The Science of Filling and Emptying
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Eryximachus — τοῖς δʼ ἀκολάστοις αἰσχρόν, οὕτω καὶ ἐν αὐτοῖς τοῖς σώμασιν τοῖς μὲν ἀγαθοῖς ἑκάστου τοῦ σώματος καὶ ὑγιεινοῖς καλὸν χαρίζεσθαι καὶ δεῖ, καὶ τοῦτό ἐστιν ᾧ ὄνομα τό ἰατρικόν, τοῖς δὲ κακοῖς καὶ νοσώδεσιν αἰσχρόν τε καὶ δεῖ ἀχαριστεῖν, εἰ μέλλει τις τεχνικὸς εἶναι. ἔστι γὰρ ἰατρική, ὡς ἐν κεφαλαίῳ εἰπεῖν, ἐπιστήμη τῶν τοῦ σώματος ἐρωτικῶν πρὸς πλησμονὴν καὶ κένωσιν, καὶ ὁ διαγιγνώσκων ἐν τούτοις τὸν
…but for the intemperate, it is shameful; so too in the bodies themselves, it is noble and necessary to gratify the good and healthy elements of each body — and this is what is named the medical — but shameful, and one must withhold favor from the bad and diseased elements, if one is going to be skilled. For medicine, to speak in a word, is the knowledge of the body's loves with respect to filling and emptying, and the one who discerns among these the…
Still in one unbroken turn, Eryximachus closes the quotation of Pausanias's maxim (gratify the good, refuse the shameless) and relocates it inside the body itself: a doctor gratifies what is healthy in a body and withholds favor from what is diseased. He then states medicine's whole business in a single formula — the knowledge of the body's loves with respect to filling and emptying.
Eryximachus keeps Pausanias's exact vocabulary — χαρίζεσθαι ('to gratify') and the paired terms καλόν and αἰσχρόν, noble and shameful — and simply transfers it from lovers and boys to a body's own appetites. The negative he needs for it doesn't already exist as a technical term, so he supplies one: ἀχαριστεῖν ('to withhold the favor'), built on χάρις exactly as χαρίζεσθαι itself is. A doctor, on this account, spends his day being gracious to some appetites in the body and stingy with others, the same social calculation Pausanias applied to which lover deserved a young man's consent. The two poles he names for love itself, πλησμονή and κένωσις, filling and emptying, read like a line out of the Hippocratic writers' own vocabulary for regimen, not a borrowed figure of speech.
Calling medicine ἐπιστήμη τῶν τοῦ σώματος ἐρωτικῶν, a science of the body's loves, is a claim with real weight: it makes Eros something a technical discipline can know and manage, not simply a force poets sing about. The same claim resurfaces later in Plato's own pages. At Phaedrus 270c, Socrates argues that rhetoric needs exactly this kind of medical knowledge, grasping the nature of the whole the way the Hippocratic method requires, before anyone treats a particular soul or body. Eryximachus, a doctor by trade, is stating here the very epistemology Socrates will later borrow to describe good speaking. Neither passage treats the comparison as decoration; both hold that loving well, like speaking well, is something a method can teach.
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