The Growing of Wings
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ὁ δὲ ἀρτιτελής, ὁ τῶν τότε πολυθεάμων, ὅταν θεοειδὲς πρόσωπον ἴδῃ κάλλος εὖ μεμιμημένον ἤ τινα σώματος ἰδέαν, πρῶτον μὲν ἔφριξε
The lover sees a beautiful face and, before anything else, shudders. Plato writes the moment as physiology — warmth, then a swelling and aching where the soul's long-lost wings begin to push through again. He does not treat this as metaphor laid over an idea. The body's response is the soul's response, one event felt at two depths.
What happens in the body when the wings begin to grow back? Socrates does not say it is pleasant. The re-growth of the soul's wings — triggered by seeing beauty in a beloved face — is at first like a fever, a shuddering, a warmth that cannot be named.
The verb is <em>ephrixen</em>, he shuddered — the same word Greek uses for hair standing on end before something holy, the body's sign of awe before a god. Plato sets it here, at the sight of a beautiful person, because for him these are finally the same encounter. <em>Eros</em> is not the danger the dialogue's earlier speeches made it. It is the body's first recognition that it has met something real.
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