No Such Thing as a Lover's Oath
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Pausanias — τῶν μὲν ὀνειδιζόντων κολακείας καὶ ἀνελευθερίας, τῶν δὲ νουθετούντων καὶ αἰσχυνομένων ὑπὲρ αὐτῶν— τῷ δʼ ἐρῶντι πάντα ταῦτα ποιοῦντι χάρις ἔπεστι, καὶ δέδοται ὑπὸ τοῦ νόμου ἄνευ ὀνείδους πράττειν, ὡς πάγκαλόν τι πρᾶγμα διαπραττομένου· ὃ δὲ δεινότατον, ὥς γε λέγουσιν οἱ πολλοί, ὅτι καὶ ὀμνύντι μόνῳ συγγνώμη παρὰ θεῶν ἐκβάντι τῶν ὅρκων— ἀφροδίσιον γὰρ ὅρκον οὔ φασιν εἶναι· οὕτω
Some blame it as flattery and servility; others admonish and feel shame for them— but the lover doing all this a grace attaches, and custom permits him to act without reproach, as though accomplishing a wholly noble deed. And here is the strangest thing, as most people say, that to the swearer alone there is pardon from the gods for breaking his oath— for they say there is no such thing as a lover's oath. So—
Continuing directly from 183a's catalogue of a lover's extravagant courtship — supplications, oaths, sleeping at the beloved's door — Pausanias notes that opinion splits: some call it flattery and servility, others merely feel shame on the boy's behalf. Yet custom sides with the lover entirely, granting him license to act without blame, and — strangest of all, he says — popular belief holds that the gods forgive a lover who breaks his oath, because there is supposedly no such thing as a lover's oath.
The phrase rendered here as “a lover's oath” is horkos aphrodisios, literally an oath “of Aphrodite” — a recognized Greek commonplace, echoed later by Roman poets who have Jupiter laugh from a safe distance at lovers' broken promises. Pausanias attributes the claim to “the many,” not to himself, but the citation sits oddly inside a speech built to prove that Athens alone treats love as a serious, deliberately legislated matter. A law careful enough to distinguish noble pursuit from shameful, open courtship from secret, still leaves standing a proverb that says a lover's promises carry no weight even with the gods supposedly enforcing them.
The Phaedrus, staged as this dialogue's companion, spends its opening half worrying over exactly this problem — whether a lover's speech, however persuasive, can be trusted to mean what it says, and whether the non-lover Lysias praises for his cooler head is for that reason the safer bet. Pausanias never draws the connection himself; he is busy building his case for Athens's law, not questioning it. But the exemption he reports here — sworn promises that need not hold, because the god presiding over them is Aphrodite rather than Zeus — is the same suspicion that will drive Phaedrus's whole dialogue: that eros makes people say things, under oath or not, that they have no obligation to mean.
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