Like Delights Like
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Socrates — ἥλικα γὰρ δὴ καὶ ὁ παλαιὸς λόγος τέρπειν τὸν ἥλικα— ἡ γὰρ οἶμαι χρόνου ἰσότης ἐπʼ ἴσας ἡδονὰς ἄγουσα διʼ ὁμοιότητα φιλίαν παρέχεται.
For an age-mate delights his age-mate, as the old saying goes — since equality of age, leading to equal pleasures, produces friendship through likeness.
Deep in his first speech — the cool case against the lover — Socrates turns the knife with an old proverb, and exposes what makes the lover's attachment unnatural: it wants inequality.
Even in his cold first speech, Socrates is a subtler arguer than Lysias, and here he plants a principle that will quietly indict the whole loveless case while seeming to serve it. He cites the oldest maxim of Greek friendship: <em>like delights like</em>, 'the age-mate his age-mate' (<em>hḗlika térpein tòn hḗlika</em>). The idea that friendship (<em>philía</em>) rests on <em>similarity</em> — that we love those who share our age, tastes, and station — was proverbial; Homer has it, Aristotle will systematize it. And it exposes something structurally wrong with erotic love as the speeches have described it: the lover and beloved are precisely <em>unequal</em> — older and younger, desirer and desired, one in power and one in bloom. The relationship is built on asymmetry, and a few lines on Socrates draws the ugly conclusion the principle implies: the lover, wanting to keep his advantage, actually <em>wants</em> the beloved to remain his inferior — weaker, more ignorant, more dependent — the opposite of what you would want for a friend.<br><br>This is the sharpest thrust of the anti-love case, and it is not wrong — which is exactly why Socrates will have to recant it, not by denying it but by transcending it. The first speech can see only two options: the fevered inequality of eros, or the safe equality of like-aged friendship. What it cannot yet imagine is a love whose 'inequality' points <em>upward</em> — the lover drawn not to keep the beloved down but to lift them both toward something higher than either, the Beauty glimpsed through the beloved's face. The palinode's whole answer is that the best love is indeed unequal, but the asymmetry is not lover-over-beloved; it is the both of them beneath the god they are climbing toward. Friendship of likes is a fine thing; but the divine madness makes two <em>un</em>likes into fellow-pilgrims, and that, Socrates will say, is better than any comfortable symmetry. The proverb is true and the first speech uses it rightly — and the palinode will still leave it behind.
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