The Double Love in the Seasons of the Year
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Eryximachus — γάρ. ἐπεὶ καὶ ἡ τῶν ὡρῶν τοῦ ἐνιαυτοῦ σύστασις μεστή ἐστιν ἀμφοτέρων τούτων, καὶ ἐπειδὰν μὲν πρὸς ἄλληλα τοῦ κοσμίου τύχῃ ἔρωτος ἃ νυνδὴ ἐγὼ ἔλεγον, τά τε θερμὰ καὶ τὰ ψυχρὰ καὶ ξηρὰ καὶ ὑγρά, καὶ ἁρμονίαν καὶ κρᾶσιν λάβῃ σώφρονα, ἥκει φέροντα εὐετηρίαν τε καὶ ὑγίειαν ἀνθρώποις καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις ζῴοις τε καὶ φυτοῖς, καὶ οὐδὲν ἠδίκησεν· ὅταν δὲ ὁ μετὰ τῆς ὕβρεως Ἔρως ἐγκρατέστερος περὶ τὰς τοῦ ἐνιαυτοῦ ὥρας γένηται, διέφθειρέν τε πολλὰ καὶ ἠδίκησεν.
For, since the seasons' yearly structure, too, is full of both these, whenever, indeed, toward one another, the moderate love chances to meet, which I was just now describing, the hot and cold, the dry and wet, take on harmony and blending, temperate, it comes, bringing abundance and health to human beings, and the other animals and plants, and does no wrong at all, but whenever the Love attended by wanton excess grows more dominant over the seasons of the year comes to be, it destroys much, and does wrong.
Continuing Eryximachus's speech, having shown that the double Eros structures harmony and rhythm alike, he now extends the same architecture to the whole cosmos, beginning with the seasons of the year. When the elements — hot and cold, dry and wet — meet under the ordered, temperate Love he has just described, the year brings health and abundance to human beings, animals, and plants alike and does no harm; but when the Love that travels with hubris instead overpowers the seasons, it brings destruction and wrongdoing.
Eryximachus extends his whole argument to the sky. The same double Eros he found in harmony and rhythm now organizes the calendar: hot, cold, dry, and wet are treated as a single neuter-plural subject taking a singular verb, ordinary Attic syntax, but it is doing real work here, since the sentence handles four opposed qualities as one acting mass the moment they submit to the moderate love for one another. When they take on krâsis, a temperate blending, and harmony, they arrive — the verb is singular again — bringing euetēría and health to people, animals, and plants alike. Krâsis is Hippocratic vocabulary, the mixture of hot and cold, wet and dry that Greek medicine used to describe a healthy body's temperament, and Eryximachus reaches for it here exactly as he reached for homología at 187b and homónoia at 186e: a term from his own craft, imported wholesale to describe the weather.
The destructive Love gets the comparative enkratésteros, 'more dominant,' built on the same root as enkráteia, the term Greek ethical writing uses for a soul that governs its own appetites. Nothing about this Eros is self-governing. It is called enkratésteros because it overpowers the seasons from outside, and the sentence says exactly how: it travels with hýbris, wanton excess, not restraint. The word enkratḗs starts as 'having the upper hand' long before Greek ethics narrows it to the sense of ruling oneself, and this sentence sits at that older, cruder meaning — a power that wins by force, not the disciplined rule the Phaedrus asks of its charioteer over the horses of appetite and spirit. Read against that companion dialogue, the line quietly asks what kind of victory a merely stronger Eros wins. The answer is in the grammar: the same gnomic aorist that described the healthy Eros doing no wrong now describes this one doing wrong, as if destruction were simply the season's other, equally regular outcome.
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