Plato: Phaedrus

Socrates meets Phaedrus and asks whence he comes and whither he goes. Phaedrus reports coming from Lysias, son of Cephalus, and heading for a walk outside the wall; Lysias was staying with Epicrates at the house of Morychus near the temple of Olympian Zeus. Phaedrus explains Lysias wrote about a fair youth tempted not by a lover, arguing the non-lover should be accepted rather than the lover. Socrates longs to hear it; Phaedrus doubts his memory, but Socrates observes the roll hidden under Phaedrus's cloak. They walk along the Ilissus to a tall plane-tree. Phaedrus asks about Boreas carrying off Orithyia; Socrates discusses rational explanations and allegories, invokes the Delphian inscription to know himself, and mentions Typho. Reaching the plane-tree, Socrates admires the spot, sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs, and says the men of the city, not the country, are his teachers, drawn out by a book. Phaedrus reads Lysias's speech, arguing at length that the non-lover is preferable to the lover. Socrates praises it ironically, then criticizes Lysias's repetition and claims he could make a different, better speech, saying he heard something from Sappho or Anacreon. Phaedrus presses him, offering golden images at Delphi and Olympia, and finally swears an oath by the plane-tree that unless Socrates speaks, he will never repeat another discourse to him. Socrates yields, declares himself conquered, says he will veil his face and gallop through the speech, and invokes the Muses to help him rehearse the tale Phaedrus desires.

Socrates continues a tale of a fair youth with many lovers, including a cunning one who pretended not to love him and argued the youth should accept the non-lover. The speech defines good counsel as requiring a definition of love, identifies love as desire, distinguishes two ruling principles—desire of pleasure and opinion aspiring to the best—naming temperance and excess, and defines love as irrational desire for beauty. Socrates pauses and asks Phaedrus whether he seems inspired; Phaedrus affirms his flow of words. Socrates, claiming divine fury and dithyrambics, blames Phaedrus and continues: the lover wants his beloved inferior and ignorant, banishes philosophy, keeps him delicate, deprives him of family and property, and becomes a disagreeable, jealous companion who, when love ceases, defaults on his promises. He ends with a verse comparing lovers to wolves loving lambs. Phaedrus asks him to praise the non-lover; Socrates declines and moves to cross the river, but Phaedrus urges him to stay through the noon heat. Socrates praises Phaedrus's love of discourse, excepting Simmias the Theban. Socrates then reports his divine sign forbidding him, recognizes his impiety in reviling Eros, son of Aphrodite and a god, and, invoking Stesichorus who recanted about Helen and regained his sight, resolves to recant. He counsels Lysias to write another discourse; Phaedrus agrees. Addressing the fair youth, Socrates names Phaedrus and Stesichorus, and begins the recantation: madness can be a divine gift. He describes prophetic madness (Delphi, Dodona, Sibyl), etymologies of mantike and oionoistike, purificatory madness, and the Muses' poetic madness. He argues love's madness is heaven's blessing, then proves the soul immortal as self-moving, unbegotten, and indestructible. He introduces the figure of winged horses and a charioteer, describing the soul's wings nourished by beauty, wisdom, and goodness.

Zeus leads a winged chariot in heaven, followed by an array of gods and demigods in eleven bands, while Hestia remains at home. When they go to festival they ascend to the vault's top; well-balanced chariots glide, others labour under a vicious steed. The immortals stand outside heaven and behold true being—the colourless, formless essence, and justice, temperance, and knowledge absolute. The charioteer feeds his horses ambrosia and nectar. Other souls struggle, some lamed or with broken wings, and feed on opinion. By a law of Destiny, souls losing their wings fall to earth and are born as man in nine ranks, from philosopher down to tyrant. After ten thousand years souls return; philosophers may return in three thousand. Souls receive judgment, draw lots for a second life, and may pass into beasts. Recollection of universals belongs to the philosopher, whose madness—the fourth kind—the speaker describes: seeing earthly beauty recalls true beauty. The soul, imprisoned in the body like an oyster, is stirred; beauty is most palpable to sight. The newly initiated lover shudders, grows wings, feels emotion (imeros). The speaker cites two apocryphal lines of Homer naming love. Followers of Zeus, Ares, Here, and Apollo seek beloveds resembling their gods. The speaker recalls dividing the soul into a charioteer and two horses, then describes the good white horse and the crooked dark one. The bad horse drives toward the beloved; the charioteer, recalling beauty with Modesty, pulls back and tames the wild steed. The beloved receives the lover; the stream Zeus named Desire flows, and Anteros lodges in the beloved. If self-control prevails they win a heavenly victory; otherwise they gain a lesser reward.

