Did I Define Love?
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Socrates — εἰ ὡρισάμην ἔρωτα… Λυσίας ἠνάγκασεν ὑπολαβεῖν τὸν ἔρωτα ἕν.
Socrates asks his question with a piece of mock-forgetfulness — he cannot quite recall his own speech, he says, 'because of the inspired state,' the enthousiasmos, he was in — and the joke lets him extract the point gently from Phaedrus rather than asserting it. Did he, at the beginning of his speech, hōrisamēn — 'define,' 'mark the boundaries of' — love? Emphatically yes, Phaedrus says. And that single verb, horizein, names everything Lysias failed to do. To horizein is to draw a boundary (the root of 'horizon'), to fix what a thing is and is not. Socrates opened his speech by doing exactly this: dividing madness into kinds and marking off erotic madness as a specific, definable thing. Lysias, by contrast, 'forced us to assume,' ēnankasen hypolabein, that love was 'one thing' — simply took for granted, without argument, whatever conception of love suited his case. The difference between the artful and the artless speaker turns out to be as simple, and as absolute, as this: one drew the boundary first; the other never drew it at all.
Socrates plays at not remembering his own speech — 'because of the inspired state I was in,' he says — and asks Phaedrus whether he defined love at the very start. Phaedrus assures him he did, most emphatically. And there is the contrast: Socrates began by defining his subject; Lysias began by simply forcing his hearers to assume that love was one fixed thing, the thing he happened to want it to be.
The verb at the center of this exchange, horizein, 'to define,' is one of the quiet giants of Greek philosophical vocabulary, and Socrates is pointing to the single act that separates his speeches from Lysias's. To define is to mark a boundary — horos means a boundary-stone, the marker set at the edge of a field, and horizein is to set those markers around a concept, fixing what falls inside it and what falls out. The whole preceding argument has established why this matters: 'love' is a wandering word, one of the contested terms about which minds go astray, and the only way to steady such a word is to draw its boundary, to say what love is before saying anything else about it. Socrates did this. His palinode began not with praise but with a definition arrived at by division — sorting madness into prophetic, ritual, poetic, and erotic kinds, and locating love precisely as the fourth. Everything the speech then said had a fixed subject to be true about. Lysias did the opposite, and the Greek is exact about the fault: he 'forced' his hearers to 'assume' a conception of love, hypolabein, to take one up without examination, so that his clever points floated free of any settled meaning. This is why Socrates can call the difference decisive rather than merely stylistic. A speech without a definition of its central term is not a weaker version of a good speech; it is a different kind of thing altogether — persuasion untethered from knowledge, a chain of appeals about a subject the speaker never troubled to fix. And the light irony of Socrates's mock-forgetfulness carries its own point. He pretends the definition came to him in a haze of inspiration, as if he barely authored it — which is both a joke and a genuine Platonic conviction, that the best speech comes partly as a gift. But inspired or not, the definition is there, doing its work, holding the speech together. That is the mark of art. The coming pages will make the same point structurally: because Socrates fixed his subject, his speech could have a shape; because Lysias never did, his fell into a heap.
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