14 The Phaedrus

Because we live in an era when entertainment is available in dizzying assortment, it is hard for us to imagine a time, way back in the fourth century bce, long before the invention of the printing press, when the chief form of amusement was spoken discourse. Theatre performances were splendid, but infrequent; musical performances did not inspire much to talk about afterwards-after all, how much can you say about the organization of sounds or about technique? But speeches! What a diversity of topics they could cover! What brilliance and talent their composition could exhibit! What opportunities for dissection and ­ criticism they could provide!

In the fifth and fourth centuries, when democratic forms of govern­ment showed how effectively oratorical ability could help clever speak­ers acquire power, teachers of rhetoric proliferated like yoga gurus or psychics during the 1920s. With the teachers came various specialties, as some practiced the artful drawing of distinctions, others poetical interpretation, others verbal pyrotechnics. Handbooks were written that multiplied the subtlest distinctions in ways of phrasing. Names of course were attached to every distinction. The fact that so many of these handbooks survived to dull the libraries of modern times is a testimony to their ubiquitous popularity and importance in antiquity.^[1] No doubt ancient aficionados of rhetoric were able to tell from a brief quotation who the author was; surely, too, they were able to recognize dozens and dozens of devices the same way we recognize hackneyed motifs of westerns or horror films or other such formulaic material.

Plato no doubt laughed at the folly of his contemporaries who spent their time and money listening to and buying up manuscript copies of speeches. The Phaedrus is targeted at the mad love of speechmaking that plagued his generation.^[2] The dialogue has just two characters, Phaedrus and Socrates, who discourse at length about speeches and what is required for their excellence.

The Phaedrus opens in a most enchanting manner, as Socrates runs into Phaedrus, whose head is still spinning because of the marvelous speech that he has heard from Lysias about why a person ought to surrender to a non-lover rather than to a lover. The speech was particularly clever because of the way it so persuasively argued what is counter to expectation (227C). Phaedrus is elsewhere represented as a devotee of speeches. In the Symposium it is he who is the “father of the conversation” and begins the series of speeches on eras. In the Protagoras, he is portrayed as listening to a speech on astronomy by the sophist Hippias. Perhaps he is a stock-character of the kind we find in New Comedy, the boastful soldier or the clever slave; in Plato’s intellectual world he represents the type of speech enthusiast.

Socrates is delighted to hear about Lysias’s speech and agrees to accompany Phaedrus for a walk outside the walls of the city. There follows a great deal of joking about whether Phaedrus knows the speech by heart. Socrates is sure that Phaedrus spent enough time pouring over the manuscript until he learned it thoroughly. Then imitating the language of lovers, Socrates claims that though Phaedrus pretends not to know the speech, he really wants to tell it (228B-C). Phaedrus relents and offers a precis, but then Socrates sees Phaedrus holding the entire manuscript under his cloak. Socrates insists that he read the speech.

This introductory scene mocks the enthusiasm for listening to speeches. Socrates, whom Plato generally portrays as having very little interest in such speeches, pretends that he does, playfully imitating his young friend’s passion for them. Phaedrus himself is completely enthralled by the speech he has heard. And we, the audience of the Phaedrus, are wondering what kind of magical speech this must be to so excite him.

As they walk on the bank of the Ilissos, looking for a comfortable spot, they pass the place where Boreas is said to have seized Orithyia. When Phaedrus asks Socrates whether he actually believes the story, Socrates reviews the fashion for dealing with such myths: scientists would explain that a wind blew a maiden down from the rocks, and then the legend developed that the wind had acted deliberately; thus, by attributing to forces of nature the names of gods, the actions could be attributed to the gods themselves (229C-E). Socrates doesn’t spend his time analyzing such myths. Rather, he says, he follows the Delphic injunction and tries to “know himself.” Yet even in the description of how he examines himself, he can’t help playfully employing mythical allusions: is he puffed up with more pride than Typhon, or is he a gentle un-Typhonic sort (230A)? That Socrates is in a playful mood is surely indicated by his use of myth in self-analysis immediately after rejecting myths as a suitable subject of study. And why shouldn’t he be playful? The situation is rather ridiculous: Phaedrus is about to read a speech, an obvious tour de force, after a great deal of amusing banter. Beyond the merriment there is a lesson: myth may be used for poeticizing adornment, to spice up conversation. In his speech later, Socrates will be using lengthier myths in just this way.

