The Common Love of Polyhymnia, Guarded Everywhere
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Eryximachus — μούσης Ἔρως. ὁ δὲ Πολυμνίας ὁ πάνδημος, ὃν δεῖ εὐλαβούμενον προσφέρειν οἷς ἂν προσφέρῃ, ὅπως ἂν τὴν μὲν ἡδονὴν αὐτοῦ καρπώσηται, ἀκολασίαν δὲ μηδεμίαν ἐμποιήσῃ, ὥσπερ ἐν τῇ ἡμετέρᾳ τέχνῃ μέγα ἔργον ταῖς περὶ τὴν ὀψοποιικὴν τέχνην ἐπιθυμίαις καλῶς χρῆσθαι, ὥστʼ ἄνευ νόσου τὴν ἡδονὴν καρπώσασθαι. καὶ ἐν μουσικῇ δὴ καὶ ἐν ἰατρικῇ καὶ ἐν τοῖς ἄλλοις πᾶσι καὶ τοῖς ἀνθρωπείοις καὶ τοῖς θείοις, καθʼ ὅσον παρείκει, φυλακτέον ἑκάτερον τὸν ἔρωτα; ἔνεστον
of the Muse is Love. But the other, Polyhymnia's, is the popular Love, which one must apply with care to whomever one applies it, so that one may reap its pleasure, but implant no licentiousness, just as in our craft it is a great task to use well the desires tied to the culinary art, so as to reap the pleasure without disease. And so, in music and in medicine, and in everything else, both human and divine, so far as possible, each of the two Loves must be guarded; both are present—
Continuing directly from 187d, where Eryximachus named the good composer's task and had just begun naming the two loves at work in music — one belonging to Urania, the Heavenly Muse — he now completes that sentence and names its counterpart: the common, everyday love that belongs to Polyhymnia. Whoever administers this pleasure-loving strand of music must handle it as carefully as a doctor handles a patient's appetite for food, reaping the pleasure without producing excess, and he then widens the same rule to medicine and to every human and divine affair whatsoever.
Eryximachus finishes the sentence broken off at 187d: the Love that belongs to the Heavenly Muse is one love; the other, belonging to Polyhymnia, is the common one. He states for it the same rule he gave for music and medicine a few lines earlier — whoever applies this common love to anyone must handle it carefully, harvesting the pleasure without producing ἀκολασία, appetite running loose past any check. The illustration comes straight from his own trade: a cook's dishes create desires a doctor has to manage the same way, extracting the pleasure without the disease. He then drops the qualifier music entirely and states the rule as universal — in music, in medicine, in absolutely everything, human or divine, both loves are present and both need watching, so far as watching is possible.
Eryximachus hands Polyhymnia the common love and reserves Urania for the heavenly one, but nothing in the wider tradition supports that pairing. Polyhymnia patronizes solemn hymn and sacred choral song, not appetite or excess; no cult or myth links her to the vulgar side of anything. He is manufacturing a second Aphrodite-and-Aphrodite split out of two Muses — the same move he already ran on Heraclitus's line about the bow and the lyre a few sentences earlier — forcing a tidy binary onto material that does not actually carry one. The Phaedrus hands its Muses a very different job: at 245a, poetic mania is their gift, a god-sent seizure no craft can manufacture, administer, or dose out safely. Here the Muses staff a doctor's clinic; there, they overturn one. Plato lets the same class of goddess argue both sides of what music actually is.
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