Blaming the Wrong Lovers
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Pausanias — ὅσον δυνάμεθα μὴ ἐρᾶν. οὗτοι γάρ εἰσιν οἱ καὶ τὸ ὄνειδος πεποιηκότες, ὥστε τινὰς τολμᾶν λέγειν ὡς αἰσχρὸν χαρίζεσθαι ἐρασταῖς· λέγουσι δὲ εἰς τούτους ἀποβλέποντες, ὁρῶντες αὐτῶν τὴν ἀκαιρίαν καὶ ἀδικίαν, ἐπεὶ οὐ δήπου κοσμίως γε καὶ νομίμως ὁτιοῦν πρᾶγμα πραττόμενον ψόγον ἂν δικαίως φέροι. καὶ δὴ καὶ ὁ περὶ τὸν ἔρωτα νόμος ἐν μὲν ταῖς ἄλλαις πόλεσι νοῆσαι ῥᾴδιος, ἁπλῶς γὰρ ὥρισται· ὁ δʼ ἐνθάδε
As far as we can, not to love. For these are the very ones who created the reproach, so that some dare to say it is shameful to gratify lovers. But they say this looking to these men, seeing their ill-timing and their injustice, since surely nothing done in an orderly and lawful way — whatever it is — could justly incur blame. And indeed, the law about love in the other cities is easy to grasp — for it is simply defined; but the one here—
Continuing the sentence begun in 181d — Pausanias's claim that there ought to be a law against loving too soon, its infinitive interrupted by 'as far as we can' and then picked back up — he explains that it is the ill-timed, unjust lovers who actually created pederasty's bad name, since nothing conducted in an orderly, lawful way could ever justly draw blame. He then turns to compare the law of love across cities, noting that the one here (and in Lacedaemon) is complicated where elsewhere it is simply stated — the comparison 182b completes with Elis, Boeotia, and Ionia.
Pausanias's whole defense turns on one word: akairia, 'ill-timing.' What makes a love affair disgraceful, on his account, is not desire so much as its handling — pursued at the wrong moment, without the right bearing at the right time. Kairos, the right moment, is the very category Greek rhetoric prizes as the orator's chief skill; Socrates and Phaedrus will spend the second half of the Phaedrus arguing over whether a speech's rightness is a matter of timing or of truth. Pausanias imports that rhetorical standard into eros: get the timing right, keep to the forms, and no blame can justly attach. What he never specifies is who judges whether the timing was right, and by what light.
That gap matters, because the same room will hear, later that night, what happens when a lover's sense of timing and a boy's do not match. Alcibiades' drunken account of pursuing Socrates at 217–219 is exactly a story about akairia from the other side: a lover convinced his moment has come, a beloved who simply declines. Pausanias's tidy legal fiction — that a well-timed, well-mannered courtship needs no further justification — leaves no room in it for the boy's own answer. His law regulates a lover's manners. It never asks what the boy wants.
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