As they come to a pleasant stopping place, Socrates remarks on the natural beauty of the spot. Phaedrus observes that Socrates acts like a tourist: locals don’t usually express such wonder at their own familiar territory (230C-D). But, says, Socrates, the countryside is strange to him. He can’t learn anything from trees, so he spends his time in town with men. Phaedrus, Socrates jests, has learned just how to get Socrates out: dangle a speech in front of him. He’d follow Phaedrus around all Attica to listen to speeches. Of course, Socrates is imitating Phaedrus’s love of speeches; after all, he could surely listen to speeches in the city. But Phaedrus is so in love with them that after spending his whole morning on this same speech, he can’t resist the opportunity to share it with someone else. At last, Phaedrus reads Socrates the speech.^[3]

In the speech, Lysias claims that it is better to yield sexually to a non-lover than to a lover. Lovers, according to the reasoning, are not in their right mind; are likely to regret the benefits they’ve bestowed once they’ve gotten what they wanted; and are more interested in future than present loves. The non-lover, on the other hand, prefers what is really best, not what seems best; is not suspect in his motives; does not want an excessively speedy possession of the beloved; and tells the truth. To yield to a lover because of his pleas would mean always to yield to the cries of those who are the most destitute. One ought to favor the most deserving, not the most importunate (231A- 234C). Well, asks the eager Phaedrus of Socrates, what did you think of the speech? Wasn’t it wonderful?

Phaedrus receives a great disappointment. Socrates likes the speech because of the enthusiasm Phaedrus had for it, but as a speech, it isn’t much. If a speech deserves praise for anything other than its diction, the speech deserves no praise, for it is merely repetitive. Phaedrus disagrees, claiming that the speech overlooks no important part of the subject. Socrates, however, claims he has heard much better; he can’t be sure from whom, but from someone (235C). Phaedrus challenges Socrates to recite the better speech, excluding any arguments that Lysias had used. Socrates protests; if he is to argue the same thesis, he will have to use some of the same arguments. Phaedrus relents and allows Socrates to include the argument that the lover is less sane than the non-lover (236B).

Thematically, so far, the dialogue bears many similarities to the Menexenus. As in that dialogue, Socrates will inventively show his talent at speechmaking, will employ the various techniques and topoi of the genre, and will present a polished and fine-sounding speech. The difference with the Menexenus is that there will be an analysis of the speech and a discussion on speechmaking generally. This additional material, I think, allows Plato to be somewhat bolder in his parodies and jests. The Menexenus was so intensely parodic that it could not be taken seriously. The speeches in the Phaedrus, particularly Socrates’ second speech on love, will be so subtly comic as to require extra discussion about its lack of seriousness. Nevertheless, despite Socra­tes’ repeated comments about how even his second speech is but another example of foolish speechmaking, it is frequently taken as Plato’s second great statement on love.^[4]

Socrates expresses reluctant second thoughts about giving a speech on Lysias’s theme, but since Phaedrus insists, Socrates covers his head and begins. After invoking the Muses,^[5] he puts his speech into the mouth of an imaginary non-lover addressing a beloved. He begins by working out a definition of love. The definition is not immediately given but is arrived at by the sophistic method of division parodied in the Sophist. There are two guides in men, the desire for what is best and the desire for pleasure. When one rules it is temperance, when the other, wantonness. Wantonness in food is gluttony (238A), in beauty is love. Obviously we have a parody of the method of division. By this arbitrary division it is possible to assert virtually anything. We could easily add, were we so inclined, “Wantonness in wisdom is sophistry, in virtue is vice,” and any number of other distinctions that might pop into our heads. Still, it all sounds scientific and scholarly. This is just the sort of plausible-sounding argument Socrates is to attack later in this very dialogue (261E). Socrates pauses here to ask Phaedrus whether he is impressed (238C-D). He is!

