No Matter If It Were False
Read the full text in our reader
Socrates — μέγιστα ἀνατιθέναι τῷ πράγματι καὶ ὡς κάλλιστα, ἐάν τε ᾖ οὕτως ἔχοντα ἐάν τε μή· εἰ δὲ ψευδῆ, οὐδὲν ἄρʼ ἦν πρᾶγμα. προυρρήθη γάρ, ὡς ἔοικεν, ὅπως ἕκαστος ἡμῶν τὸν ἔρωτα ἐγκωμιάζειν δόξει, οὐχ ὅπως ἐγκωμιάσεται. διὰ ταῦτα δὴ οἶμαι πάντα λόγον κινοῦντες ἀνατίθετε τῷ Ἔρωτι, καί φατε αὐτὸν τοιοῦτόν τε εἶναι καὶ τοσούτων αἴτιον, ὅπως ἂν
to attribute the greatest and finest things to the subject, whether it be so or whether not; and if they were false, it was then no matter at all. For it was announced beforehand, it seems, that each of us should seem to praise Eros, not really praise him. For these reasons, I suppose, you stir up every argument and lay it on Eros, and say he is of such a kind and the cause of so much, so that he may —
Socrates spells out the rule of the game as he now sees it: praise means heaping the greatest and finest things on the subject, true or not — and if the praise turned out to be false, that was no matter. The point of the evening, he says, was that each should seem to praise Eros, not that he really should. So the speakers stir up every argument and pile it onto the god. The sentence continues into 199a.
The phrase "whether it is so or not" is the heart of the indictment, and it echoes far beyond this party. Plato's persistent worry — in the Gorgias, the Phaedrus, the Republic — is that persuasion unhooked from truth will say whatever flatters. An encomium that does not care whether its praise is false is, for him, a small model of that danger. Socrates is about to refuse the terms and offer, instead, the truth about Eros: that the god of desire is not himself beautiful and complete, but needy — which is why he reaches.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Plato, Symposium 198e in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Plato, Symposium — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Plato, Symposium 198e — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/symposium/198e/