Swimming Backwards
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Socrates — οὐδὲ ἀρχῆς ἀλλʼ τελευτῆς ὑπτίας ἀνάπαλιν ἐπιχειρεῖ τὸν λόγον.
Socrates turns the criticism into a piece of physical comedy. Lysias, he says, is 'far from doing what we seek,' because he does not begin his speech ap' archēs, 'from the beginning,' but apo teleutēs, 'from the end' — and Socrates piles on the image: ex hyptias anapalin, the man is trying to swim his speech 'backwards, on his back,' like a swimmer who has flipped over and is thrashing toward the shore he started from. The point under the joke is precise. Lysias opens with the non-lover already deep in his argument — noting how lovers regret their generosity 'once desire stops' — which is a thought that belongs at the end of a discussion of love, after much has been established, not at its head. He has started from a conclusion. A speech, like a swimmer, is supposed to move forward from a starting point it has chosen for a reason; Lysias's flails in reverse from a finish, because there was never a real beginning — no definition — to push off from. And Socrates caps it with an endearment that is also a needle: 'or did I say nothing, Phaedrus, dear head?' — philē kephalē, 'dear head,' the very word for the part Lysias's speech is missing.
Phaedrus reads on into Lysias's opening — the non-lover pressing his suit, remarking how ordinary lovers come to regret their kindnesses once desire cools. Socrates seizes on it with delight. This speaker, he says, is the very opposite of what they are looking for: he does not begin at the beginning but at the end, trying to swim through his speech backwards, on his back — starting from the things a lover would say only when the affair was already over.
The image of swimming backwards is funnier and more pointed than it first appears, and it depends on the definition-point just established. Why can Lysias only swim in reverse? Because he has no beginning to swim from. A proper speech, on Socrates's view, has a natural starting point given by its subject: once you have defined love, you know where the account of it must begin, and everything flows forward from there in an order the subject itself dictates. Lysias, having skipped the definition, has no such natural head, and so he simply plunges in wherever he likes — and where he likes, as it happens, is a thought that belongs to the very end of the matter, the jaded observation that lovers come to regret their kindnesses. Beginning there is like beginning a story with its moral, or a proof with its conclusion: the speech has to thrash backwards, on its back, trying to reach the grounds for a claim it has already made. The joke about the missing 'head' — Socrates calling Phaedrus 'dear head' in the same breath — sets up the great image that is only a few lines away, where a speech is compared to a living animal that must not be 'headless' or 'footless.' Lysias's speech is precisely akephalos, headless: it has no proper beginning because it has no definition to serve as one. And there is a deeper Platonic conviction under the comedy. For Plato, order is not a decoration added to thought but a sign of understanding: a mind that truly grasps its subject will lay it out in the order the subject requires, beginning where it truly begins, because it sees the real articulations of the thing. Disorder in a speech is therefore evidence of disorder in the speaker's knowledge. Lysias swims backwards not because he is a careless writer but because he never knew, in the deep sense, what he was talking about. To fix the order you would have to fix the subject; to fix the subject you would have to define it; and to define it you would have to do philosophy. The swimming-backwards joke, like everything in this stretch of the dialogue, points back to the same missing first step.
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