Phaedrus 253a · 253a

Here is the palinode's most beautiful account of what a lover actually <em>does</em> to a beloved — and it is an image of sacred plumbing. Each lover, having gazed so intently at the god his soul once followed that he is filled with that god's nature, does not hoard the fullness: he 'draws' it (<em>arýtōsin</em>, the verb for drawing water from a spring) and 'pours it out' (<em>epantloûntes</em>) upon the beloved's soul, irrigating it until the beloved, too, grows to resemble the god. And the drawers are cast as <em>Bacchae</em> — the maenads of Dionysus, who in Euripides's play strike the ground and make water, milk, and honey well up, the possessed body becoming a channel through which the god's abundance floods into the world. Love, in this figure, is a channeling of the divine: the lover is a conduit, drawing from heaven and pouring into another person.<br><br>This transfigures everything the first speeches assumed about love. For Lysias, the lover was a taker — draining, using, endangering the beloved. Here the true lover is a <em>giver</em>, and what he gives is not himself but his <em>god</em>: he makes the beloved more like the divine, not more like the lover's own appetite. The Bacchic imagery, which has run through the whole dialogue as a half-joke (Socrates and Phaedrus as fellow-Corybants at 228b, fellow-bacchants at 234d), lands here in earnest — the possession is real, and it is <em>generous</em>, a frenzy that fills the lover only so that he may fill another. It is also, quietly, a theory of education and friendship far beyond eros: the best thing one soul can do for another is not to shape it in one's own image but to become a clear channel for something higher, and pour <em>that</em> in. The lover who has seen his god becomes, for the beloved, a window onto the divine — which is exactly what the beloved's own beauty was for him. Love, at its height, is two souls passing the god between them.

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