License to Do Astonishing Things
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Pausanias — καὶ μὴ ἑλόντι αἰσχρόν, καὶ πρὸς τὸ ἐπιχειρεῖν ἑλεῖν ἐξουσίαν ὁ νόμος δέδωκε τῷ ἐραστῇ θαυμαστὰ ἔργα ἐργαζομένῳ ἐπαινεῖσθαι, ἃ εἴ τις τολμῴη ποιεῖν ἄλλʼ ὁτιοῦν διώκων καὶ
And failing is held shameful. And toward the attempt to win, the law has given the lover license to be praised for performing astonishing deeds— deeds which, if anyone dared to do in pursuit of anything else at all, and—
Pausanias continues his praise of Athens's law: failing to win a beloved counts as shameful, but the pursuit itself carries a legal license — the law has granted the lover permission to perform extraordinary deeds and be praised for them, deeds no one would be forgiven for in pursuit of any other aim.
Ἐξουσίαν is the word to sit with here. Athenian legal and political prose uses it for a formal grant of authority — the standing a magistrate holds by virtue of his office, a power the city extends and could in principle take back — not a vague permissiveness but a recognized, nameable power. Pausanias's Athens, on his telling, has handed the lover exactly that kind of standing: δέδωκε makes it a completed grant already in force, covering θαυμαστὰ ἔργα, 'astonishing deeds,' with praise rather than blame as the expected response. The clause keeps the asymmetry sharp on both sides — fail, and the verdict is αἰσχρόν, shameful; keep trying, and the deeds themselves earn applause no matter how the pursuit turns out. Pausanias is describing something closer to a legal office than a private feeling.
The move matters because Pausanias needs it. He has just spent several Stephanus pages arguing that Athens alone has legislated love correctly, and here he specifies what that correct legislation actually licenses: not affection in general but conspicuous, sanctioned extremity, public behavior that would be humiliating or worse under any other pretext. The catalogue of specific deeds is still ahead — oaths, doorstep vigils, a slavery no household slave would put up with — but the legal groundwork comes first: whatever the lover does under this ἐξουσία arrives pre-approved. Socrates spends most of the rest of the evening quietly declining to extend that same immunity to Alcibiades.
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