Having thus formulated his premises, Socrates argues that a man seeking pleasure will use whatever means possible; he will make his lover weak, a bad speaker, and a stranger to philosophy. The lover will be untrue to the promises he made before the beloved yielded.

Socrates concludes that as a wolf is to a lamb, so is a lover to a lad (241D).

Phaedrus, whose appetite for speeches is far from satiated, com­ plains bitterly that Socrates has not completed the second half of his speech. True, he has discussed the disadvantages of yielding to a lover, but he has not spoken about why one should yield to a non-lover (241D). Socrates protests that he was beginning to be seized by the nymphs and couldn’t go on. Phaedrus should simply realize that every evil for the lover has a corresponding good for the non-lover and leave it at that. By reference to this technique, Socrates shows how easy it is to manufacture such speeches, if one is only willing to abandon his mind to them.

Socrates suggests that he’d best be going. But Phaedrus insists that he stay to discuss the speeches, at least until the weather cools off a bit. Socrates remarks on the insatiability of Phaedrus for discourse and claims that only Simmias of Thebes (whom we recall from the Phaedo) has stimulated more discourse. Socrates says that he must speak again: his divine sign has warned him not leave the area until he has atoned for his speech (242B-D). Socrates admits that he has sinned. It was blasphemy for him to claim that Love, the child of the goddess Aphrodite, was an evil thing. He recalls Stesichorus, a poet who allegedly went blind because of his defamation of Helen (243A) and had his vision restored only after he had written corrective verses. (Homer, whose loss of vision was permanent, never wrote the necessary corrective verses.) Socrates too will recant and will deliver a different speech in order to cleanse himself of the bitter taste of his false speech.

How Plato loves to make fun of poets! We can only imagine what numerous lies Homer told that resulted in his permanent blindness. What Plato is showing is the ease with which one may say in a speech anything he pleases.^[6] It is a medium that allows no rebuttal or exami­nation. One can make a speech saying one thing, then a speech saying the exact opposite. No matter, people like Phaedrus will receive them with equal enthusiasm.

Socrates attributes his second speech on love to Stesichorus, who is addressing an imaginary beloved. Madness, he begins, is not the invariable evil it has been suggested to be. With sophistic brilliance Socrates divides madness into two kinds, regular bad madness and good heaven-sent madness. Heaven-sent madness is further divided into four types. How often have we seen Socrates or his various interlocutors squirm out of a difficulty by making a distinction! Certainly distinctions are valid ways of exploring nature and learning, but they can also be a means by which a semblance of sense is given to nonsense.^[7] Now in a great surprise, we learn that madness is actually something good and heavenly! We have to be suspicious when the great proponent of rational discourse-Socrates-proposes that the greatest blessings to mankind have come by way of madness. Still inspired by an enthusiastic fit, Socrates shows that prophecy has always been recognized as madness: “it was because they held mad­ ness to be a valuable gift, when due to divine inspiration, that they named that art as they did, though the men of today, having no sense of values, have put in an extra letter, making it not manic but mantic.” If we were in doubt about the jest in the etymology, Socrates follows it up with an equally silly one on the words “oionoistic” and “oionistic” where he explains the lengthened “o” as an attempt to make the word sound more impressive. The four divine madnesses are prophecy, the purgative actions for family sins that one engages in because of prophetic pronouncements, poetry, and love. Socrates then declares his procedure: he will prove that love is a madness that comes from the gods (245B-C). In a sly sophistic swipe he says that his proof will prevail “with the wise, though not with the learned.” Here too he makes a very strange distinction; after all, who are the learned, if not the wise? This distinction is never taken up or referred to again. It is, I think, just another attempt to lend an aura of profundity to the speech by another hollow but fine-sounding distinction. This superfluous distinction is a further hint that we are not to take the distinctions of the divine madnesses seriously. There will be additional hints later.

