Lysias, but he is also in profound earnest and in a deeper vein of irony
than usual. Having improvised his own speech, which is based upon the
model of the preceding, he condemns them both. Yet the condemnation is not
to be taken seriously, for he is evidently trying to express an aspect of
the truth. To understand him, we must make abstraction of morality and of
the Greek manner of regarding the relation of the sexes. In this, as in
his other discussions about love, what Plato says of the loves of men must
be transferred to the loves of women before we can attach any serious
meaning to his words. Had he lived in our times he would have made the
transposition himself. But seeing in his own age the impossibility of
woman being the intellectual helpmate or friend of man (except in the rare
instances of a Diotima or an Aspasia), seeing that, even as to personal
beauty, her place was taken by young mankind instead of womankind, he tries
to work out the problem of love without regard to the distinctions of
nature. And full of the evils which he recognized as flowing from the
spurious form of love, he proceeds with a deep meaning, though partly in
joke, to show that the 'non-lover's' love is better than the 'lover's.'

We may raise the same question in another form: Is marriage preferable
with or without love? 'Among ourselves,' as we may say, a little parodying
the words of Pausanias in the Symposium, 'there would be one answer to this
question: the practice and feeling of some foreign countries appears to be
more doubtful.' Suppose a modern Socrates, in defiance of the received
notions of society and the sentimental literature of the day, alone against
all the writers and readers of novels, to suggest this enquiry, would not
the younger 'part of the world be ready to take off its coat and run at him
might and main?' (Republic.) Yet, if like Peisthetaerus in Aristophanes,
he could persuade the 'birds' to hear him, retiring a little behind a
rampart, not of pots and dishes, but of unreadable books, he might have
something to say for himself. Might he not argue, 'that a rational being