As Wolves Love Lambs
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Socrates — ὡς λύκοι ἄρνας ἀγαπῶσιν, ὣς παῖδα φιλοῦσιν ἐρασταί. τοῦτʼ ἐκεῖνο, ὦ Φαῖδρε.… ἤδη σοι τέλος ἐχέτω ὁ λόγος
As wolves love lambs — so lovers love a boy. There it is, Phaedrus, the whole of it. You'll hear nothing further from me; let the speech end right there.
Socrates slams the brakes on his own speech. Rather than praise the non-lover as promised, he caps the attack on the lover with a savage proverb — cast as a mock-epic verse — and refuses to say another word.
The exit line is a single verse — Socrates caps his prose speech with a hexameter, the meter of epic, built on the old ὡς…ὥς frame of a Homeric simile: <em>as</em> wolves love lambs, <em>so</em> lovers love a boy. He is quoting-and-twisting a proverb ('the wolf loves the lamb' meant treacherous affection), and the versification is a tell: the man who joked at 238d about slipping into dithyrambs now genuinely cannot keep his feet out of poetry.<br><br>The line's cruelty is in its verbs. Greek has three loves, and the verse uses all three registers at once: the wolves get <em>agapôsin</em> — the tender cherishing-verb whose noun the Bible would later make divine love; the lovers get <em>philoûsin</em> — the warmth of friends and family; and they themselves are named <em>erastaí</em>, the desirers. Predator's appetite dressed in the gentlest vocabulary Greek owns: that is the first speech's whole claim in seven words. Socrates stops there in visible disgust — he will not deliver the promised praise of the non-lover — and within a page his daimonion will forbid him to leave until the entire performance is unsaid.
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