The Oldest God, the Greatest Good
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Phaedrus — οὕτω πολλαχόθεν ὁμολογεῖται ὁ Ἔρως ἐν τοῖς πρεσβύτατος εἶναι. πρεσβύτατος δὲ ὢν μεγίστων ἀγαθῶν ἡμῖν αἴτιός ἐστιν. οὐ γὰρ ἔγωγʼ ἔχω εἰπεῖν ὅτι μεῖζόν ἐστιν ἀγαθὸν εὐθὺς νέῳ ὄντι ἢ ἐραστὴς χρηστὸς καὶ ἐραστῇ παιδικά. ὃ γὰρ χρὴ ἀνθρώποις ἡγεῖσθαι παντὸς τοῦ βίου τοῖς μέλλουσι καλῶς βιώσεσθαι, τοῦτο οὔτε συγγένεια οἵα τε ἐμποιεῖν οὕτω καλῶς οὔτε τιμαὶ οὔτε πλοῦτος οὔτʼ ἄλλο
Thus, on many grounds, it is agreed that Eros is among the very oldest. And, being the oldest, he is responsible for the greatest goods we have. For I cannot say what greater good there is, right from youth, for a young man, than a good lover and for a lover, a beloved. For what men who mean to live well their whole life must have as their guide that, neither kinship is able to instill so well, nor honors, nor wealth, nor anything else…
Continuing Phaedrus's speech in praise of Eros, opened at 178a with the claim, drawn from Hesiod, Acusilaus, and Parmenides, that Eros has no parents and belongs among the very first beings to exist. Having established the god's priority in age, Phaedrus turns here to the payoff: since Eros is oldest, he is the cause of our greatest goods, and Phaedrus can name nothing better for a young man than a good lover, and for a lover, a good beloved. He begins a list of what cannot match it — kinship first — in a sentence that runs on into 178d.
The proof of age is borrowed straight from theogony. In Hesiod, Erōs is one of the first four powers to come into being, older than Kronos, older than Zeus, present before the Olympian order exists at all — a claim Phaedrus has just laid out at 178a–b from Hesiod, Acusilaus, and Parmenides. He treats seniority the way any Greek audience would treat it in a family or a city: the oldest carries the most honor and the most authority. Then, with nothing to bridge the gap, he slides from that mythic fact to an entirely different claim about ordinary Athenian life — that a chrēstos lover and a good paidika are the single best thing a young man can have. Nothing in the argument connects a god's birth order to the value of a human relationship; the connection is simply asserted, and it is exactly the kind of move Socrates spends the rest of the dialogue taking apart. The list Phaedrus starts here — kinship, honor, wealth, and whatever comes next — is the same move Socrates himself makes in the Phaedrus when he argues that erotic mania is the source of our greatest goods (244a): Phaedrus is arguing the same case, but from the god's age rather than from the soul's experience of being in love.
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