No Part in Hybris
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Pausanias — τε οὔσης πολὺ ἢ τῆς ἑτέρας, καὶ μετεχούσης ἐν τῇ γενέσει καὶ θήλεος καὶ ἄρρενος. ὁ δὲ τῆς Οὐρανίας πρῶτον μὲν οὐ μετεχούσης θήλεος ἀλλʼ ἄρρενος μόνον— καὶ ἔστιν οὗτος ὁ τῶν παίδων ἔρως— ἔπειτα πρεσβυτέρας, ὕβρεως ἀμοίρου· ὅθεν δὴ ἐπὶ τὸ ἄρρεν τρέπονται οἱ ἐκ τούτου τοῦ ἔρωτος ἔπιπνοι, τὸ φύσει ἐρρωμενέστερον καὶ νοῦν μᾶλλον ἔχον ἀγαπῶντες. καί τις ἂν γνοίη καὶ ἐν αὐτῇ τῇ παιδεραστίᾳ τοὺς εἰλικρινῶς
Far younger than the other, and sharing too in her birth both female and male. But the Heavenly Love, first, not sharing in the female, but only the male — and this is the love of boys — then, older, with no part in hybris. Hence indeed those inspired by this Love turn to the male, loving what is by nature stronger and has more mind. And one might tell, even within paiderastia itself, the ones genuinely…
Mid-sentence from 181b: having said that the younger, Common Aphrodite is far younger than the elder and shares in her own birth both a female and a male parent, Pausanias turns to the elder, Heavenly Aphrodite, who shares only in the male — hence the love of boys — and who, being older, has no part in wanton violence. Those this Love inspires turn to the male for being by nature stronger and more intelligent, and Pausanias begins to say that even within paiderastia the genuine lovers can be told apart — a claim 181d completes.
Pausanias's case for ranking the Heavenly Love above the Common one turns on a claim about nature that he never argues for: those it seizes turn to the male because the male is by nature stronger and has more nous, mind. That clause is doing all the work. If males simply have more mind than females, then a love aimed only at males is, without further argument, aimed at the more rational half of the species — and Pausanias can call his own preference the philosophical one. The premise appears once, folded into a genitive absolute, and the speech moves straight past it as though it had already been proven.
The same sentence hands the Heavenly Aphrodite a second, moral alibi: she has no part in hybris, the term Athenian law used for an assault on another person's body or honor. Paired with epipnoi, 'breathed into' — from the same root as pneuma, breath or spirit — the men this Love takes hold of are pictured as receiving something blown into them from outside rather than choosing an object for themselves. Socrates undoes exactly this move later on. In the Phaedrus's palinode he keeps Pausanias's vocabulary of possession, mania, but moves its object from a body with more mind to the soul's own memory of Beauty; what is or isn't in a boy's head at the time stops being the point. Pausanias's nous is a fact about the beloved's brain. When Diotima speaks through Socrates later this same evening, mind will instead be a fact about the lover's own climb.
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