The Sovereign of Pleasures
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Agathon — ἅπτεται. οὔτε ποιῶν ποιεῖ— πᾶς γὰρ ἑκὼν Ἔρωτι πᾶν ὑπηρετεῖ, ἃ δʼ ἂν ἑκὼν ἑκόντι ὁμολογήσῃ, φασὶν οἱ πόλεως βασιλῆς νόμοι δίκαια εἶναι. πρὸς δὲ τῇ δικαιοσύνῃ σωφροσύνης πλείστης μετέχει. εἶναι γὰρ ὁμολογεῖται σωφροσύνη τὸ κρατεῖν ἡδονῶν καὶ ἐπιθυμιῶν, Ἔρωτος δὲ μηδεμίαν ἡδονὴν κρείττω εἶναι. εἰ δὲ ἥττους, κρατοῖντʼ ἂν ὑπὸ Ἔρωτος, ὁ δὲ κρατοῖ, κρατῶν δὲ ἡδονῶν καὶ ἐπιθυμιῶν ὁ Ἔρως διαφερόντως ἂν σωφρονοῖ. καὶ μὴν εἴς γε ἀνδρείαν Ἔρωτι
does not touch him. Nor, in acting, does he act by force— for everyone willingly serves Eros in everything, and whatever one willing party agrees with another willing party, the city's kingly laws call just. And besides justice, he shares most fully in temperance. For temperance is agreed to be the mastery of pleasures and desires, and no pleasure is stronger than Eros; but if pleasures are weaker, they would be mastered by Eros, and he would be their master, and Eros, mastering pleasures and desires, would be exceptionally temperate. And indeed, when it comes to courage, against Eros—
Agathon rounds off his proof that Eros commits no violence — since everyone serves him willingly, the city's own laws call whatever willing parties agree to just — then argues the god is supremely temperate, since temperance is the mastery of pleasure and desire, and no pleasure outmasters Eros himself.
The phrase “the city's own kingly laws” calls up one of the most famous lines in Greek political thought: Pindar's tag nomos basileus, “law is king of all,” quoted by Herodotus and later seized on by Callicles in Plato's Gorgias to argue that convention is a fiction the naturally strong should override. Agathon's version does something close to the opposite. He does not set nomos against nature; he lets nomos ratify a private agreement between two willing parties as automatically just, with no further test applied. It is a strikingly permissive definition of justice — closer to a sophist's bargain-model of right than to anything Socrates will accept in the Republic — and it slides by here because the topic is Eros rather than politics, dressed as praise rather than argument.
The temperance argument has a similar seam. Agathon defines sōphrosynē as the mastery of pleasure and desire, then makes Eros safe from every pleasure by simple fiat: no pleasure can outrank him, so whatever he masters, he remains in control of himself. But Eros himself, on the assumption every speaker at this party has been working from since Phaedrus opened the evening, is a form of desire — perhaps the strongest one there is. A desire that masters other desires is not obviously different from one appetite outbidding another; it is not the same thing as the rational restraint sōphrosynē was supposed to name. Diotima will dismantle this picture from the opposite direction a few speeches later: at 203b–e she makes Eros not a master of anything but the son of Poverty, permanently short of what he wants, resourceful only because he is always in need. The commanding, self-possessed Eros who closes this argument gets replaced, a few pages on, by a beggar at the door.
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