Harmful Now, Faithless Later
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Socrates — καὶ ἐρῶν μὲν βλαβερός τε καὶ ἀηδής, λήξας δὲ τοῦ ἔρωτος εἰς τὸν ἔπειτα χρόνον ἄπιστος,
Socrates delivers the summary verdict, and it has two clauses. While the lover is in love, he is both harmful — every injury the speech has catalogued — and simply disagreeable, exhausting company. But the second clause is the sting: when the love finally ends, the lover turns faithless. All the promises he made in the heat of desire, sworn with oaths and pleadings, evaporate; for the whole future he is apistos, not to be trusted. The affair damages the beloved while it lasts and abandons him when it stops. There is no phase of it that serves the person the lover claims to love.
Socrates closes the case against the lover with a two-part verdict. While the love lasts, the lover is both harmful and unpleasant to be around. And once it burns out, he is worse: faithless for all the time to come, breaking every promise he swore with oaths and entreaties while the passion held him.
The whole indictment comes to rest on one word: apistos, faithless. It is the exact negative of pistos, 'trustworthy,' the quality that earlier defined the true friend, and it turns on pistis — trust, good faith, the thing that makes a bond a bond. The lover, this speech concludes, cannot keep faith, because his love was never about the beloved in the first place; it was appetite, and appetite, once fed or exhausted, has no reason to honor what it promised while starving. So the temporal shape of the argument is devastating: harmful during, faithless after, worthless throughout. This is the low point the whole first speech has been driving toward, and it is exactly here that Socrates will soon break off — unable, his daimonion will tell him, to go on slandering the god of love. For everything this speech says is true of one thing only: a counterfeit love, desire wearing love's name. The palinode will answer clause by clause. The true lover is not apistos but the most faithful of all, because what he loves in the beloved is not a pleasure to be used up but an image of the eternal — and you cannot exhaust, or betray, your share in the divine. Faithlessness is the mark of appetite; fidelity, the mark of love that has seen what it loves.
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