Princeton University Press

Chapter Title: Erotikos Logos

Book Title: Eros the Bittersweet

Book Subtitle: An Essay
Book Author(s): Anne Carson
Published by: Princeton University Press. (1986)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zv117.26

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the Bittersweet

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 Erotikos Logos

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn"

Phaedrus is in love with a text composed by the sophist

Lysias. It is an "erotic logos" (227c), the written version
of a speech delivered by Lysias on the subject of love. Its
thesis is a deliberately repugnant one. Lysias argues that
a beautiful boy would do better to bestow his favors on
a man who is not in love with him than on a man who is
in love with him, and he enumerates the ways in which a
nonlover is preferable to a lover as erotic partner. Desire
stirs Phaedrus when he gazes at the words of this text
(epethumei, 228b) and visible joy animates him as he
reads it aloud to Sokrates (234d). Phaedrus treats the
text as if it were his paidika or beloved boy, Sokrates ob-
serves (236b) and uses it as a tool of seduction, to draw
Sokrates beyond the city limits for an orgy of reading in
the open countryside (230d-e; cf. 234d). The reading
elicits from Sokrates an admission that he himself is a
"lover of logos" (andri philologd, 236e; cf. ton logon
erastou, 228c). Eros and logos are fitted together in the
Phaedrus as closely as two halves of a knucklebone. Let
us see what meaning is being composed.

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