Socrates’ proof about love coming from the gods begins surprisingly with an analysis of the nature of soul. Soul as a self-moving first principle is immortal, neither created nor destroyed (245E-246A). The soul resembles a charioteer with two steeds, one good, one bad. All soul has care of the inanimate and travels the universe in everchanging forms. A soul that has shed its wings sinks to earth and enters a body (256A-C).

At this point Socrates interrupts his speech to say some strange things about his terms. “Immortal,” he says, is a term applied without a reasoned argument. “Our fancy pictures the god whom we have never seen, nor fully conceived, as an immortal living being, possessed of a soul and a body for all time.” Why does Socrates interject these comments into his speech? They certainly do cast doubt upon the rest of his theological assertions. They are even more puzzling since they are followed immediately by comments about Zeus and Hestia and the other gods, gods who have all just been attributed to our fancy!

The gods easily traverse the various blisses of heaven (we should recall that both steeds of their chariots are good, unlike those of men). Thus they have no trouble climbing and gazing into the world of being (247C-D). This world is a place of true beauty and no poets sing of it. ^[8] Reason alone looks upon justice, temperance, and knowledge. This is the life of the gods (248A). This section of the speech certainly has a Socratic familiarity to it. What it has to do with love we may wonder. No matter, it is splendid.

Now a few souls, those of the best people, having a bad steed, don’t get to look down on this world of being permanently. They get a little peek at it and then fly off to other places. But the souls of most people trample upon one another, are lamed, their wings broken, and they never get a vision of being; instead, they feed on the food of semblance (248B). But souls themselves want to behold Truth, for they replenish their wings thereby. Now Necessity has ordained that souls that have discerned some truth be kept from sorrow for a while. But when the wings are burdened by wrongdoing, the soul sinks to earth and goes through a succession of steadily deteriorating lives: philosopher-lover, king, warrior or ruler, statesman, businessman, athlete, prophet, poet, farmer, sophist, and finally tyrant (249A-E).

Don’t we have here a second hint that the divine madnesses are something of a joke? Why else would the great blessings to mankind, prophecy and poetry, be placed so far down the list of deteriorating lives? Are we expected by now to have forgotten the division and the lofty divine place of the earlier blessings? We should recall as well that Socrates has put this so-called speech into the mouth of Stesichorus, a poet. Is it likely that Stesichorus would have given his own profession a place so far down the list?

Souls, continues Socrates’ Stesichorus, do not return to their place of origin for ten thousand years (249A). An express route, however, is available for philosophical lovers. If in three revolutions of a thousand years a soul has chosen a philosophical life, it regains its wings right away. Some, after their first life, are punished; others go to the heavens and live there according to how they lived on earth. Later they are reincarnated as beasts. But the souls of humans who have beheld truth when they were in human form-those who have beheld the forms­ these reincarnate as humans. Thus, it is right that the soul of a philosopher regain his wings (249C).

With this giant preamble, Socrates returns to the subject of the lover. A lover, seeing something beautiful, is reminded of the vision of beauty in the world of being and begins to sprout his wings again (249D-E). All humans have had some vision of true being, but it is not easy for all to be reminded of it again. Very few are reminded by earthly justice of the justice they observed in the world of being (250B). It is different, however, with beauty: we all saw beauty once, and we can still see it through our eyes (250D). Those who have forgotten the sublime vision of beauty seek the beastlike pleasure in procreation or unnatural pleasure (250E). But he who is fresh from the mystery of beauty feels reverence for it, even when he sees a bodily beauty. He begins to sweat and shudder and his wings grow (251B). Socrates continues with a rather physical and sexual description of the effect of erotic beauty on the beloved: it is rather reminiscent, indeed, of Sappho’s poem on the effect of being next to a beloved.^[9] In short, it is a passage unique in Plato (251C-252A), and, alas, in translation it is nearly impossible to see the highly charged erotic language. Socrates concludes this part of his speech with a joke on some badly metrical lines quoted by Homerists in secret works: “Mortals call him winged Eros, / But, on account of a wing-growing necessity, the celestials call him Pteros.” The joke has several parts: first, a confirmation of the imaginative myth with so-called evidence, the rhyming play on eras and pteros, which echoes an earlier pun on meros and imeros (251C); next, the humorous parody of those obscure passages in Homer where the gods have one name for a thing, mortals another-a peculiarity that comes in for outrageous farce in the Cratylus (391D-E). In view of the rationalizing of myths earlier (229C-E), one must wonder how seriously references to such myths are meant.

