How Shamelessly We Spoke
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Socrates — ἐννοεῖς ὡς ἀναιδῶς εἴρησθον τὼ λόγω, οὗτός τε καὶ ὁ ἐκ τοῦ βιβλίου ῥηθείς.
Now Socrates names what was really wrong with both speeches, his and the one read from the book. They were spoken shamelessly — anaidōs — without reverence for their subject. Imagine, he says, a listener of noble and gentle character, someone who has loved or been loved worthily, overhearing us claim that lovers fall into great feuds over trifles and treat their beloveds with envy and harm. He'd assume we'd been brought up among rough sailors and had never in our lives witnessed a love fit for free men. The charge is not that the speeches were inaccurate but that they were coarse — they described love with no sense of what it deserves, the way a vulgar person handles a sacred thing.
Socrates diagnoses the deeper fault in both speeches — his own and the one from Lysias's scroll. They spoke of love shamelessly, without a trace of reverence. A well-bred, gentle-natured listener, he says, would think the speakers had been raised among coarse sailors and had never once seen a generous, freeborn love.
The key word is anaidōs, 'shamelessly' — and it is built on aidōs, one of the most untranslatable terms in Greek ethics. Aidōs is reverent shame, the awe before what is holy or noble that makes a decent person shrink from baseness without needing a rule. To have spoken anaidōs about love, then, is not to have made factual errors; it is to have handled a divine thing with no reverence, dissecting a god as though he were a case of appetite. Socrates is confessing that both speeches lacked exactly the quality their subject called for. And this diagnosis reaches straight into the myth about to unfold, because aidōs is about to become a living character in it. The good horse of the soul, the noble one that strains upward toward beauty and needs no whip, is described as the horse 'of aidōs' — reverence made animal, the part of us that instinctively honors the beautiful. The two shameless speeches described a soul with only the bad horse; the palinode restores the good one. So this small self-criticism is really the pivot of the whole recantation: what the first speeches lacked was reverence, and reverence — aidōs — is precisely what the true account of love is made of. To speak rightly of a god, you must first feel the awe that the clever, shameless speeches had trained themselves to suppress.
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