Lysis

Outline

The divisions follow the argument. References are to Stephanus pages and sections, which stand in the margins of both pages of the text.

I. Hippothales and his poems (203a–206e)

203a–204a Socrates, “making my way from the Academy straight to the Lyceum”, is stopped by Hippothales and Ctesippus at the spring of Panops and asked into a wrestling-school, “newly built”, where “the time is spent mostly in talk” and Miccus teaches.

204b–c Asked who the beautiful one is for him, Hippothales blushes; Socrates knows that “you are not only in love, but already far along, making your way in love”, for this has been given him by a god: “to be able to know quickly one who is in love and one who is beloved”.

204c–e Ctesippus: Hippothales has “deafened and filled full of Lysis” their ears, in prose and with “his poems and compositions”; the boy “is still called after his father”, Democrates of Aexone.

204e–205d Socrates asks to know “what a lover should say about his darling”; Hippothales denies that he makes verses, and Ctesippus tells what he sings: “what the whole city sings about Democrates and Lysis”, the family’s victories, and the entertaining of Heracles, “things more Cronian still”.

205d–206a “Before you have won, are you making verses and singing a song of praise about yourself?” If the darling “gets away”, the songs make the lover ridiculous; “whoever is wise in matters of love, my friend, does not praise his beloved before he has caught him”.

206a–b Praise fills the beautiful ones “with pride and boastfulness” and makes them “harder to catch”, like a hunter who “scared off the game as he hunted”; “to make wild with words and songs, instead of charming, is a great want of the Muses”. Hippothales agrees that a man who harms himself by his poetry is no good poet: that “would be a great want of sense”.

206c–e Hippothales asks “what talk one could hold, or what one could do, to become a friend to one’s darling”; Socrates could perhaps show him “what you ought to talk to him about”, if Hippothales gets Lysis to come and talk. It is the Hermaea, and Lysis is “Menexenus’ closest companion of all”.

II. In the wrestling-school (206e–207d)

206e–207b The boys are playing knucklebones; Lysis, “outstanding in looks”, keeps “turning round and looking at us”, and comes over after Menexenus; Hippothales stands “where he thought Lysis would not see him”.

207b–d Socrates asks “which of you two is the elder?” “We dispute it”, says Menexenus. Socrates will not ask which is the richer, since they are friends, and “the things of friends are said to be common”. Menexenus is called away by the trainer.

III. Lysis: what one is entrusted with (207d–210e)

207d–e Lysis’ father and mother “love you very much” and want him “to be as happy as possible”; yet “me they do stop, and from a great many things”.

208a–b They entrust the chariot to “a charioteer who draws wages from my father”, and the mules to “the muleteer”, a slave.

208c–e Lysis is ruled by his tutor, a slave (Socrates: “How dreadful … that a free man should be ruled by a slave!”), and by his teachers; at home, “I’d be beaten if I touched” the tools of his mother’s loom.

208e–209a “So it seems you get no use out of your wealth, great as it is”, and “you, Lysis, rule nothing, and do nothing that you desire.”

209a–c “That’s because I’m not yet of age”; but he may write, read and play the lyre as he wants, “because I know these things”, and his father will entrust everything to him “on whatever day he believes that you understand better than he does”.

209c–210a So too the neighbor and the Athenians; and the Great King, if “we” showed him that we understand the preparing of a dish better than his son, would let us “grab a handful of the salt” and throw it into the broth, and would not stop us treating his son’s eyes if he took us “to be skilled in medicine”.

210a–c Socrates concludes that “in the things in which we come to have understanding, everyone will entrust them to us”, while in those in which we do not acquire sense, “everyone will get in our way”.

210c–d “So now not even your father loves you, nor does anyone else love anyone else, insofar as he is useless”; “if you become wise, my boy, everyone will be a friend to you and everyone akin to you”. Lysis grants that if he needs a teacher he does not yet understand, and so he is not “proud”, “if you are still without understanding”.

210e Socrates nearly says to Hippothales, “This, Hippothales, is how one should talk to one’s darling, humbling him and taking him down”.

IV. Menexenus returns (211a–d)

211a–b Lysis asks Socrates, “say to Menexenus too what you are saying to me”; Socrates tells him to report it himself.

211b–d Menexenus is “contentious”, “a pupil of Ctesippus”; Socrates agrees, “Talk I must”.

V. Menexenus: who becomes a friend of whom (211d–213d)

211d–212a Socrates has “in fact desired a certain possession” since he was a boy; toward the acquiring of friends he is “altogether like one in love”, and yet he does “not even know how one becomes a friend of another”.

212a–b Socrates asks: “when someone loves someone, which becomes a friend of which, the one who loves of the one loved, or the one loved of the one who loves?” “No difference”, says Menexenus; then both “become friends of each other, if the one alone loves the other”.

212b–d One may love and not be loved back, or even be hated: “now, unless both love, neither is a friend”, and “nothing is a friend to the one who loves unless it loves him back”.

212d–213a Then none are friends of horses whom the horses do not love back, nor friends of wisdom “unless wisdom loves them back”, or the poet is lying; since he speaks the truth, “what is loved is a friend to the one who loves it”, as newborn children, even while they hate, are “the greatest friends to their parents”.

213a–c On this argument “it is not the one who loves who is a friend, but the one who is loved”; but then “many are loved by their enemies and hated by their friends”, which is “a great want of sense”; and the reverse fails the same way.

213c–d Neither those who love, nor those who are loved, “nor those who both love and are loved” are friends. Socrates asks whether they were “not seeking rightly at all”; Lysis answers, “We were not, I think, Socrates”, and blushes.

