Divination as Guardian and Healer of Love
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Eryximachus — καὶ ἀνθρώπους πρὸς ἀλλήλους κοινωνία— οὐ περὶ ἄλλο τί ἐστιν ἢ περὶ Ἔρωτος φυλακήν τε καὶ ἴασιν. πᾶσα γὰρ ἀσέβεια φιλεῖ γίγνεσθαι ἐὰν μή τις τῷ κοσμίῳ Ἔρωτι χαρίζηται μηδὲ τιμᾷ τε αὐτὸν καὶ πρεσβεύῃ ἐν παντὶ ἔργῳ, ἀλλὰ τὸν ἕτερον, καὶ περὶ γονέας καὶ ζῶντας καὶ τετελευτηκότας καὶ περὶ θεούς· ἃ δὴ προστέτακται τῇ μαντικῇ ἐπισκοπεῖν τοὺς ἐρῶντας καὶ ἰατρεύειν, καὶ ἔστιν αὖ ἡ
and human beings, toward one another — the partnership is concerned with nothing else than the guarding and healing of Love. For all impiety tends to arise whenever someone fails to gratify the orderly Love, or honor him and give precedence in every action, but honors the other instead — concerning parents, living and dead, and concerning the gods. These very things divination has been charged to watch over lovers and to heal, and it is, in turn, the—
Continuing Eryximachus's speech: having just called sacrifice and divination the standing partnership between gods and human beings, he specifies what that partnership actually protects — nothing but the guarding and healing of Love. He then explains why this matters: all impiety arises whenever someone fails to honor the orderly Love above the other, whether toward parents living and dead or toward the gods, and this is exactly what divination is charged to watch over and heal.
The word for the trouble Eryximachus names is asebeia, impiety — the same word a jury will use of Socrates in another room, years after this dinner, when it indicts him for not honoring the city's gods. Eryximachus cannot know that; he is using an ordinary Athenian term for a failure of due reverence, and he stretches it further than usual, making it cover parents living and dead alongside the gods themselves, as if honor owed to the dead and honor owed to Olympus were instances of the same debt. What holds the list together is not doctrine but bookkeeping: slight the orderly Love in any one of these relations and the whole ledger of piety goes wrong at once.
The craft he hands this bookkeeping to, mantikē, is built on mantis, seer, and Plato elsewhere lets the same syllables slide into mania, madness — the etymological play of Phaedrus 244b–c, where prophecy done well turns out to be a god-sent madness worth more than any sober skill. Nothing in this sentence signals that pun; Eryximachus's mantikē gets a plain job description, paired evenly with episkopein and iatreuein, watching and healing, the two verbs of his own profession. He folds the seer's art into the doctor's without a word of comment, the same quiet annexation he performed on the weather in 188a.
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