Neither Wronging Nor Wronged
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Agathon — καὶ ἀπηνθηκότι καὶ σώματι καὶ ψυχῇ καὶ ἄλλῳ ὁτῳοῦν οὐκ ἐνίζει Ἔρως, οὗ δʼ ἂν εὐανθής τε καὶ εὐώδης τόπος ᾖ, ἐνταῦθα δὲ καὶ ἵζει καὶ μένει. περὶ μὲν οὖν κάλλους τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ ταῦτα ἱκανὰ, καὶ ἔτι πολλὰ λείπεται, περὶ δὲ ἀρετῆς Ἔρωτος μετὰ ταῦτα λεκτέον, τὸ μὲν μέγιστον ὅτι Ἔρως οὔτʼ ἀδικεῖ οὔτʼ ἀδικεῖται οὔτε ὑπὸ θεοῦ οὔτε θεόν, οὔτε ὑπʼ ἀνθρώπου οὔτε ἄνθρωπον. οὔτε γὰρ αὐτὸς βίᾳ πάσχει, εἴ τι πάσχει— βία γὰρ Ἔρωτος οὐχ
And on the faded and in body and in soul, and in anything else, Eros does not settle, but wherever a place is blooming and fragrant, there he also settles and remains. Now, concerning the god's beauty, and this is enough, and still much remains untold— but concerning Eros's virtue, it must next be told: the first, greatest point is that Eros neither wrongs nor is wronged— not by a god, nor a god; not by a man, nor a man. For he himself does not suffer by violence, if he suffers anything at all— for violence— not Eros—
Agathon finishes the flower-image begun in 196a — Eros settles only where a place is in bloom — and then turns from the god's beauty to his virtue (ἀρετή): the first and greatest point is that Eros neither wrongs nor is wronged by any god or man, because violence never touches him.
Agathon closes the flower conceit with a small run of Gorgianic anaphora — and in body, and in soul, and in anything whatever — piling up alternatives the way the god himself supposedly moves through them without discrimination. Then he pivots from κάλλος to ἀρετή and states his first and largest claim as a bare assertion: Eros neither wrongs nor is wronged, by god or by man. The verbs he chooses, ἀδικεῖ and ἀδικεῖται, are the active and passive of ordinary Athenian courtroom language — the vocabulary of a lawsuit, not a hymn. Agathon is quietly trying his god before a jury that was never asked to convene. The claim that a god is incapable of doing wrong is not new with him: Republic Book II builds an entire theological argument for exactly this premise, insisting that a truly good god can only ever cause good and never harm (379b). Agathon simply states as given, for one god, what Socrates in the Republic will spend pages proving must hold for all of them.
The word doing the real work here is βία, violence or force, and it is put in the position of nullity — it "suffers nothing," is not what touches Eros, is not something he uses. Everything Eros gets, he gets because the other party is ἑκών, willing, a term the argument reaches on the very next page. Force versus willing consent was a live antithesis in the rhetorical culture Agathon came from: his own teacher, Gorgias, argued in the Encomium of Helen that speech itself works on a soul with something like the force of a drug or a blow — an eloquent excuse for why Helen isn't to blame for going to Troy. Agathon, trained in that school, exempts his own god from the very charge his teacher leveled at language. He is not being dishonest, exactly; he seems not to notice the tension, which is its own kind of evidence for what these speeches actually are.
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