VI. Lysis: like and like (213d–215c)

213d–214b Socrates, “pleased with the other’s philosophy”, turns to Lysis and to the poets, “like fathers and guides of wisdom”: “Ever, you know, the god brings like to like”; and the wisest men, who “talk and write about nature and the whole”, say “that like must always be a friend to like”.

214b–d Half of it would not be true, “if the wicked are like one another”, for the wicked man becomes “the more of an enemy” the nearer he comes to the wicked; they mean that the good are like one another and friends, while the bad are “capricious and unaccountable”, so that “the good man alone is a friend to the good man alone”.

214e–215a But “what benefit could anything whatever that is like have for anything whatever that is like it”? Things “having no aid to give each other” are not cherished: “one who is like is not a friend to one who is like”.

215a–c The good man, “insofar as he is good”, is “sufficient for himself”, in need of nothing, and so cherishes and loves nothing: “How then will the good be friends to the good for us at all”.

VII. Opposite and opposite (215c–216b)

215c–d Socrates once heard someone say “that like is most hostile to like”, with Hesiod’s potter, singer and beggar as witness, and that “the poor man is compelled to be a friend to the rich”.

215e–216a Further, “the most opposite is most a friend to the most opposite”: “the dry desires the wet, the cold the hot”, and “the opposite is food to its opposite”. Menexenus: “He speaks well”.

216a–b But “those all-wise men, the masters of contradiction”, will ask whether “enmity is not most opposite to friendship”; so “neither is like a friend to like, nor opposite to opposite”.

VIII. What is neither good nor bad (216c–218c)

216c–d Perhaps the friend is “what is neither good nor bad”; Socrates is “really dizzy”, and recalls the old proverb that “the beautiful is a friend”, which “resembles something soft and smooth and glossy”; and “the good is beautiful”.

216d–217a Socrates, “divining”, proposes that what is neither good nor bad “is a friend of the beautiful and good”, and sets out “some three kinds: the good, the bad, and what is neither good nor bad”; it is to the good alone that what is neither good nor bad “becomes a friend”.

217a–c The healthy body is “in no need of medicine”, but the body, neither good nor bad, loves medicine because of disease: “what is neither bad nor good becomes a friend of the good because of the presence of bad”, and “before it has itself become bad”.

217c–e Hair smeared “with white lead” would “appear” white, but when “old age brings this same color upon it” it has become white; so what is neither bad nor good is “sometimes not yet bad when bad is present”.

218a–b Those who are already wise, “whether these are gods or men”, do not love wisdom, nor do the bad and unlearned, but those who have ignorance and “still believe they do not know what they do not know”.

218b–c So “we have most certainly found out what the friend is and what it is not”, and Socrates is “very glad, like a hunter”.

IX. The first friend (218c–220b)

218c–d But “a most strange suspicion” enters Socrates’ mind: “it looks as if we have been rich in a dream”, and he fears that, “as with impostors among men, we have come across arguments of that sort about the friend”.

218d–219b A friend is a friend “for the sake of something and because of something”: the sick man “because of disease and for the sake of health”; so “the friend is a friend of the friend for the sake of the friend, because of the enemy”.

219b–d Unless they give up, they must “arrive at some starting point which will no longer lead back to another friend, but will come to that which is first friend”; the other friends are “as it were, images” of it.

219d–220a A father who sets great store by his son sets store by wine, if the boy has drunk hemlock and he believes that wine will save him, and by its vessel, but not more than by his son: “all such earnestness is not spent on these things”.

220a–b Rather, “it looks as if what is really a friend is that very thing in which all these friendships, as they are called, end”; “the friend is not a friend for the sake of some friend”.

X. If the bad perished (220b–221d)

220b–d But “is the good loved because of the bad”? If the bad “went away”, would the good “have become useless”, “the good being a remedy for the bad, and the bad an illness”?

220d–e Then what is really a friend is “the very opposite of this”, for “it has come to light as a friend to us for the sake of an enemy”, and “if the enemy were to go away, it is no longer, it seems, a friend to us”. Menexenus: “I think not”, “at least as it is now being put”.

220e–221b If the bad perishes, will there be hunger, “but not harmful hunger”? “Or is the question laughable”? Even now one may desire beneficially, harmfully or neither, so “the desires that are neither good nor bad will exist even if the bad things perish”.

221b–d One who desires and is in love loves what he desires, so there will be “some things that are friends” even then, and “some other cause of loving and being loved appears”.

XI. Desire and the akin (221d–222b)

221d Perhaps it is “desire that is the cause of friendship”, and what was called a friend before was “some idle talk, like a long poem put together”.

221d–e But “what desires desires what it lacks”, what lacks is “a friend of that which it lacks”, and it comes to lack what “is taken away from it”; so “it is of what is akin, it seems, that love and friendship and desire are in fact”.

221e–222a If the boys are friends, they are “by nature in some way akin to each other”, and a lover is akin to his beloved “either in his soul, or in some character of his soul, or in his ways, or in his figure”. Menexenus assents; “Lysis was silent”.

222a–b So “it is necessary for the genuine lover, and not the pretended one, to be loved by his darling”; Hippothales “turned colors of every kind”.

XII. Akin and like; the end (222b–223b)

222b–c If “like and akin are in fact the same”, the earlier argument stands, that like is useless to like; “drunk, as it were, with the argument”, they grant that “what is akin is something different from what is like”.

222c–d Shall they set down “that the good is akin to everything, and the bad alien”, or each akin to each? Either way they have fallen back “into the arguments about friendship that we threw out at first”.

222e–223a Socrates counts it all over “like the wise men in the law courts”: “if none of these is a friend, I no longer know what to say.”

223a–b The tutors come “like spirits of some kind” and, “in their half-foreign Greek”, call the boys home. People will say “that we think we are friends of one another”, but “have not yet been able to find out what the friend is”.