Like a Four-Footed Beast
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Socrates — οὐ σέβεται προσορῶν, ἀλλʼ ἡδονῇ παραδοὺς τετράποδος νόμον βαίνειν ἐπιχειρεῖ καὶ παιδοσπορεῖν, καὶ ὕβρει προσομιλῶν οὐ δέδοικεν,
Against the initiate who is struck into awe by beauty, Socrates sets the man who is corrupted or too long fallen. He sees the same beautiful face, but nothing happens: no beauty pulls him upward, no reverence stirs. Instead he surrenders to pleasure and treats the beloved as an occasion for the plainest animal act — mounting 'like a four-footed beast' to beget children — and, keeping company with hubris, wanton excess, he feels no fear at all. It is the exact portrait of the lover the first two speeches recommended, drawn now with disgust: desire that sees beauty and reaches only for the body, reverence replaced by rutting, the human reduced to the quadruped.
Socrates describes the base response to beauty. The man newly-initiated no longer, or corrupted, does not let a beautiful face carry him toward Beauty itself. He feels no reverence as he looks; surrendering to pleasure, he sets about mounting like an animal and begetting children, and — keeping company with wanton excess — he is not even afraid.
This is the palinode's picture of love gone wrong, and it works entirely by contrast with the initiate who was 'struck out of himself' a page ago. Both men see the same beauty; the difference is what the sight does in them. In the initiate, beauty fires the buried memory and reverence — sebomai, the verb of holy awe — floods in, and he is carried up toward Beauty itself. In the corrupted man, nothing is remembered; he 'does not revere' (ou sebetai) as he looks, and so beauty registers only as an itch of pleasure. The single word tetrapodos, 'four-footed,' does the moral work: to respond to beauty without reverence is to behave as an animal, mounting to breed, and Plato lets the ugliness of the image land. Notice, too, what he pairs with the beastliness: hubris, the wanton, boundary-breaking excess that was the very name Socrates's first speech gave to the tyranny of appetite over judgment. The base lover 'consorts with hubris and feels no fear' — no aidōs, no reverent shame, the exact quality the good horse of the soul embodies. So this passage is not a condemnation of bodily desire as such; it is a diagnosis of desire cut loose from memory and awe. The same beautiful face is either a rung on the ladder to heaven or an invitation to rut, and which it becomes depends on whether the soul looking at it can still remember what beauty is a likeness of. Reverence is the whole difference between the lover who grows wings and the beast who breeds.
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