Men Call It Love; the Gods Have a Name
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Socrates — τοῦτο δὲ τὸ πάθος ὦ παῖ καλέ, πρὸς ὃν δή μοι ὁ λόγος, ἄνθρωποι μὲν ἔρωτα ὀνομάζουσιν, θεοὶ δὲ ὃ καλοῦσιν ἀκούσας εἰκότως διὰ νεότητα γελάσῃ.
Having reached the emotional peak of the myth, Socrates lightens the tone with a joke. This whole overwhelming experience, he tells the beautiful boy the speech is aimed at, is what we humans name erōs, love. But the gods, he says, call it by a different name — one that will make the boy laugh when he hears it, precisely because he is young. The name, revealed a line later in a pair of mock-Homeric verses, is Pterōs — 'the Winged One' — a pun that fuses erōs with pteron, wing. The god of love, in the gods' own language, is named for the very thing the whole myth has been about: the wings that love grows on the soul.
Socrates turns playful. This whole experience, he tells the beautiful boy his speech is addressed to, is what humans name 'erōs,' love — but the gods have their own name for it, and when the boy hears it he'll surely laugh, being young. (The gods' name, he'll reveal, is 'Pteros,' the Winged One — a pun on the wings love grows.)
The joke is doing real work, in the way Plato's jokes usually do. After pages of soaring metaphysics — the Forms, the fall, the tingling wings — Socrates steps back and grins: humans have one name for all this, erōs, but the gods have another, and it is silly enough to make a young man laugh. That pivot from the sublime to the comic is itself part of the palinode's argument. Plato is refusing to let the vision harden into solemnity; love is the highest thing and also faintly ridiculous, and both are true. The divine name he supplies, Pterōs, is a pun — erōs plus pteron, 'wing' — and like all Plato's serious puns it hides a claim: that if you could name love from the god's-eye view, from outside the human muddle of it, you would name it for its effect on the soul, the growing of wings. We call it love, feeling it from inside as longing and torment and joy; the gods call it 'the Winged One,' seeing it from above as the thing that lifts a fallen soul back toward heaven. The two names are the two perspectives the whole dialogue has been holding together — the felt experience and the metaphysical truth of it — and the boy laughs at the gods' name only because he is too young to have felt yet how exactly right it is. The comedy is a kindness: Socrates knows the boy cannot receive the full weight of this, so he wraps the deepest claim of the speech in a pun and lets him smile.
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