Sokrates drives home his point about Lysias’ bad writing with an analogy from the grave. “It is very like the inscription on the tomb of Midas the Phrygian,” he says of Lysias’ discourse, and proceeds to cite the inscription:
Χαλκῆ παρθένος εἰμί, Μίδα δ᾽ ἐπὶ σήματι κεῖμαι.
ὄφρ᾽ ἄν ὕδωρ τε νάῃ καὶ δένδρεα μακρὰ τεθὴλῃ,
αὐτοῦ τῇδε μένουσα πολυκλαύτου ἐπὶ τύμβου,
ἀγγελέω παριοῦσι Μίδας ὅτι τῇδε τέθαπται.
Bronze maiden am I and on Midas’ mound I lie.
As long as water flows and tall trees bloom,
Right here fixed fast on the tearful tomb,
I shall announce to all who pass near: Midas is dead
and buried here!
The analogy is an artful one on several levels, for the inscription epitomizes in its form as well as in its content all that Sokrates says we should mistrust about the written word, and also aims specific satire at Lysias. The inscription is an epitaph: advertisement of death and a challenge to time. It promises to assert a single unchangeable fact in one unchanging form into eternity: Midas is dead. Its voice is that of a girl, youthful forever and proud to defy the world of time and change and living phenomena passing before her. With Midas, she holds aloof: he in death, she in letters.
Furthermore, Sokrates confides, this epitaph is distinctive in one feature of its composition. Every line is independent of every other, in sense and in meter, so that the poem yields much the same meaning in whatever order it is read:
ὅτι δ᾽ οὐδὲν διαφέρει αὐτοῦ πρῶτον ἢ ὕστατόν τι λέγεσθαι, ἐννοεῖς που, ὡς ἐγᾦμαι.
I suppose you notice (Sokrates says to Phaedrus) that it makes no difference which line is read first or which read last. (264e)
With this detail the inscription becomes specifically derisive of Lysias. It is fairly obvious how a poem whose lines are interchangeable may be compared with a speech that starts where it should end and follows no cogent order throughout its exposition. But let us train our attention, through this textual comparison, at the analogy in real life toward which it points. The Midas inscription has some salient details in common with the theory of love that Lysias expounds in his speech.
Like Lysias’ nonlover, the words of the inscription stand aloof from time and declare their difference from the world of ephemeral beings. The nonlover bases his claim to moral superiority over the lover on this difference. He achieves his difference by sidestepping the moment which is ‘now’ for the man in love, that is, the moment of desire when the lover loses self-control. The nonlover, like the words on Midas’ tomb, projects himself into the future. Standing outside the time of desire, he can stand also outside its emotions and regard all moments of the love affair as equal and interchangeable. Neither Lysias’ erotic theory nor his speech acknowledges any necessary ordering of its parts in time. So, too, the words on Midas’ tomb transcend the temporal order, in their form as in their content. Changeless themselves, they promise to the reader, as Lysias does to his beloved boy, unchanging consistency in the face of transforming time.
Now consider Midas himself. As a mythological symbol Midas deserves our passing consideration, for the statement made by his tomb repeats the central, disfiguring mistake of his life. It is a mistake from which the lover may have something to learn.
He is a paradoxical case, in the ancient view. Midas is used by Aristotle, for instance, to betoken the absurdity of want in the midst of wealth:
καίτοι ἄτοπον τοιοῦτον εἶναι πλοῦτον οὗ εὐπορῶν λιμῷ ἀπολεῖται, καθάπερ καὶ τὸν Μίδαν ἐκεῖνον μυθολογοῦσι διὰ τὴν ἀπληστίαν τῆς εὐχῆς πάντων αὐτῷ γιγνομένων τῶν παρατιθεμένων χρυσῶν.
It is an absurd thing [atopon] for wealth to be of such a kind that a man who is rich with it dies of starvation, like the mythological Midas: by reason of the insatiability of his prayer, everything set before him became gold. (Pol. 1.3.1257b)
Midas is an image of someone stranded in his own desire, longing to touch and not to touch at the same time, like the children in Sophokles’ poem with their hands full of ice. Perfect desire is perfect impasse. What does the desirer want from desire? Candidly, he wants to keep on desiring.
Midas’ golden touch would be a powerful symbol of perfect, self-extinguishing, self-perpetuating desire. As such, Midas might call to mind the type of bad lover whom Sokrates and Lysias denounce in their speeches, for Midas’ touch has a devastating effect on the things he loves. They turn to gold. They stop in time. So, too, the bad lover contrives to fix the living organism of his paidika at a moment of gold, that is at the akmē of his youthful bloom, so that he may be perfectly enjoyable for as long as possible. The Midas touch stops time for the lover too, permitting him to freeze his own emotional life at the high point of desire.
Plato does not make explicit any connection between Midas and the lover who wants to stop time; nonetheless, Midas may be selected for mention here partly in order to evoke the Midas touch as an image of desire. It is an important image because it helps to focus the central point at issue between Sokrates’ and Lysias’ theories of eros. Both theories agree that desire pulls the desirer into paradoxical relations with time. Both theories observe that the conventional erastēs responds to this problem with certain tactics, attempting to block the natural currents of physical and personal development that are moving his beloved through life. These tactics are damaging, Sokrates and Lysias concur; they do not concur at all on what tactics are preferable. Lysias recommends, through the fiction of his nonlover, that the best thing to do is simply stand aside from time. ‘Now’ is the moment that presents a problem, so imagine yourself at ‘then’ and avoid the problem. Sokrates refers to this tactic as “swimming backwards against the current” (264a) and likens it to the jeu d’esprit on Midas’ tomb. But his objections are more than rhetorical, and he goes on to judge the Lysian attitude a crime against eros (242e). In the rest of the dialogue we come to see what this means: a Lysian theory of love violates those natural currents of physical and spiritual change that constitute our human situation in time. What happens when you choose to abstract yourself from participation in time? Plato gives us three different images of the answer.
Midas himself is one image. On his tomb, as in his life, Midas is surrounded by a world of changing phenomena in which he may not participate. His problems in life begin with insatiable greed and end in death by want, a paradox with significant cross-references for erotic desire. But his life and its implications remain an implicit feature of Plato’s treatment, so perhaps we are not justified in drawing them out. We must turn to another category of creatures who appear in the dialogue, and who share Midas’ dilemma in its main outlines as well as in its attitude to want.