Gymnastics, Farming, and the Bow-and-Lyre of Heraclitus
Read the full text in our reader
Eryximachus — κυβερνᾶται, ὡσαύτως δὲ καὶ γυμναστικὴ καὶ γεωργία; μουσικὴ δὲ καὶ παντὶ κατάδηλος τῷ καὶ σμικρὸν προσέχοντι τὸν νοῦν ὅτι κατὰ ταὐτὰ ἔχει τούτοις, ὥσπερ ἴσως καὶ Ἡράκλειτος βούλεται λέγειν, ἐπεὶ τοῖς γε ῥήμασιν οὐ καλῶς λέγει. τὸ ἓν γάρ φησι διαφερόμενον αὐτὸ αὑτῷ συμφέρεσθαι, ὥσπερ ἁρμονίαν τόξου τε καὶ λύρας. ἔστι δὲ πολλὴ ἀλογία ἁρμονίαν φάναι διαφέρεσθαι ἢ ἐκ διαφερομένων ἔτι εἶναι. ἀλλὰ ἴσως τόδε ἐβούλετο λέγειν, ὅτι ἐκ διαφερομένων
It is governed, and likewise gymnastics and farming; music too is plain to anyone paying attention even a little, that it stands the same way as these, as perhaps even Heraclitus means to say, though in his words at least he does not say it well. For he says that the one, at variance with itself agrees with itself, like the harmony of a bow and a lyre. But it is quite unreasonable to say that harmony is at variance, or that it still consists of things at variance. But perhaps this is what he meant to say: that out of things once at variance,
Continuing the sentence begun at 186e (medicine “is governed wholly through this god”), Eryximachus extends the same claim to gymnastics and farming, then turns to music — invoking, and immediately correcting, a saying he attributes to Heraclitus about a self-differing unity like the harmony of a bow and a lyre. The sentence runs on unbroken into 187b, where Eryximachus applies the point to high and low musical pitch.
Eryximachus has spent this whole speech converting Eros into a technical vocabulary shared across crafts — medicine, and now, in one breath, gymnastics, farming, and music. The move here is to claim that music makes the same double-love structure “plain to anyone who pays even a little attention,” then to reach for Heraclitus as a witness. What he actually does with Heraclitus is telling: he softens a real fragment (DK B51, palintropos harmonia, “the backward-turning harmony,” likening the cosmos to a strung bow and a lyre) into something closer to his own doctrine, then complains that Heraclitus “does not put it well in his own words” (tois ge rhḗmasin ou kalôs légei). A technician correcting a philosopher's phrasing, on a philosopher's own subject, is exactly the kind of overreach Eryximachus has shown all through this speech — he is a doctor, not a metaphysician, and he knows Heraclitus by report rather than by the fragment's own hard logic.
His own objection is fair on its face: a taut bowstring or a tuned lyre string is not, strictly, “at variance” once it holds its pitch — the very state of being an attunement (ἁρμονία, harmonia) seems to rule out the tension Heraclitus wants to keep alive inside it. Eryximachus resolves the puzzle by moving from bow and lyre to musical pitch — high and low notes that were once in tension and are brought into agreement by the craft of music, which is where 187a breaks off. That resolution flattens Heraclitus's paradox into a before-and-after story a craftsman can act on: first discord, then a technique that removes it. The Phaedrus later gives Socrates a gentler version of the same faith that a technical account can capture a truth poets only gesture at; here, in a minor doctor's aside, Plato lets us watch that faith reduce a hard saying to something more manageable than it is.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Plato, Symposium 187a 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 187a — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/symposium/187a/