pleasure 'not without the Muse.' A courtesan can be blamed as harmful, and yet, like many such creatures and trades, she is at least agreeable company for the day-to-day. The point is a trap he is about to spring: whatever else you say about these harmful pleasures, they are pleasant. The lover, Socrates will conclude, is worse than all of them — harmful, and not even nice to be around.
Socrates pauses on a comparison. Nature, he observes, mixes at least some pleasure into most harmful things — even into a flatterer, that 'terrible beast,' there is a certain low charm. A courtesan, other such creatures and pursuits, are at least agreeable company day to day. The setup is pointed: he is about to say the lover manages to be harmful without even that saving pleasantness.
Two words carry the passage's weight. The first is kolax, the flatterer — no idle example. For Plato the flatterer is a recurring villain and, in the Gorgias, the very model of the false arts: flattery, kolakeia, is his name for any craft that aims at pleasure instead of the good, and rhetoric is its chief instance. So by ranking the lover against the flatterer, Socrates is quietly measuring erotic desire on the same scale as bad rhetoric — both flatter their object toward its own harm, both mistake pleasure for the good. The dialogue's two great themes, love and speech, meet in this one comparison. The second word is amousos, or rather its litotes ouk amouson, 'not un-Muse-touched.' Even a flatterer's pleasure, Socrates concedes, has a little art to it — and the phrase recalls the Muses he invoked at the start of this very speech. It sets up the scale the whole Phaedrus runs on: pleasures range from the merely gratifying and graceless up to the truly Muse-given, the divine madness the palinode will exalt. Even while cataloguing love's harms, Socrates cannot stop weighing pleasures by how much of the Muse is in them — the surest sign that the cold, appetite-based account he is giving is not really his own.
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