Dear Eros — Be Gracious
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Socrates — αὕτη σοι ὦ φίλε Ἔρως… καλλίστη καὶ ἀρίστη δέδοταί παλινῳδία… εὐμενὴς καὶ ἵλεως τὴν ἐρωτικήν τέχνην ἣν ἔδωκας μήτε ἀφέλῃ.
The speech closes as a recantation must — by turning to the offended god and offering the recantation itself as a gift. Socrates dedicates it to Eros: 'this, dear Eros, the fairest and best palinode, has been given you.' The word palinōidia — the 'again-song,' the take-back song — names the whole speech and the whole genre; Socrates had invoked it at the start, recalling how the poet Stesichorus, struck blind for slandering Helen, wrote a palinode to win back his sight. Now he pays his own. And then the two great words of Greek prayer: he asks Eros to be eumenēs and hileōs — 'gracious' and 'propitious,' the god's face turned toward the worshipper in favor rather than anger. His specific plea is that the god not, out of wrath at the earlier slander, 'take away' the erōtikē technē, the 'art of love,' that Eros had given him. The philosopher who spoke against love now begs to keep love's art.
The palinode ends where a recantation must: in prayer. Socrates dedicates the whole speech to the god he had offended, offering it as the fairest and best palinode he could make, and asks Eros — gracious and propitious — not to take away in anger the 'art of love' the god had given him, but to let him be ever more honored among the beautiful. With this the great myth of the soul closes.
To end the greatest speech in the dialogue with a prayer is itself the argument, and it helps to see the frame Plato has built around it. The palinode exists because Socrates became afraid. He had delivered a first speech condemning love as a kind of madness to be avoided, and then his daimonion checked him and he realized he had committed a sin against a god — for if Eros is a god, as Socrates believes, then to slander love is impiety. His model is Stesichorus, the poet who lost his sight for writing that Helen sailed to Troy and recovered it only when he composed a palinode swearing she never did. So this whole soaring myth of the soul — the chariot, the Forms, the wings, the recovered vision of beauty — has been, in its frame, an act of religious repair, a take-back song sung to appease an angry divinity. That is why it ends with hileōs, the word by which the Greeks asked a god to be merciful, and with the confession implied in 'do not take away in anger.' But watch what has happened to the god across the length of the prayer. When Socrates first feared Eros, Eros was a temperamental Olympian who might blind a man. By the end, after everything the palinode has said, Eros has become the name for the force that moves every soul toward beauty and, through beauty, back toward the divine reality it saw before birth — nearer to a cosmic principle than a jealous god. And so the prayer changes meaning as it is spoken. To ask this Eros to be 'gracious and propitious,' and above all not to take away the 'art of love,' is no longer merely to placate a deity; it is to pray that the deepest current of the soul — its capacity to be drawn upward by what is beautiful — should keep flowing and never be shut off. The erōtikē technē Socrates begs to keep is the same 'knowledge of love' he claims, in the Symposium, is the one thing he truly understands. Here at the close of the Phaedrus, he asks that it never be taken from him — which is to ask, in the end, that he never stop being a lover.
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