An Army of Lovers, a Coward Turned Brave
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Phaedrus — ἀλλήλους, καὶ μαχόμενοί γʼ ἂν μετʼ ἀλλήλων οἱ τοιοῦτοι νικῷεν ἂν ὀλίγοι ὄντες ὡς ἔπος εἰπεῖν πάντας ἀνθρώπους. ἐρῶν γὰρ ἀνὴρ ὑπὸ παιδικῶν ὀφθῆναι ἢ λιπὼν τάξιν ἢ ὅπλα ἀποβαλὼν ἧττον ἂν δήπου δέξαιτο ἢ ὑπὸ πάντων τῶν ἄλλων, καὶ πρὸ τούτου τεθνάναι ἂν πολλάκις ἕλοιτο. καὶ μὴν ἐγκαταλιπεῖν γε τὰ παιδικὰ ἢ μὴ βοηθῆσαι κινδυνεύοντι— οὐδεὶς οὕτω κακὸς ὅντινα οὐκ ἂν αὐτὸς ὁ Ἔρως ἔνθεον ποιήσειε πρὸς ἀρετήν, ὥστε ὅμοιον εἶναι τῷ ἀρίστῳ φύσει·
one another, and such men, fighting alongside one another, though few, would conquer, so to speak, all mankind. For a man in love would surely be less willing to be seen by his beloved, having left his post or thrown away his weapons, than by everyone else, and would many times choose to die rather than that. And moreover, as for deserting his beloved or not helping him when he's in danger— no one is so cowardly that Love himself could not make him inspired toward virtue, so that he becomes like the best man by nature.
Continuing the sentence begun at 178e, where Phaedrus imagined a city or army made up of lovers and their beloveds abstaining from every shameful act and competing for honor with one another. He now draws out the payoff: such an army, however small, would defeat the whole world, because a man in love would rather die than be seen by his beloved abandoning his post. From there Phaedrus generalizes to a claim about Eros himself: there is no one so cowardly that the god cannot make him brave — the claim he is about to prove with his one piece of evidence, Alcestis, at 179b.
Phaedrus's proof runs on shame, not conviction: a man's courage here is calibrated entirely to who is watching. He is less afraid of the whole world seeing him disgraced than of one person, his beloved, seeing it, and that asymmetry is the whole argument. The word Plato chooses for what Eros does to a coward is entheos, 'having the god within, possessed' — the register Socrates later formalizes as mania in the Phaedrus (244a–245c), where poet, prophet, and lover all act beyond their own capacities because a god has entered them. Here the possession is instant and situational: Eros does not build a better character so much as override the old one for as long as the beloved is in view. The fantasy of an army run on this mechanism became historical fact within decades — fourth-century Thebes fielded the Sacred Band, a unit of a hundred and fifty pairs of lovers organized on exactly this reasoning. The Republic's far colder definition of courage, a settled knowledge of what is and is not to be feared (429b–430b), answers a case like this one without naming it: bravery that depends on an audience is not yet the virtue Socrates is after.
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