One of the Three Olympic Falls
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Socrates — τῶν τριῶν παλαισμάτων τῶν ὡς ἀληθῶς Ὀλυμπιακῶν ἓν νενικήκασιν… μεῖζον ἀγαθὸν οὔτε σωφροσύνη ἀνθρωπίνη οὔτε θεία μανία.
Socrates reaches for the language of the wrestling-ring to measure what these lovers have achieved. Greek wrestling was decided by the best of three falls, and he says the couple who disciplined their love have won 'one of the three truly Olympic falls' — a decisive round in the greatest contest there is. The metaphor is not idle: the whole struggle of the chariot, reason throwing and pinning the unruly horse, has been a kind of wrestling-match, and here it is scored as a win at Olympia, the supreme prize in the Greek world. Then comes the sentence the entire palinode has been climbing toward. This victory is a good so great, Socrates says, that neither 'human temperance,' sōphrosynē anthrōpinē, nor 'divine madness,' theia mania, could furnish anything greater to a human being. The two contestants of the whole debate are named side by side in the last breath of the argument — and love's madness is not merely acquitted but crowned.
Socrates describes the reward of the lovers who mastered themselves — living in harmony, self-controlled and orderly, having enslaved the part of the soul in which vice grows and freed the part where virtue lives. When they die, winged and light, they have won a victory Socrates ranks in the highest possible terms: one of the three 'Olympic falls,' than which no greater good can come to a human being.
To feel the force of this passage you have to hear the two phrases Socrates sets against each other at the end, because they are the two sides of the entire dialogue's argument about love. Sōphrosynē — temperance, self-possession, the cool moderation that keeps a person always in control — was the virtue the non-lover's advocates prized above all; Lysias's speech and Socrates's own first speech both recommended the beloved to choose the calm, calculating companion precisely because he embodies sōphrosynē and the lover does not. Theia mania, divine madness, is what Socrates has spent the whole palinode rehabilitating: the god-sent unreason of love that the first speeches condemned as a sickness. And now, at the summit of the reward, he lays them side by side and says that the good these lovers have won is greater than either human temperance or divine madness could supply on its own. The wording repays attention. He does not say madness beats temperance; he says the prize is greater than what either can give — because the life he has just described is not the triumph of one over the other but their marriage. These lovers were maddened by love, seized by the divine mania, and yet they lived 'self-controlled and orderly,' having enslaved the base part of the soul and freed the noble one. Their achievement is madness that has learned discipline, or discipline set on fire by madness — the two things the first speeches treated as enemies, fused into a single life. That is why the reward outstrips both: sōphrosynē alone gives you a safe, cold, earthbound life, and raw mania alone destroys you, but love that is both god-touched and self-mastered grows wings. And Plato scores it as an Olympic victory for a reason. The Greeks had no higher image of human excellence than the crowned athlete at Olympia; Socrates is claiming that the disciplined lover has won, in the arena of the soul, the equivalent of that supreme crown — and that there is, for a human being, no greater good to win.
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