Counter-Love, the Mirror
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Socrates — ὥσπερ δὲ ἐν κατόπτρῳ ἐν τῷ ἐρῶντι ἑαυτὸν ὁρῶν λέληθεν. καὶ ὅταν μὲν ἐκεῖνος παρῇ, λήγει κατὰ ταὐτὰ ἐκείνῳ τῆς ὀδύνης· ὅταν δὲ ἀπῇ, ποθεῖ καὶ ποθεῖται, εἴδωλον ἔρωτος ἀντέρωτα ἔχων· καλεῖ δὲ αὐτὸν καὶ οἴεται οὐκ ἔρωτα ἀλλὰ φιλίαν εἶναι
Gazing at his lover, the boy meets his own reflection — 'as in a mirror' — and does not recognize it. When the lover is near, the boy's own ache subsides, exactly as the lover's does. When he is gone, the boy longs, and is longed for, the two yearnings answering each other. What he feels is a true reflection of the lover's love, a <em>counter-love</em>. But he has no name for it that he dares use, so he calls it friendship.
Deep in the palinode, Socrates describes what happens inside the beloved boy. The lover's passion, reflected back from the boy's own eyes, kindles a love in return — which the boy, not understanding, calls only friendship.
This is the palinode's tenderest stroke, and it turns on a word Plato seems to have coined for the moment: <em>antérōs</em>, counter-love — <em>érōs</em> with the prefix ἀντί, 'back at you,' the love-beam reflected from the beloved's eyes. Up to now eros in the speech has been one-directional: the lover is struck, the boy merely shines. Here the boy catches it — seeing himself in his lover 'as in a mirror' (<em>en katóptrōi</em>), and, Plato adds, <em>lélēthen</em>: it escapes his notice. That verb is the root Greek negates to make <em>alḗtheia</em>, truth — the boy is one step short of the un-hidden. Plato calls this returned feeling an <em>eídōlon</em> of love — an 'image,' the same word Homer uses for the bloodless ghosts of the dead, and the root of our 'idol.' It is real love and a reflected love at once, the copy that the lover's original throws off.<br><br>The heartbreak is in the last verb. The boy <em>believes</em> (<em>oíetai</em> — the verb of mere supposing) his feeling to be not <em>érōs</em> but <em>philía</em>, friendship. Greek keeps these loves in separate words — the fever of <em>érōs</em>, the warmth of <em>philía</em>, the family tenderness of <em>storgḗ</em> — and the boy reaches for the safe one. Plato had drawn the same self-deception in the <em>Lysis</em>, his dialogue on friendship, and would have Aristophanes tease it in the <em>Symposium</em>: lovers who cannot say what they want from each other. Here the boy simply does not yet know his own heart — and the word he refuses is the truer one.
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