Ready to Share a Whole Life
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Pausanias — ὑπὸ τούτου τοῦ ἔρωτος ὡρμημένους· οὐ γὰρ ἐρῶσι παίδων, ἀλλʼ ἐπειδὰν ἤδη ἄρχωνται νοῦν ἴσχειν, τοῦτο δὲ πλησιάζει τῷ γενειάσκειν. παρεσκευασμένοι γὰρ οἶμαί εἰσιν οἱ ἐντεῦθεν ἀρχόμενοι ἐρᾶν ὡς τὸν βίον ἅπαντα συνεσόμενοι καὶ κοινῇ συμβιωσόμενοι, ἀλλʼ οὐκ ἐξαπατήσαντες, ἐν ἀφροσύνῃ λαβόντες ὡς νέον, καταγελάσαντες οἰχήσεσθαι ἐπʼ ἄλλον ἀποτρέχοντες. χρῆν δὲ καὶ νόμον εἶναι μὴ ἐρᾶν
Impelled by this Love, for they do not love boys, but only once they have already begun to get sense — and that borders on growing a beard. Those who begin loving from that point on are prepared, I think, to be together their whole life, and sharing it jointly, not by deceiving him, catching him in his folly as a mere boy, mocking him, and being gone, running off to someone else. There ought to be a law, too, against loving…
Continues Pausanias's speech mid-sentence from 181c, still explaining how to tell a genuine lover apart within paiderastia: he loves the boy only once the boy has begun to show sense, near the age of a first beard, and he means to stay for a whole shared life rather than deceive him and run off. The unit ends mid-clause, with Pausanias about to call for a law; 181e completes the thought.
Pausanias has just argued that the Heavenly Love aims at whoever has more nous, mind. Here he says how a lover would actually check for it: wait until the boy starts geneiáskein, growing a beard. A criterion that sounded philosophical, mind over body, turns out to have a plain physical marker, one a father or a magistrate could confirm on sight. That slippage from an inner quality to a visible sign matters, because the same stretch of argument ends with Pausanias calling for an actual law against loving children who are too young. His ranking of the two Aphrodites was never only a private taste; he wants it to become policy, and a policy needs something checkable, not a soul.
The genuine lover is then described in language closer to a marriage contract than to erotic poetry: synesómenoi, going to be together, and symbiōsómenoi, going to share a life — both future participles binding the man to the boy's whole future rather than one season of it. Pausanias sets against that a small, almost comic sketch of the con man: he deceives, he catches the boy in his folly for being young, he mocks him, and his aim gets its own future form, oichēsesthai, simply to be gone. Two speeches later Aristophanes will make the wish for a whole shared life literal, turning it into the myth of two halves hunting for the rest of one original body — Pausanias has already supplied him the vocabulary.
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