Now he slides into a new way of looking at love as he no longer treats it as a form of madness; now he somehow blends it with Eros. Those who are caught by love do their loving in accordance with the nature of the gods they follow. Thus followers of Zeus bear Love (called with deliberate equivocation after all the discussion of wings “the winged one” [252C]) with constancy; they seek a Zeus-like beloved, that is, someone disposed to wisdom; they attribute any improvement they undergo in trying to live a godlike life to their beloved. Those who follow Hera look for a royal nature in their beloveds, and so on for all the gods.

Finally, Socrates turns to how the beloved is captured. He reviews the image of the charioteer with two steeds. The good steed is fine looking, with a hooked nose, and needs no whipping. But the bad steed, among other characteristics, is crooked, short-necked, snub-nosed, and hard to control with the whip or goad. Amazingly, the bad steed resembles Socrates! Is not Socrates poking fun at his own rambunctiousness? Isn’t this very speech a sign of his mischievous­ness?

Well, the bad horse, says Socrates, seeing the beloved, lurches towards him and tries to pull the entire chariot in that direction. But eventually the good horse and the strength of the charioteer are sufficient to prevail. The lover follows the beloved with reverence and awe (254E). The beloved sees that in the lover there dwells a god (255B) and is filled with love, and they feel mutual sexual urges (255E). When they lie side by side, the wanton horses kiss each other, but the good horses, moved by reverence, resist (255E-256A). If the higher elements prevail, they live an ordered philosophical life and have inward peace. But there is a reward for wanton lovers too! If the wanton steeds catch the others off guard, they have sex (256C). They go away wingless, but eventually they get their wings because of their love (256E). In short, love helps both abstinent and indulgent to grow wings. This, says Socrates, is his speech to love, a recantation for the first speech, with some poetical language thrown in especially to please Phaedrus.

What a speech! Socrates has proved himself no Hippolytus, no Miltonic postlapsarian Adam condemning sex.^[10] His speech has been long enough and varied enough to please the speech-hungry Phaedrus. But how shall we respond, watching the whole performance from a distance? Well, we learned essentially nothing about whether one should yield sexually to a lover or a non-lover. Surely Lysias’ s position was abhorrent: that we should grant favors to someone who doesn’t even care about us. Has Socrates’ speech, however, been particularly enlightening? He has claimed that when one sees beauty, it reminds him of the eternal beauty in the world of being. In view of the story of Boreas’s rape of Orytheia, we may wonder whether beauty really functions in this lofty way. Was Boreas thinking about the eternal idea of beauty when he raped the fair Orytheia? Surely the earlier refer­ences to Helen and indeed the placing of the entire palinode to love in Stesichorus’s mouth are intended to remind us of Helen’s situation. When Paris abducted Helen, was he contemplating the eternal image of beauty? Was the Trojan War actually fought, as Goethe suggested, over the idea of beauty? Surely the whole purpose of Stesichorus’s palinode is meant to suggest how easy it is to present any case at all in a speech.

When Phaedrus praises Socrates’ second speech as much superior to his first effort (257C), the conversation at the Ilissus turns to speechwriting. Phaedrus thinks that the name “speechwriter” is in­ sulting, but Socrates shows how politicians in fact want to be admired for their speeches (257E) and how people think great speechwriters are equals of the gods (258C). The shame is not in writing speeches, but in writing bad ones (258D).

Phaedrus will gladly examine the nature of speechwriting with Socrates, for, says Phaedrus, listening to speeches is the true pleasure in life, not pleasure of the body! There is rich irony here, especially in view of Phaedrus’s apparent eagerness to hear speeches on sex and love. But, as it turns out, he is really interested in the speeches, not the experience. He is like the mythical Prof. von Von Kochenbach, a German professor who was raised in the great humanistic tradition of Kant and Goethe and lived before Germany became militaristic. One day, von Von Kochenbach saw two doors, one of which when opened led directly to love and paradise, the other to an auditorium where a lecture was being given on love and paradise. There was no hesitation on von Von Kochenbach’s part. He darted—to hear the lecture. Such is Phaedrus the ardent lover—of speeches.

