A Great Proof
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Aristophanes — τοῖς ἀνδράσι, καί εἰσιν οὗτοι βέλτιστοι τῶν παίδων καὶ μειρακίων, ἅτε ἀνδρειότατοι ὄντες φύσει. φασὶ δὲ δή τινες αὐτοὺς ἀναισχύντους εἶναι, ψευδόμενοι, οὐ γὰρ ὑπʼ ἀναισχυντίας τοῦτο δρῶσιν ἀλλʼ ὑπὸ θάρρους καὶ ἀνδρείας καὶ ἀρρενωπίας, τὸ ὅμοιον αὐτοῖς ἀσπαζόμενοι. μέγα δὲ τεκμήριον: καὶ γὰρ τελεωθέντες μόνοι ἀποβαίνουσιν εἰς τὰ πολιτικὰ ἄνδρες οἱ τοιοῦτοι. ἐπειδὰν δὲ ἀνδρωθῶσι,
...with men, and these are the best of the boys and young men, seeing they are the most manly by nature. And indeed some say that they are shameless, but they are wrong— for it's not out of shamelessness that they do this, but out of boldness and courage and virility, embracing what is like themselves. And a great proof: for indeed, once grown, such men alone turn out to be men in public affairs. And when they become men—
Continuing directly from 191e's sentence: the boys who are 'cut pieces of the male' delight in lying beside and embracing men. Aristophanes now defends them against a charge of ἀναισχυντία (shamelessness), attributing their conduct instead to θάρρος, ἀνδρεία, and ἀρρενωπία — boldness, courage, manly bearing — and offers his proof (τεκμήριον): such men alone grow up to succeed in public life. The sentence runs on into 192b as they reach manhood in turn.
Aristophanes answers an accusation before anyone in the room has made it: some say these boys are shameless. He denies it by swapping one vocabulary for another. Anaischyntía is a moral term — a failure of the shame that keeps a person inside the lines of custom. Thársos, andreía, and arrenōpía are not moral terms at all; they name qualities of temperament and body — boldness, manliness, a virile look. The last word looks like Aristophanes' own coinage, built the way hetairístriai was two Stephanus pages earlier: a compound of ἄρρην and the root of ὄψ, ‘face,’ pressed into service because ordinary Greek has no ready noun for having a male appearance. What looks like a question of character is, on Aristophanes' account, a question of anatomy — the boy embracing another boy is not resisting his nature but expressing it exactly.
The proof he offers is odder than it sounds: these men alone, he says, turn out to be men in public life once grown, τελεωθέντες — a verb Plato elsewhere reserves for religious completion, the language of the mystery rites he has Socrates borrow at Phaedrus 249c for the vision of true being. Here the word does ordinary work for growing up, but the older sense is not far off — reaching manhood is treated as a kind of τέλος, an initiation into a settled adult self. Aristophanes never asks whether success in public affairs proves anything about a soul at all, a question Diotima's speech, still ahead in this same dialogue, answers differently: for her, eros seeks the good, not one's own likeness. The two accounts cannot both be right, and Plato does not say which one wins.
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