No Small Prize
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Socrates — οὐ σμικρὸν ἆθλον τῆς ἐρωτικῆς μανίας φέρονται… σκότον οὐ νόμος… ἀλλὰ φανὸν βίον διάγοντας εὐδαιμονεῖν.
Socrates measures even the imperfect lovers' reward in the highest terms he has. They 'carry off no small prize' — athlon, the word for a victor's prize in the games, keeping alive the athletic image of the Olympic falls just used of the better pair. And the prize is spelled out as a choice between two afterlives. For these souls it is 'not lawful,' ou nomos, to go 'into darkness,' skotos, and the journey under the earth — the grim descent that Greek imagination assigned to ordinary or guilty souls. Instead they live a 'bright life,' a phanon bion, and 'flourish,' eudaimonein. The two words skotos and phanos, darkness and brightness, are set directly against each other, and behind them stands the language of the mysteries, where initiates were promised light and the uninitiated left in the dark. The lesser lovers, touched by love's madness, have been initiated enough to walk in the light.
Socrates finishes the account of the honor-loving couple. Even though they sometimes yielded, the pledges of love bind them as friends for life. And their reward is real: when they die, wingless but already beginning to grow wings, they escape the dark journey under the earth that awaits other souls, and instead live a bright life and flourish.
The whole palinode has been an argument about how to weigh love, and in these closing lines Plato shows his hand about what the right currency is. The first two speeches — Lysias's and Socrates's own first attempt — did their accounting in pleasure and pain: is the lover a good bargain or a bad one, does the beloved gain more enjoyment or more trouble by yielding to him? That is a ledger of feelings and consequences. Here, at the end, Socrates measures love in a completely different coin. The reward of even the second-rank lovers is that they 'flourish' — eudaimonein — the verb of eudaimonia, the deepest word Greek ethics has for a whole life gone well. Eudaimonia is not a mood or a sum of pleasures; it means, at root, to live under a good daimōn, to have one's entire existence turn out well and be blessable in its entirety. By ending on this word, Plato quietly disqualifies the whole framework of the first speeches. The question was never whether love feels good or costs too much; it is whether love makes a life, and a soul's long journey through many lives, go well. And the answer the palinode gives is drawn in light and darkness. The image of skotos, the dark road under the earth, against the phanos, the bright life above, comes straight from the mystery religions — Eleusis, the Orphic rites — in which initiates were promised a luminous afterlife while the uninitiated were left to grope in the gloom. Socrates has already called love a teletē, an initiation; now he collects the promise. To have loved, even imperfectly, even with occasional surrender, is to have been initiated into the light — to have begun to grow the wings that lift a soul out of the dark cycle and toward the place it saw before it was born. That is the prize, and Plato insists it is no small one.
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