Not Every Love Deserves Praise
Read the full text in our reader
Pausanias — οἷον ὃ νῦν ἡμεῖς ποιοῦμεν, ἢ πίνειν ἢ ᾁδειν ἢ διαλέγεσθαι, οὐκ ἔστι τούτων αὐτὸ καλὸν οὐδέν, ἀλλʼ ἐν τῇ πράξει, ὡς ἂν πραχθῇ, τοιοῦτον ἀπέβη· καλῶς μὲν γὰρ πραττόμενον καὶ ὀρθῶς καλὸν γίγνεται, μὴ ὀρθῶς δὲ αἰσχρόν. οὕτω δὴ καὶ τὸ ἐρᾶν καὶ ὁ Ἔρως οὐ πᾶς ἐστι καλὸς οὐδὲ ἄξιος ἐγκωμιάζεσθαι, ἀλλὰ ὁ καλῶς προτρέπων ἐρᾶν. ὁ μὲν οὖν τῆς Πανδήμου Ἀφροδίτης ὡς ἀληθῶς πάνδημός
For example, what we are doing right now — drinking, singing, or talking together — none of these, taken by itself, is noble. It is the doing of it, however it is done, that decides how it turns out: done nobly and rightly, it becomes noble; done wrongly, it becomes base. So too with loving, and with Love himself: he is not wholly noble, nor worth praising, except the one who nobly urges one to love. Now, the Love that belongs to the Common Aphrodite is truly common...
Continuing directly from 180e's principle, Pausanias illustrates it with the party itself — drinking, singing, conversing are none of them noble or base in themselves, only their manner decides — then applies the same rule to Love: Love is not wholly noble or praiseworthy, only the Love that nobly urges someone to love is. He then begins to name the Love that belongs to the Common Aphrodite as "truly common," the sentence running on into 181b.
The examples he reaches for are not neutral. Drinking, singing, talking together — that is exactly what the room is doing as he speaks, a symposium describing itself while it happens. Pausanias could have picked any three activities to prove that manner outranks matter; he picks the party's own actions, folding his argument into its occasion the way the frame narrative already does with Apollodorus retelling a story he was not even present for. It is a small move, and it does real work: no one in the room can object to the premise without objecting to what they themselves are doing.
The extension to Love is the sleight of hand. Once no action is noble or base by itself, Pausanias can say the identical thing about erōs — loving itself, and Love the god, earn praise only through the manner of the urging, not through what they are. That sounds even-handed, but it never says what makes an urging "noble" in the first place; it only promises, three sentences later, to sort lovers by which Aphrodite sponsors them. Socrates will not let this pass unanswered. When his turn comes, by way of Diotima, he insists a definition of Love must come before any verdict on how Love is exercised — the very step Pausanias skips here to get to his real subject, which is Athenian custom about which boys a man may honorably pursue.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Plato, Symposium 181a in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Plato, Symposium — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Plato, Symposium 181a — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/symposium/181a/