When feeling fades
SocratesWhile he loves, then, the man is harmful and disagreeable; after he ceases to love, he proves faithless about the future. For its sake, with many promises, oaths and pleas, he had barely persuaded his beloved to bear a relationship that was painful even at the time, in hope of good things to come. When it is time to pay what he owes, he has taken another ruler and guardian within himself: reason and self-control instead of love and madness. He has become another man without his beloved knowing it. The young man asks for what he is owed and reminds him of the deeds and words of that earlier time, as though he were speaking to the same person. But the former lover, ashamed, dares not say that he has changed. Nor can he see how to make good the oaths and promises of his former foolish rule; now that he has his senses and is self-controlled, he fears that doing the same things would make him once again like his earlier self, and once again that very man.