The Law of Love, City by City
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Pausanias — καὶ ἐν Λακεδαίμονι ποικίλος. ἐν Ἤλιδι μὲν γὰρ καὶ ἐν Βοιωτοῖς, καὶ οὗ μὴ σοφοὶ λέγειν, ἁπλῶς νενομοθέτηται καλὸν τὸ χαρίζεσθαι ἐρασταῖς, καὶ οὐκ ἄν τις εἴποι οὔτε νέος οὔτε παλαιὸς ὡς αἰσχρόν, ἵνα οἶμαι μὴ πράγματʼ ἔχωσιν λόγῳ πειρώμενοι πείθειν τοὺς νέους, ἅτε ἀδύνατοι λέγειν· τῆς δὲ Ἰωνίας καὶ ἄλλοθι πολλαχοῦ αἰσχρὸν νενόμισται, ὅσοι ὑπὸ βαρβάροις οἰκοῦσιν. τοῖς γὰρ βαρβάροις διὰ τὰς τυραννίδας αἰσχρὸν τοῦτό γε καὶ ἥ γε
and in Lacedaemon, it is complicated. For in Elis and in Boeotia, and wherever people are not skilled at speaking, it has simply been made law that gratifying lovers is honorable, and no one, young or old, would say it is shameful, so that, I think, they won't have trouble trying to persuade the young men with argument, since they are unable to speak well. But in Ionia and in many other places it is held shameful, wherever people live under barbarian rule. For to the barbarians, because of their tyrannies, this at least is shameful— and so is the…
Completing the sentence begun in 182a — the law here (and in Lacedaemon) is complicated, unlike the simple rule elsewhere — Pausanias surveys that simplicity city by city: in Elis and Boeotia, where people have no gift for speaking, gratifying a lover is flatly lawful and no one calls it shameful, since no one there needs to argue young men into anything. In Ionia and elsewhere under barbarian rule, by contrast, it is held shameful — and he starts to explain why (tyranny's own reasons) just as the unit breaks off, continuing into 182c.
Pausanias calls the law here and in Sparta poikilos, ‘variegated, hard to reduce to one rule.’ The word already carries a charge for a reader of the companion dialogue: in the Phaedrus it names the soul's unruly dark horse, dappled and hard to govern, and Socrates uses it half-mockingly of Lysias's overworked cleverness. Pausanias means something more mundane — a law too qualified to state simply — but the choice of word still fits the point he is making: Elis and Boeotia get by with one flat statute because their people, he says, are ‘not skilled in speaking’ and never have to argue the matter. Where rhetoric is weak, a law can stay simple; where it is strong, as in Athens, it grows elaborate because it has to survive being talked about. Praising his own city's legal tangle as proof of its sophistication, Pausanias quietly makes skill in speech, rather than justice, the reason a custom turns complicated.
He then turns to Ionia and ‘wherever people live under barbarian rule,’ where the identical practice is held shameful — and the sentence breaks off mid-word, <span class="gk">καὶ ἥ γε</span> (‘and so is the...’), exactly where he is about to explain why: barbarian tyrannies, his argument continues, cannot survive the bond that eros creates between men. That turns an erotic custom into a political fact rather than a private one. It anticipates the very anxiety the Symposium spends the rest of the night testing: Alcibiades' account of pursuing Socrates, three speeches later, reads like that fear realized from the inside — a citizen undone by an attachment, rather than a tyrant undone by one he could not control.
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