[Preliminary note:

We found the part of the Lysis covered in this chapter, together with that covered in chapter 3, the hardest in the whole dialogue. In the case of the material of the present chapter, our difficulties were increased by the cavalier treatment Socrates appears to hand out to the poets and the cosmologists whose views he is supposedly canvassing. The reader may well feel that Socrates is not in fact taking their views seriously at all, but rather using them as an excuse to drag in a bunch of claims he wants to discuss in any case: that the y in ‘x loves y’ can only be the good; that the x in ‘x loves y’ cannot be either the good or the bad, but is rather the neither-good-nor-bad; and that the object of love is a certain self-sufficient, teleological and hierarchical good that is the ultimate object of love for all desirers – all of whom stand in need of something, namely, that self-sufficient ultimate good. (It will turn out that the self-sufficiency involved is of a special, particular kind: a maximal, or practicable self-sufficiency. But that is to anticipate a specific issue that will bulk large in the present chapter.)

An obvious parallel the reader might adduce, for the whole style of the passage, is Socrates' treatment of Simonides at Protagoras 338e6–347a5: the passage which – extraordinarily, one might say, even mischievously?