Love, the Best of All Inspirations
Read the full text in our reader
Socrates — αὕτη πασῶν τῶν ἐνθουσιάσεων ἀρίστη τε καὶ ἐξ ἀρίστων τῷ τε ἔχοντι καὶ τῷ κοινωνοῦντι αὐτῆς γίγνεται, καὶ ὅτι ταύτης μετέχων τῆς μανίας ὁ ἐρῶν τῶν καλῶν ἐραστὴς καλεῖται.
Now the crown of the whole argument. Of the four god-sent madnesses — prophetic, purificatory, poetic, erotic — Socrates ranks love first: it is the best inspiration and comes from the best source, and it is good both for the one who has it and for the one who shares in it. And here he answers, at last, the question the whole dialogue has been circling: why is a lover called a lover? Because he partakes of this particular madness. The erastēs is not named for an appetite he indulges but for a divine possession he undergoes — the highest of all the ways a god can fill a human soul. What the first two speeches diagnosed as a disease to be avoided, the palinode has now identified as the single best thing that can happen to a person.
Socrates crowns the fourth madness. Of the four god-sent inspirations — prophetic, purificatory, poetic, erotic — love is the best, and from the best, both for the one who has it and for the one who shares in it. And it is precisely because he partakes of this madness that the lover of beautiful things is called a lover at all.
Two words seal the reversal the whole palinode has been performing. The first is enthousiasis, 'divine possession' — the genus under which all four madnesses fall, prophecy and purification and poetry and love each a way of being filled with a god. By ranking love 'best of all the inspirations, and from the best,' Socrates does not merely defend it; he crowns it, placing erotic madness above even the prophetic and poetic frenzies the Greeks already revered. The lover, the erastēs, is therefore named not for a hunger he gives in to but for a god he is possessed by — the exact inversion of the first speech's anoētos, the mindless lover. But the quieter, more radical word is koinōnounti — 'to the one who shares in it.' Love is the best inspiration, Socrates says, both to the one who has it and to the one who shares it. That second clause dismantles the entire economy of the first two speeches. There the beloved was a resource, harvested for the lover's benefit and left depleted; here he is a koinōnos, a partner, a co-sharer in the same divine gift. Love in the palinode has no user and no used. It is a koinōnia, a communion — a possession by one god that lifts two souls together, good for the beloved exactly as it is good for the lover, because what it gives is not pleasure taken from one and paid by the other but wings, grown by both. The dialogue that opened with a speech urging a boy to give himself to a man who feels nothing has arrived at its opposite: the claim that to be seized by love, and to share that seizure with another, is the finest thing a human being can undergo.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Phaedrus 249e in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Phaedrus — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Phaedrus 249e — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/phaedrus/249e/