The Slaveries No Slave Would Bear
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Pausanias — βουλόμενος διαπράξασθαι πλὴν τοῦτο, φιλοσοφίας τὰ μέγιστα καρποῖτʼ ἂν ὀνείδη— εἰ γὰρ ἢ χρήματα βουλόμενος παρὰ του λαβεῖν ἢ ἀρχὴν ἄρξαι ἤ τινα ἄλλην δύναμιν ἐθέλοι ποιεῖν οἷάπερ οἱ ἐρασταὶ πρὸς τὰ παιδικά, ἱκετείας τε καὶ ἀντιβολήσεις ἐν ταῖς δεήσεσιν ποιούμενοι, καὶ ὅρκους ὀμνύντες, καὶ κοιμήσεις ἐπὶ θύραις, καὶ ἐθέλοντες δουλείας δουλεύειν οἵας οὐδʼ ἂν δοῦλος οὐδείς, ἐμποδίζοιτο ἂν μὴ πράττειν οὕτω τὴν πρᾶξιν καὶ ὑπὸ φίλων καὶ ὑπὸ ἐχθρῶν,
Wanting to accomplish anything but this, he would reap philosophy's harshest reproaches— for if, wanting either to get money from someone, or to hold office, or some other power, he were willing to do the very things lovers do toward their beloveds— making supplications and entreaties in his pleading, swearing oaths, sleeping at doors, and willing to perform slaveries such as not even any slave would bear— he would be stopped from doing the act this way, both by friends and by enemies,
Continuing the sentence begun at 182e—whoever pursued money, office, or power the way a lover pursues his beloved would draw philosophy's own censure—Pausanias spells out the list of humiliations a suitor performs: begging, oath-swearing, sleeping at the door, a servility no real slave would tolerate. The unit ends mid-sentence, continuing directly into 183b.
Pausanias reaches for a farming word to make his point: karpoîto, “would reap for himself,” is the ordinary verb for bringing in a harvest. Here the crop is reproach. Anyone chasing money, office, or influence by a lover's methods—begging, oath-swearing, sleeping outside someone's door, servility a household slave would refuse—would draw philosophy's own censure for it. The list is specific and Athenian in a way that sharpens the point: a real doulos has exactly one status, but the plural here, douleias, “acts of slavery,” describes a free man piling up servile gestures by choice. Custom does not forbid the behavior itself. It forbids doing it for the wrong reason.
The joke runs deeper than Pausanias means it to. Philosophia, invoked here as the force that would shame an ordinary schemer, is about to become something very close to what the lover is already doing. Later this same evening, Diotima's speech will describe philosophy itself as an erotic ascent—a lover's climb from one beautiful body toward Beauty itself, using the very vocabulary of desire Pausanias treats here as beneath philosophical dignity. He cannot see that coming; he is still building a legal case for his own household, since he is Agathon's lover and every clause in this sentence describes conduct Athenian custom will let him get away with. The irony belongs to Plato, not to his speaker: the man arguing that erotic self-abasement escapes philosophy's reproach is one speech away from watching Socrates redefine philosophy as exactly that self-abasement, aimed at a better object.
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