Socrates concludes his recantation: those who begin the heavenward pilgrimage stay in light and receive matching plumage, and the lover's friendship confers such blessings, whereas the non-lover breeds vulgar qualities and leaves the youth a fool below for nine thousand years. He addresses Eros, begs forgiveness, and asks not to be deprived of the art of love; he blames Lysias for any earlier rudeness and bids him study philosophy like his brother Polemarchus. Phaedrus joins the prayer and asks why the second speech was finer, mentioning that a politician abused Lysias as a "speech-writer." Socrates argues that statesmen in fact prize writing speeches, citing how laws begin with approvers' names, and names Lycurgus, Solon, and Darius as authors thought godlike. He states disgrace lies in writing badly. Socrates tells the tale of the grasshoppers, once humans transformed by the Muses, who report to the Muses—Terpsichore, Erato, Calliope, Urania—those who honor them. They resolve to discuss rules of writing. Phaedrus reports the view that an orator needs opinion, not truth. Socrates gives the example of persuading Phaedrus to buy an ass called a horse, and warns of confusing good with evil. Rhetoric defends herself. A Spartan declares no art of speaking divorced from truth. Socrates calls forth arguments, references Nestor, Odysseus, Palamedes, Gorgias, Thrasymachus, Theodorus, and the Eleatic Palamedes (Zeno). They discuss deception through small resemblances, requiring knowledge of truth. Socrates proposes examining Lysias's and his own speeches, attributing his inspiration to local deities and the Muses. Phaedrus reads Lysias's opening words. Socrates distinguishes agreed things (iron, silver) from disputed (justice, goodness), and asks to which class love belongs.

Socrates and Phaedrus confirm that Socrates defined love at his speech's opening. Socrates declares the Nymphs of Achelous and Pan son of Hermes better rhetoricians than Lysias son of Cephalus. Phaedrus rereads Lysias' beginning; Socrates observes that Lysias began at the end. He states every discourse should be a living creature with beginning, middle, and end, and compares Lysias' speech to the epitaph of Midas the Phrygian, which he recites, noting its lines have no fixed order. Turning to the other speech, Socrates recalls the two speeches argued for lover and non-lover, that love is madness, and that madness has two kinds—human and divine—the divine subdivided into prophetic (Apollo), initiatory (Dionysus), poetic (Muses), and erotic (Aphrodite and Eros). He identifies two principles: gathering particulars into one idea, and division into species at the natural joints, and names such practitioners dialecticians. He and Phaedrus survey teachers of rhetoric—Theodorus, Evenus, Tisias, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, Polus, Licymnius, Protagoras, the Chalcedonian giant—and their devices. Socrates questions rhetoric's power, offering analogies with medicine (Eryximachus, Acumenus), tragedy (Sophocles, Euripides), and music. He cites Pericles, who learned from Anaxagoras about Mind, and compares rhetoric to medicine, one treating the body, the other the soul. Invoking Hippocrates the Asclepiad, he argues the soul's nature must be known as a whole, calling oratory the art of enchanting the soul. Socrates then invokes "the wolf" proverb and Tisias' doctrine that probability, what the many think, outweighs truth, illustrated by the case of a feeble valiant man and a strong coward. Socrates replies that only one who knows truth can discover its resemblances and divide things into classes.

Socrates states that skill in speaking comes only through effort undertaken to say and act acceptably to God, citing wiser men that a man of sense should please his masters rather than his fellow-servants, and that long roads suit great ends. He addresses Tisias, saying rhetoric here has a fair beginning. Phaedrus calls this admirable if practicable; Socrates replies that failing in an honourable object is honourable. They agree enough has been said of true and false speaking, and turn to propriety of writing. Socrates relates a tradition: at Naucratis, Theuth, inventor of arithmetic, geometry, and letters, showed his arts to King Thamus (called Ammon) at Egyptian Thebes. Theuth praised letters as an aid to memory and wit; Thamus replied they would create forgetfulness and give only the semblance of truth. Phaedrus objects that Socrates invents tales of Egypt. Socrates cites the oaks of Dodona, saying men of old accepted truth from oak or rock. Phaedrus acknowledges the rebuke and agrees with the Theban. Socrates compares writing to painting, silent when questioned, and describes a better word graven in the soul. He gives the husbandman and garden of Adonis analogy, contrasting play with serious sowing, and praises the dialectician. They return to Lysias, defining the requirements of art: knowing truth, dividing, and knowing souls. Socrates names philosophers as the fitting title. Phaedrus raises Isocrates; Socrates prophesies he has an element of philosophy. Socrates prays to Pan for inward beauty; Phaedrus asks the same, and they depart.