Platonic Friendship in the Lysis

Abstract The concept of friendship in the ancient world was an important one to Suzanne Stern-Gillet. In her review of Penner and Rowes’ study, Plato’s Lysis , she suggests that the best way to understand the Lysis is to take a step-by-step reading of the dialogue. Only in reading each stage of Plato’s argument can one understand Plato’s point: she says, “a Platonic dialogue is not a series of discrete arguments, as analytic interpreters still too often tend to assume, but a unitary and sustained piece of reasoning which is all of a piece with the literary vehicle in which it is presented.” This paper will look at the dialogue in parts—analyzing each section of the work—in order to understand Plato’s point on friendship. For, it seems that the difficulty in reading the work lies in uncovering the Lysis ’ sophisticated dramatic unity as well as interpreting the conclusion of the dialogue in context, where Socrates proclaims to have made no progress in understanding the nature of friendship. It is this final aporia , as well as Socrates’s statement early in the dialogue that he has never had a friend at all, that makes finding a positive statement on friendship so difficult. Is the Lysis a discussion of friendship in human life or is it a conversation about friendship which draws us to an even higher form of friendship? It seems that the Lysis is a dialogue on eros , of which philia is one kind. The key to understanding the force of philia is in the relationship between knowledge and desire.