Two Aphrodites, Two Loves
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Pausanias — ὁποῖον δεῖ ἐπαινεῖν. ἐγὼ οὖν πειράσομαι τοῦτο ἐπανορθώσασθαι, πρῶτον μὲν ἔρωτα φράσαι ὃν δεῖ ἐπαινεῖν, ἔπειτα ἐπαινέσαι ἀξίως τοῦ θεοῦ. πάντες γὰρ ἴσμεν ὅτι οὐκ ἔστιν ἄνευ Ἔρωτος Ἀφροδίτη. μιᾶς μὲν οὖν οὔσης εἷς ἂν ἦν Ἔρως· ἐπεὶ δὲ δὴ δύο ἐστόν, δύο ἀνάγκη καὶ Ἔρωτε εἶναι. πῶς δʼ οὐ δύο τὼ θεά; ἡ μέν γέ που πρεσβυτέρα καὶ ἀμήτωρ Οὐρανοῦ θυγάτηρ, ἣν δὴ καὶ Οὐρανίαν ἐπονομάζομεν· ἡ δὲ νεωτέρα Διὸς καὶ Διώνης,
Which sort one ought to praise. I will then try to set this right: first to specify which Love one ought to praise, then to praise him worthily of the god. For we all know that there is no Aphrodite without Eros. So if she were one, Love would be one; but since there truly are two, there must also be two Loves. And how are the two goddesses not two? The one, I suppose, is elder and motherless, daughter of Ouranos — whom indeed we also call Urania — while the other is younger, of Zeus and Dione,
Continuing directly from 180c's broken-off sentence, Pausanias states his plan for correcting Phaedrus's speech: first say which Love deserves praise, then praise it worthily. Since everyone knows there is no Aphrodite without Eros, and there are in fact two Aphrodites, there must be two Loves to match. He begins naming the elder — motherless, daughter of Ouranos alone, called Urania — and starts naming the younger, daughter of Zeus and Dione, before the sentence runs on into 180e.
“We all know” (pántes ísmen) is doing a great deal of work here, and Pausanias never argues for it — he simply asserts that Aphrodite implies Eros, then reasons that because the mythic tradition happens to recognize two Aphrodites, there must mechanically be two Erotes as well. The inference treats the name as though it tracked one fixed thing: if the word splits, the god must split too. It is the same unexamined-premise problem Socrates will spend the rest of the dialogue circling — through Diotima he will eventually make Eros not a god at all, but a daimon, a single restless in-between thing, which quietly dissolves the whole apparatus of counting Aphrodites and Erotes in pairs.
The word amḗtōr, “motherless,” is doing quieter work. Pausanias states it as a plain genealogical fact — daughter of Ouranos, no mother involved — but the source is Hesiod's Theogony, where the elder Aphrodite is born from the severed genitals of Ouranos, thrown into the sea by his own son Cronus; the foam that gathers around them, aphrós, is built directly into her name. Pausanias needs the fact of motherlessness — it lets him argue that this Aphrodite is untouched by the female and so belongs properly to love between men — but he has no use for the violence that produced it, and simply leaves it out.
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