Driven by the Goad
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Socrates — ἀνάγκης τε καὶ οἴστρου ἐλαύνεται ὃς ἐκείνῳ μὲν ἡδονὰς ἀεὶ διδοὺς ἄγει, ὁρῶντι, ἀκούοντι, ἁπτομένῳ, καὶ πᾶσαν αἴσθησιν αἰσθανομένῳ τοῦ ἐρωμένου,
Socrates now exposes the affair's basic unfairness, and he starts with the lover's side of it. The lover is driven — the word is passive, he cannot help it — by necessity and by a goad, an oistros, that pays him in pleasure at every step. He sees the beloved, hears him, touches him, drinks him in through every sense, and so serves him gladly, because the serving is its own reward. That is the lover's experience: a constant sensory feast. The beloved's, Socrates is about to say, is the opposite — the same hours spent, but repaid only with tedium and, eventually, revulsion at a lover grown old. The pleasures all run one way.
Socrates reaches the asymmetry at the heart of the affair. The lover is driven by compulsion and by a maddening goad that rewards him with pleasure at every turn — the sight, sound, and touch of the beloved, drunk in through every sense. But the beloved, spending the same hours, gets no such pleasure; only, in time, disgust at an aging face.
The gem of the passage is oistros, the gadfly's sting. In myth Hera sends an oistros to torment Io, driving the girl-turned-heifer in a frenzy across the world; a stung ox bolts and cannot stop. By saying the lover 'is driven' — elaunetai, passive — 'by necessity and the goad,' Socrates casts erotic desire as exactly that: a maddening sting that gives its victim no peace, herding him from one contact with the beloved to the next. And notice the vocabulary of sensation piled up around it — horōnti, akouonti, haptomenōi, and 'perceiving with every aisthēsis, sense.' In this speech that is the whole of love: a body driven by a sting toward a body, all sensory appetite. But hold onto the word oistros, because it is double-edged and Plato is about to turn it over. The very same maddening drive, the palinode will say, is not the sting of a fly but the ache of the soul's wings pushing through their roots as it remembers the beauty it once saw — the divine goad that drives it back toward the Forms. Here the oistros is a disease; there it will be the beginning of flight. Everything depends on what the sting is really the sting of.
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