Neither Secure Nor Lasting
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Pausanias — ἐάν τε κακῶς πάσχων πτήξῃ καὶ μὴ καρτερήσῃ, ἄν τʼ εὐεργετούμενος εἰς χρήματα ἢ εἰς διαπράξεις πολιτικὰς μὴ καταφρονήσῃ· οὐδὲν γὰρ δοκεῖ τούτων οὔτε βέβαιον οὔτε μόνιμον εἶναι, χωρὶς τοῦ μηδὲ πεφυκέναι ἀπʼ αὐτῶν γενναίαν φιλίαν. μία δὴ λείπεται τῷ ἡμετέρῳ νόμῳ ὁδός, εἰ μέλλει καλῶς χαριεῖσθαι ἐραστῇ παιδικά. ἔστι γὰρ ἡμῖν νόμος, ὥσπερ ἐπὶ τοῖς ἐρασταῖς ἦν δουλεύειν ἐθέλοντα
Whether, treated badly, he cowers and does not hold firm, or, benefited with money or political dealings, he does not disdain them — none of these seems secure or lasting, quite apart from the fact that not even a noble friendship grows from them. So one path alone remains, by our custom, if a boy is to gratify a lover nobly. For we have a custom: just as with lovers, it was, for one willing to serve—
Continuing directly from 184a, where Pausanias described a custom designed to make conquest hard — testing a suitor through the delay of time and counting it shameful to be won quickly, by money, or by political influence — here he gives the reason: nothing gained through money or favor is secure or lasting, since no noble friendship grows from it by nature, so only one path remains by which a boy may nobly gratify a lover (the custom completed in 184c).
Pausanias reaches here for the vocabulary of contract law rather than the vocabulary of feeling. Bébaios is the ordinary Greek term for a valid legal title — a sale, a debt, a piece of property held bébaios is one an owner cannot be evicted from, guaranteed against a rival claim. He pairs it with mónimos, "lasting" (the same word Pausanias used three times at 183e of the faithful lover), a term equally at home describing a durable treaty, and sets both against a love bought with chrḗmata ("money") or diapráxeis politikás ("political dealings" — the phrase Athenian speech used for a brokered arrangement, a piece of business pushed through committee). The argument that bought affection has no standing borrows its proof from the world of banking and litigation Pausanias is supposedly warning the boy away from.
The reasoning also leans on an ordinary Greek intuition about growth. A bond that has pephykénai, "grown, arisen by nature," belongs to the organic register of phýsis, the root behind English "physics" — φιλία is the kind of thing that either takes root in its own soil or does not grow at all, and money is not soil it can grow in. The one path this leaves, arrived at by elimination rather than by praise, sets up the argument Pausanias makes next at 184c: the same verb douleúein, "to be a slave, to serve," that sounds demeaning when a boy serves a bribe becomes, redirected toward virtue, the model this dialogue proposes for how a student should attach himself to someone wiser — not far from what the Republic asks the philosopher to do before the form of the good.
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