Gifts, Not Bookkeeping
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Socrates — ταῦτα τοσαῦτα, ὦ παῖ, καὶ θεῖα οὕτω σοι δωρήσεται ἡ παρʼ ἐραστοῦ φιλία· ἡ δὲ ἀπὸ τοῦ μὴ ἐρῶντος οἰκειότης, σωφροσύνῃ θνητῇ κεκραμένη, θνητά τε καὶ φειδωλὰ οἰκονομοῦσα, ἀνελευθερίαν ὑπὸ πλήθους ἐπαινουμένην ὡς ἀρετὴν…
Gifts so many and so divine, my boy, the friendship of a lover will bestow on you. But the intimacy the non-lover offers — diluted with a merely mortal temperance, dispensing mortal and stingy benefits — will breed in your soul an illiberality that the crowd praises as a virtue …
The palinode ends by weighing the two loves it has argued about all along. The lover's friendship bestows divine gifts; the non-lover's careful intimacy hands out only mortal, rationed benefits — and breeds a smallness the crowd applauds as good sense. Socrates's final answer to Lysias.
The palinode ends where Lysias began, and answers him word for word. Lysias's non-lover opened (231a) with the language of the ledger — advantage, what one is owed; Socrates closes with two economic verbs set against each other. The lover <em>dōreîtai</em> — 'bestows,' gives freely, from <em>dôron</em>, gift (the root of Theodore and Dorothy, 'god's gift'). The non-lover <em>oikonomeî</em> — 'manages the household accounts,' from <em>oîkos</em>, home: the literal birth of the word 'economy.' Love reduced to bookkeeping. Even the temperance he brings is <em>kekraménē</em>, 'diluted' — a drinking-word, wine cut with so much water it cannot warm anyone. The whole contrast is generosity versus thrift, the open hand versus the careful one.<br><br>But the sting is in the last noun. What the cautious non-lover actually produces in the beloved is <em>aneleuthería</em> — 'unfreedom,' the character of a slave: a cramped, grasping, calculating soul. For a Greek, freedom (<em>eleuthería</em>) was a quality of spirit before it was a legal status; the <em>aneleútheros</em> man is small even when no one owns him. And the crowd — <em>tò plêthos</em>, 'the many,' whose judgment Plato distrusts everywhere from the <em>Republic</em> to the <em>Crito</em> — 'praises it as a virtue,' mistaking a shrunken soul for a prudent one. This is the deepest charge in the dialogue against loveless prudence: not that it is joyless, but that it makes you <em>less free</em>. Divine madness, for all its danger, enlarges; safe calculation dwarfs. The sentence trails off unfinished in the Greek — the illiberality is about to be 'engendered' in the soul — as if Socrates cannot bring himself to complete the diminishment.
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