He had the same attitude to his life as a sculptor to his statue or a novelist to his novel. One of a novelist’s inalienable rights is to be able to rework his novel. If he takes a dislike to the beginning, he can rewrite it or cross it out entirely. But Zdena’s existence deprived Mirek of his prerogative as an author. Zdena insisted on remaining part of the opening pages of the novel. She refused to be crossed out.
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Plato presents Lysias as someone who thinks himself able to control all the risks, alarms and inebriations of eros by means of a prodigious emotional calculus. The Lysian strategy of life and love applies to real erotic events a set of tactics that are by now familiar to us. The Lysian nonlover steps aside from the moving current of his beloved’s life and places himself at a point of aesthetic distance. It is the vantage point of the writer. Lysias’ insights on eros are a writer’s insights, and the theory of control he expounds treats the experience of love as a fixed text that can be begun anywhere or read backwards and render the same sense. It is a bad speech, and the nonlover would make a tedious erastēs. Yet the speech at one time seduced Phaedrus. He read it over and over as if in love with the words (228b; cf. 236b). There is a terrible power in the Lysian logos. What is it?
Lysias’ text offers to its readers something that no one who has been in love could fail to covet: self-control. How do apparently external events enter and take control of one’s psyche? This question, especially in its erotic versions, obsessed the Greeks. We have seen how Homer framed the question in his Iliad, as an encounter between Helen and Aphrodite on the wall of Troy (3.400ff). Aphrodite materializes out of nowhere, in the midst of an otherwise ordinary afternoon, and enjoins desire upon Helen. There is a flurry of resistance on Helen’s part; Aphrodite flattens it with a single threat. Desire is a moment with no way out. Consistently throughout the Greek lyric corpus, as well as in the poetry of tragedy and comedy, eros is an experience that assaults the lover from without and proceeds to take control of his body, his mind and the quality of his life. Eros comes out of nowhere, on wings, to invest the lover, to deprive his body of vital organs and material substance, to enfeeble his mind and distort its thinking, to replace normal conditions of health and sanity with disease and madness. The poets represent eros as an invasion, an illness, an insanity, a wild animal, a natural disaster. His action is to melt, break down, bite into, burn, devour, wear away, whirl around, sting, pierce, wound, poison, suffocate, drag off or grind the lover to a powder. Eros employs nets, arrows, fire, hammers, hurricanes, fevers, boxing gloves or bits and bridles in making his assault. No one can fight Eros off (Homeric Hymn to Hermes 434; Sappho, LP, fr. 130.2; Soph. Ant. 781; Trach. 441; Eur., TGF, fr. 433; cf. Pl. Symp. 196d). Very few see him coming. He lights on you from somewhere outside yourself and, as soon as he does, you are taken over, changed radically. You cannot resist the change or control it or come to terms with it. It is in general a change for the worse, at best a mixed blessing (glukupikron, as Sappho says). That is the poets’ standard attitude and conviction.
Addressing a fifth-century audience educated in the poets, Plato is writing for men imbued with this conviction. Lysias himself bespeaks the poetic tradition, for his determinative assumption in showing how damaging eros can be is that the conventional erastēs is someone out of his own control:
καὶ γὰρ αὐτοὶ ὁμολογοῦσι νοσεῖν μᾶλλον ἢ σωφρονεῖν, καὶ εἰδέναι ὅτι κακῶς φρονοῦσαν, ἀλλ᾽ οὐ δύνασθαι αὑτῶν κρατεῖν·
For indeed lovers themselves admit that they are sick not sane, and know they are not in their right minds, but they are not able to control themselves. (231 d)
The lover mastered by eros cannot answer for his own mind or actions. From this condition, which the Greeks call erotic madness or mania, the lover’s harmfulness ensues.
As soon as eros enters his life, the lover is lost, for he goes mad. But where is the point of entry? When does desire begin? That is a very difficult moment to find, until it is too late. When you are falling in love it is always already too late: dēute, as the poets say. To be able to isolate the moment when love begins, and so block its entry or avoid it entirely, would put you in control of eros. Lysias’ nonlover claims to have achieved such control. He does not say how and the claim remains psychologically incredible. His logos simply ignores the moment when eros begins; he speaks from the end of the love affair as one who has never been taken over by desire at all. Nonlovers are people who remain “masters of themselves” (232a).
Sokrates denies that such control is ever possible, or even desirable, for human beings. He speaks of it as an economy of death:
… ἡ δὲ ἀπὸ τοῦ μὴ ἐρῶντος οἰκειότης, σωφροσύνῃ θνητῇ κεκραμένη, θνητά τε καὶ φειδωλὰ οἰκονομοῦσα, ἀνελευθερίαν ὑπὸ πλήθους ἐπαινουμένην ὡς ἀρετὴν τῇ φίλῃ ψυχῇ ἐντεκοῦσα.…
… the intimacy of the nonlover is mixed with a mortal self-control [sōphrosynē thnētē] which disburses itself in mortal miserly measurings [thnēta te kai pheidōla oikonomousa] and engenders in the beloved soul that spirit of begrudgement commonly praised as virtue.… (256e)
It is a deadly stinginess by which the nonlover eludes desire. He measures his emotions out like a miser counting gold. There is no risk entailed in his transaction with eros because he does not invest in the single moment that is open to risk, the moment when desire begins, ‘now.’ ‘Now’ is the moment when change erupts. The nonlover declines change, as successfully as the cicadas do, enclosed in a carapace of sōphrosynē. He is secure in his narrative choices of life and love. He already knows how the novel will end, and he has firmly crossed out the beginning.