Neither Noble Nor Base
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Pausanias — ἣν δὴ Πάνδημον καλοῦμεν. ἀναγκαῖον δὴ καὶ ἔρωτα τὸν μὲν τῇ ἑτέρᾳ συνεργὸν Πάνδημον ὀρθῶς καλεῖσθαι, τὸν δὲ Οὐράνιον. ἐπαινεῖν μὲν οὖν δεῖ πάντας θεούς, ἃ δʼ οὖν ἑκάτερος εἴληχε πειρατέον εἰπεῖν. πᾶσα γὰρ πρᾶξις ὧδʼ ἔχει· αὐτὴ ἐφʼ ἑαυτῆς πραττομένη οὔτε καλὴ οὔτε αἰσχρά.
whom indeed we call the Common one. It is necessary then that Love too — the one, fellow-worker to the other is rightly called the Common — and the other, Heavenly. One must praise all the gods, but what each has been allotted, one must try to say. For every action is like this: taken by itself, simply being done, is neither noble nor base.
Pausanias completes the naming he began in 180d: the younger goddess, born of Zeus and Dione, is the one we call Pandemos, 'Common,' so the Love that works alongside her is rightly called Common too, and the other Love, Heavenly. All the gods deserve praise, he says, but the real task is to say exactly what each Love has been allotted — and he states the principle his whole speech will run on: no action, taken by itself, is noble or base.
The claim that no action is noble or base in itself, only in how it is done, is not original to Pausanias — it is a stock move in fifth-century ethical argument, the same logic Socrates later uses on rhetoric in the Gorgias: a skill or an act is like a weapon, neutral until someone picks it up and uses it well or badly. Pausanias borrows that neutrality to buy himself room. If the deed itself carries no verdict, then everything depends on manner, and manner is exactly what he intends to define, on his own terms, for the rest of his speech.
That is not an abstract point for him. Plato's Protagoras already shows Pausanias at Agathon's side years earlier, and later tonight Aristophanes will tease the two of them as a settled old couple — a match that had outlasted the age at which Athenian custom expected a boy to stop being courted. A principle that puts virtue and vice entirely in manner, never in the act, suits a man who needs his own long relationship classified as the right kind. Socrates will spend his turn undoing exactly this shortcut: before anyone can call an action or a lover noble by its manner, he insists, someone has to say what Love actually is. Pausanias skips that question and moves straight to etiquette.
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