Beautiful and Blessed for the Beloved
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Socrates — προθυμία μὲν οὖν τῶν ὡς ἀληθῶς ἐρώντων καὶ τελετή… οὕτω καλή τε καὶ εὐδαιμονικὴ ὑπὸ τοῦ διʼ ἔρωτα μανέντος φίλου τῷ φιληθέντι γίγνεται.
Socrates draws the thread of the whole account together into a promise. The eagerness of those who truly love — and, he says, their 'consecration,' teletē, the same word used for a mystery-initiation — becomes, when it reaches its right fulfilment, something 'beautiful and blessed' for the beloved. Two words carry the claim, and both are chosen against the first speeches. The lover's zeal is a teletē, a sacred rite, not an appetite; and what it produces for the beloved is eudaimonikon, blessed, conducive to true flourishing — not pleasure, not a good bargain, but a good life. The beloved receives this, Socrates adds, from 'a friend driven mad by love.' The madness the first speech warned against turns out to be the very source of the beloved's deepest good.
Socrates sums up what the true lover's love does for the one loved. The zeal and, as he calls it, the 'consecration' of those who truly love — if they achieve what they long for in the right way — becomes something beautiful and blessed for the beloved, coming to him from a friend driven mad by love. He then turns back to the chariot, to show how the beloved is won.
This short passage is the palinode collecting its winnings, and it does so with two of the most loaded words in Greek. The first is teletē, initiation — the lover's whole effort toward the beloved is not lust or strategy but a consecration, a sacred rite, the same word used for the Eleusinian Mysteries. Love has been re-described, across the whole speech, as a religious initiation into the sight of beauty, and here that description is sealed: the true lover's zeal is holy. The second word is the payoff: eudaimonikon, blessed, life-completing. Greek ethics has no higher goal than eudaimonia — not pleasure, not success, but a whole human life gone genuinely well, flourishing under a good daimōn. And Socrates says this is exactly what love, rightly lived, gives the beloved. Recall what the first two speeches offered. They weighed love on a ledger of pleasure and pain, gain and loss, and concluded that the beloved does better to choose the safe, calculating non-lover. Socrates now overturns the whole scale. What the beloved gets from the non-lover is, at most, convenience and safety — a well-managed transaction. What he gets from the true lover, the friend 'driven mad by love,' is eudaimonia itself, a share in the best life a human soul can live. The madness the first speech treated as love's disqualifying flaw is revealed as the channel through which the greatest good flows. The palinode has completely inverted the terms of the debate: the question was never whether love is a good deal, but whether it is a blessing — and Socrates has now said, in the plainest and highest word available to him, that it is.
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