From the book
Charmides
Plato · Diotimos Editions · 2026
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At a Glance
- The wordErōs names love or erotic desire; in this example it is construed with a genitive identifying the beloved object.
- In the CharmidesSocrates' question at 167e asks whether a love could love itself and the other loves while loving nothing beautiful.
- In this edition“Love” rather than “desire” retains the contrast with epithymia a few lines earlier.
- A place to readLove of loves and itself, but of nothing beautiful, denied.
Meaning
Erōs names love or erotic desire; in this example it is construed with a genitive identifying the beloved object. Kalou, “of something beautiful”, supplies the ordinary object that the hypothetical love excludes.
Use in the book
Socrates' question at 167e asks whether a love could love itself and the other loves while loving nothing beautiful. Critias says no. The example belongs to a deliberately varied series of capacities and attitudes, each defined through an ordinary field that the proposed reflexive version would abandon.
The dialogue has already made erotic attraction vivid through Charmides' entrance and Socrates' response. The philosophical example can therefore carry dramatic resonance without becoming another description of the prologue. Its argument is about what such a love would be of, not a moral judgment that the earlier attraction is or is not temperate.
The line also should not be made to bear the complete theory of erōs from the Symposium. Here love's direction toward the beautiful is accepted for the analogy; no account of reproduction, ascent, immortality or philosophical desire is developed. Nor is “love of love” in ordinary language an immediate counterexample, since that phrase commonly retains beautiful persons, experiences or imagined satisfactions as its content. The hypothetical pointedly removes them.
Places to read
- 167eLove of loves and itself, but of nothing beautiful, denied
Translation in this edition
“Love” rather than “desire” retains the contrast with epithymia a few lines earlier. The genitive kalou is adjectival and supplies an object, not necessarily the technical phrase “the Form of Beauty”.
ἔρως
Attested: ἔρως (erōs). Erotic love; in the reflexive-capacity example its normal object is beauty. References: 167e. Lexical identification: lemma: ἔρως. See Love as a relative.