Fused with Something Lasting
Read the full text in our reader
Pausanias — ὁ τοῦ σώματος μᾶλλον ἢ τῆς ψυχῆς ἐρῶν, καὶ γὰρ οὐδὲ μόνιμός ἐστιν, ἅτε οὐδὲ μονίμου ἐρῶν πράγματος. ἅμα γὰρ τῷ τοῦ σώματος ἄνθει λήγοντι, οὗπερ ἤρα, οἴχεται ἀποπτάμενος, πολλοὺς λόγους καὶ ὑποσχέσεις καταισχύνας— ὁ δὲ τοῦ ἤθους χρηστοῦ ὄντος ἐραστὴς διὰ βίου μένει, ἅτε μονίμῳ συντακείς. τούτους δὴ βούλεται ὁ
The one who loves the body more than the soul, for indeed he is not even constant, since he loves no constant thing. For as soon as the body's bloom he loved fades, he is off and gone, having disgraced his many words and promises— but the lover of a good character remains for life, since he has fused with something lasting. These, then, the—
Continuing directly from 183d, where Pausanias named the vulgar lover (ὁ ἐραστὴς ὁ πάνδημος) who acts basely — here he explains why: that lover loves the body rather than the soul, and so is bound to something as fleeting as youth's bloom, while the lover of good character remains for life, fused with something lasting.
The verb for the fickle lover's exit is apoptamenos, "having flown off" — built on petomai, the same root that gives pteron, "wing." Pausanias reaches for it to describe something unflattering: a lover bolting the moment his beloved's bloom fades, the way a bird lifts off a branch. Set against that flight is a different verb for the one who stays: syntakeis, "fused," from syntekō, a word Greek uses for metals melted together until the seam between them disappears. The steadfast lover of 183e has been alloyed with the character he loves, the way two poured metals lose their separate edges, so the metaphor claims something more than closeness: an actual change of state.
The Phaedrus, this dialogue's companion, takes the same wing-root and reverses its moral: there the soul's ptera are an organ that desire, rightly directed, grows back, rather than an exit for someone tired of the terms. Pausanias's lover flies because the goods he wanted — bloom, youth — ran out, not because anything in him is ascending toward anything. The custom described at 183b, which forgives a broken oath because "there is no such thing as a lover's oath," gets its object lesson here: a love pinned to something as temporary as physical bloom was unlikely to keep its promises, and casting the departure as flight lets it read as nature rather than as a choice.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Plato, Symposium 183e in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Plato, Symposium — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Plato, Symposium 183e — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/symposium/183e/