Lysias’ speech is designed to alarm standard sentiment and displace preconceptions about love. It aims to be powerfully, seductively subversive. Yet the speech is simple, for it owes all its insights and shock value to one mechanism: Lysias takes up a particular vantage point on time. It is this temporal point of view which differentiates all that a nonlover feels and thinks and does from what a lover feels, thinks or does. It is a point of view that no one who is in love could tolerate. Lysias looks at a love affair from the point of view of the end.
No one in love really believes love will end. Lovers float in that “pure portion of anxiety,” the present indicative of desire. They are astonished when they fall in love, they are equally astonished when they fall out of love. This attitude is simply fatuous, in Lysias’ view, and must be dispensed with by anyone who would make a realistic appraisal of erotic experience. Lysias insists on one fact, the invariably transient nature of erotic desire, and from this fact his subversive theory of eros devolves.
The relation of desire to time, then, is the fulcrum of Lysias’ argument. As soon as the lover’s desire flags, Lysias predicts, the lover will lose interest in his beloved boy and exit, with pain and embarrassment all round. He will repudiate the relationship, regret his investment in it and move on to new infatuations. Love based on the physical passion of the moment cannot but falter when that thrill is gone (233a-b). The nonlove of the nonlover, in contrast, having no special commitment to pleasure in the present, can take a consistently atemporal attitude to his love object and to the love affair. ‘Now’ and ‘then’ are moments of equal value to the nonlover. So he says to the boy he is courting:
… πρῶτον μὲν οὐ τὴν παροῦσαν ἡδονὴν θεραπεύων σννέσομαί σοι, ἀλλὰ καὶ την μέλλουσαν ὠφελίαν ἔσεσθαι, οὐχ ὑπ᾽ ἔρωτος ἡττώμενος ἀλλ᾽ ἐμαυτοῦ κρατῶν, οὐδὲ διὰ σμικρὰ ἰσχυρὰν ἔχθραν ἀναιρούμενος ἀλλὰ διὰ μεγάλα βραδέως ὀλίγην ὀργὴν ποιούμενος, τῶν μὲν ἀκουσίων συγγνώμην ἔχων, τά δὲ ἑκούσια πειρώμενος ἀποτρέπειν· ταῦτα γάρ ἐστι φιλίας πολὺν χρόνον ἐσομένης τεκμήρια.
… When I spend time with you I shall not primarily be cultivating the pleasure of the moment but, really, the profit coming in the future, since I am not overthrown by desire but in full control of myself.
… These things are indications of a friendship that will last for a long time. (233b-c)
The consistency of his own outlook permits the nonlover to accommodate change in the beloved, Lysias goes on to argue. The nonlover will not be appalled when his boy’s physical appearance changes with age (234b) nor will he endeavor to prevent the boy from changing in other ways, for example, by acquiring new friends, new ideas or assets (232b-d). He will not desert the relationship when passion cools nor begrudge his beloved any of the benefits of friendship, even after the boy’s beauty has passed its peak (234b):
ὠς ἐκείνοις μὲν τότε μεταμέλει ὧν ἂν εὖ ποιήσωσιν, ἐπειδὰν τῆς ἐπιθυμίας παύσωνται· τοῖς δὲ οὐκ ἔστι χρόνος ἐν ᾧ μεταγνῶναι προσήκει.
For lovers regret their good services as soon as their desire ceases, but there is no time when it is appropriate for nonlovers to regret. (231a)
“There is no time when” desire is pain for the nonlover. ‘Now’ and ‘then’ are for him interchangeable: his love affair is a series of events in time that can be entered at any point or rearranged in any order without damage to the whole. Lysias’ thought process begins from the termination of desire and his text runs eros backwards. Or, as Sokrates puts it:
οὐδὲ ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς ἀλλ᾽ ἀπὸ τελευτῆς ἐξ ὑπτίας ἀνάπαλιν διανεῖν ἐπιχειρεῖ τὸν λόγον, καὶ ἄρχεται ἀφ᾽ ὧν πεπαυμένος ἂν ἤδη ὁ ἐραστὴς λέγοι πρὸς τὰ παιδικά.
