The Most Hostile Things
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Eryximachus — καλόν τε καὶ αἰσχρὸν ἔρωτα, οὗτός ἐστιν ὁ ἰατρικώτατος, καὶ ὁ μεταβάλλειν ποιῶν, ὥστε ἀντὶ τοῦ ἑτέρου ἔρωτος τὸν ἕτερον κτᾶσθαι, καὶ οἷς μὴ ἔνεστιν ἔρως, δεῖ δʼ ἐγγενέσθαι, ἐπιστάμενος ἐμποιῆσαι καὶ ἐνόντα ἐξελεῖν, ἀγαθὸς ἂν εἴη δημιουργός. δεῖ γὰρ δὴ τὰ ἔχθιστα ὄντα ἐν τῷ σώματι φίλα οἷόν τʼ εἶναι ποιεῖν καὶ ἐρᾶν ἀλλήλων. ἔστι δὲ ἔχθιστα τὰ ἐναντιώτατα, ψυχρὸν θερμῷ, πικρὸν γλυκεῖ, ξηρὸν ὑγρῷ,
…the love that is noble and base — this one is the most skilled physician, and the one who can bring about the change, so that one acquires the other love instead of the one, and for those in whom love is not present but ought to arise — knowing how to implant it, and, when present, to remove it — such a one would be a good craftsman. For indeed it is necessary to make the things most hostile in the body friendly, able to be so, and to love one another. And the most hostile are the most opposite: cold to hot, bitter to sweet, dry to wet,
Continuing his account of the double Eros in bodies (186b–c), Eryximachus finishes describing the physician's craft: whoever can tell the healthy love from the diseased one in a body, and can implant love where it is lacking or remove it where it is harmful, is a good practitioner. He then states the principle behind that skill: what is most hostile in the body is what is most opposite, and gives his first examples — cold and hot, bitter and sweet, dry and wet.
δημιουργός is plain workaday Greek for any skilled hand — a potter, a shipwright — and Eryximachus reaches for it to size up what a good doctor actually does with love. The verbs framing it are exact: ἐμποιῆσαι, to implant, and ἐξελεῖν, to take out. Eros here is treated as something a craftsman installs or removes from a body, the way a smith fits or knocks out a peg, not a feeling a body simply happens to have. The same noun later becomes, in Plato's own Timaeus, the name for the god who builds the whole cosmos on a rational plan; the ambition in 186d is far smaller, one patient's two rival loves, but the confidence that skill can rearrange what a thing desires is already there.
The pairs he lists next — cold to hot, bitter to sweet, dry to wet — are the working vocabulary of Greek medicine, the hot/cold and wet/dry axes Hippocratic writers used to describe a body's state long before humoral theory got its Latin name. Eryximachus is doing on the scale of one body what the Presocratic physicists did on the scale of the whole world, turning a list of opposed qualities into an explanation. Heraclitus held the warring opposites together with a single governing logos; Eryximachus proposes eros instead, and the proposal only works if 'hostile' and 'unlike' name the same relation whether the subject is a fevered patient or fire and water.
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