… he does not begin at the beginning but tries to swim backwards against the current of the logos, starting from the end. He begins with what the lover would say to his boy when the affair was over. (264a)
Lysias sidesteps the whole dilemma of eros in one move. It is a move in time: he simply declines to enter the moment that is ‘now’ for the man in love, the present moment of desire. Instead, he stations himself safely at an imaginary ‘then’ and looks back upon desire from a vantage point of emotional disengagement. He is able to include, in his appraisal of the erotic situation ‘now,’ all the likelihoods and implications of the same erotic situation ‘then.’ Lysias does not create a stereoscopic image out of these two points in time, pulling your perceptions askew as Sophokles does in the poem about melting ice. Lysias’ ‘now’ and ‘then’ are not discontinuous or incompatible with one another, and their convergence is not paintful or paradoxical for the nonlover: desire is invested at neither point. Eros traditionally puts the lover in the position of genuinely desiring both points at once. Lysias’ erotic theory forestalls this problem. The nonlover is unlikely ever to find himself staring down in desperation at a lump of melting ice. When this man picks up ice it is in full expectation that he will soon have a handful of cold water. He likes cold water fine. And he has no special affection for ice.
Such is the substance of Lysias’ speech. When Phaedrus finishes reading it aloud, he solicits Sokrates’ opinion and Sokrates confesses himself somewhat dissatisfied with the logos as a rhetorical production (234e). He seems to recall that the same topics have been treated:
… ἤ που Σαπφοῦς τῆς καλῆς ἤ Ἀνακρέοντος τοῦ σοφοῦ ἤ καὶ συγγραφέων τινῶν.
… by the beautiful Sappho, I think, or the wise Anakreon or even by some prose writers.… (235c).
Whereupon he undertakes to expound a form of the Lysian thesis himself. Sokrates’ speech admits and restates Lysias’ emphasis on the temporal factor. He agrees with Lysias that a very important question to ask, in any evaluation of erotic experience, is ‘What does the lover want from time?’ He further agrees that what the conventional lover wants is to remain in the ‘now’ of desire at any cost, even to the extent of radically damaging and deforming his beloved in order to do so. Such a lover, Sokrates says, will stunt the growth of his beloved in every direction that leads the boy away from direct dependence on his erastēs. He will inhibit the boy from normal physical development in outdoor life, keeping him in shadow and cosmetics, away from manly toils (239c-d). He will set up similar barriers to the boy’s cultural and intellectual development, lest the paidika grow beyond him in mind:
φθονερὸν δὴ ἀνάγκη εἶναι, καὶ πολλῶν μὲν ἄλλων συνουσιῶν ἀπείργοντα καὶ ὠφελίμων ὅθεν ἂν μάλιστ᾽ ἀνὴρ γίγνοιτο, μεγάλης αἴτιον εἶναι βλάβης, μεγίστης δὲ τῆς ὅθεν ἂν φρονιμώτατος εἴη· τοῦτο δὲ ἡ θεία φιλοσοφία τυγχάνει ὄν, ἧς ἐραστὴν παιδικὰ ἀνάγκη πόρρωθεν εἴργειν, περίφοβον ὄντα τοῦ καταφρονηθῆναι· τά τε ἄλλα μηχανᾶσθαι ὅπως ἂν ᾖ πάντα ἀγνοῶν καὶ πάντα ἀποβλέπων εἰς τὸν ἐραστὴν.
The lover is of necessity jealous and will do great damage to his beloved, restricting him from many advantageous associations which would do most to make a man of him, and especially from that which would bring his intellect to its capacity—that is, divine philosophy. The lover will have to keep his boy far away from philosophy, because of his enormous fear of being despised. And he will contrive to keep him ignorant of everything else as well, so the boy looks to his lover for everything. (239b-c)
Finally, this lover will discourage his paidika from attaining an adult life in society:
ἔτι τοίνυν ἄγαμον, ἄπαιδα, ἄοικον ὅτι πλεῖστον χρόνον παιδικὰ ἐραστὴς εὔξαιτ᾽ ἂν γενέσθαι, τὸ αὑτοῦ γλυκὺ ὡς πλεῖστον χρόνον καρποῦσθαι ἐπιθνμῶν.
Furthermore the lover would fervently wish his beloved to remain without marriage, child, or household for as long a time as possible, since it is his desire to reap the fruit that is sweet to himself for as long a time as possible. (240a)
In sum, this harmful lover does not want his beloved boy to grow up. He prefers to stop time.
Sokrates and Lysias agree, then, that an erastēs of the conventional type damages his beloved in the course of loving him. They also agree on the instrument of damage, namely an attempt to control time. What this lover asks of time is the power to stall his paidika at the akmē of boyhood, in a timeless status quo of dependence upon his erastēs. The boy makes himself desirable by willingness to be arrested in time in this way. Sokrates’ description of this boy and his dilemma makes him sound somewhat like the piece of melting ice in Sophokles’ poem:
… οἷθς ὢν τῷ μὲν ἥδιστος, ἑαυτῷ δὲ βλαβερώτατος
ἂν εἴη.
… as such the boy is most delightful to his lover just where he does most damage to himself. (239c)