The argument now turns to the question of whether to speak well one must have knowledge or seem to have it (260A). They conclude that a speaker who does not know about good and evil will not sow a very good crop in his listeners (260D). The question is whether knowledge in itself is enough to make a man persuasive. Socrates suggests that oratory would be able to persuade if oratory were an art and not a knack (260E). And when he asks about the applicability of rhetoric, suggesting that it is present in every facet of life, Phaedrus restricts it to public speeches and the lawcourts. Socrates, to show that oratorical ability is applicable everywhere, responds with the wild claim that various Homeric characters—Nestor, Odysseus, and Palamedes—wrote rhetorical handbooks (261C).

As they discuss the particulars of oratory, Phaedrus agrees that people are misled by things when the differences are little and that when the orator shifts his ground gradually, he makes it easier for his shifting to pass unnoticed (261E). Is this not exactly what Socrates has done in his speech, especially his second one, where he has subtly slipped in a demotion of poetry and prophecy and glided over the various points in such a way that the wanton steeds came off nearly as well as the good steeds? If, says Socrates, one goes chasing beliefs, speech will be a comical sort of art (262C). Yet Socrates, in his comments about our fancy’s creating myths about the gods, has implied that this is just what he has been doing, making a speech based on beliefs, not knowledge. Indeed, he says he has done so: “By some stroke of luck it seems that in the two speeches we have a sort of paradigm of the way in which one who knows the truth can mislead his audience by playing an oratorical joke on them” (262C-D).

Rhetoric, the argument continues, deals with words about which men disagree (263B). Rhetoricians need to divide words into two classes, those that we argue about and those we don’t. The argument is already much like Aristotle’s comments on oratory in his Rhetoric (1357a).

Lysias’s speech had many defects: first, he did not take the trouble to define “love,” a disputable word (264A). Next, his speech could have been written in any order: it had no organic unity.

They turn to Socrates’ speeches (265A). Socrates says of his own two speeches that they were “mad,” surely not a term of approbation. In view of the fact that Socrates’ second speech is so very often taken as one of the two official Platonic positions on love, I think it is important to realize that in the mind of the character Socrates as portrayed in the Phaedrus, the speech is not meant to be taken as a serious philosophical position on love.

Continuing his criticism of his own speech, he explains how he practiced division on the term “madness,” said some true things about a lover, though he also sometimes went astray. This blend of the false and true gave the speech plausibility and gave it a religious air. Yes, agrees Phaedrus, it was very pleasant to hear (265B).

It is a very bold magician who can reveal his secrets and still fool his audience. Yet Plato is such a magician: “For the most part I think our festal hymn has really been playful entertainment” (265C). In effect, Plato warns us how easily plausibility can be established. Socrates’ speech included enough philosophical remarks to give the impression of seriousness. As a whole, the dialogues do the same. It is no wonder that they have been assumed to be serious works.

Socrates and Phaedrus now examine the way in which the speech went from the censure to the praise of irrationality (265C-D). The procedure consisted of definition, and, Socrates adds, it didn’t matter whether the definition was right or wrong; the definition itself enabled the discourse to be clear and consistent. Next he divided irrationality into the bad and good kinds. This practice of division is proper to dialectic, Socrates says (266B); but it seems that a number of rhetori­cians, including Thrasymachus, have used it to make themselves masters of oratory.

There follows a discussion of the traditional divisions of a speech (266D-E) and a catalogue of a large number of rhetoric teachers and their specialties:^[11] Evenus of Paros, the inventor of secret allusions and indirect compliments; Tisias and Gorgias, who give probability more respect than truth; Polus, who collects maxims and phrases; Protago­ras; and others (267A-D).^[12] It is not enough to know various tricks or figures, they agree, without knowing how to arrange the whole, just as in music or drama it would make little sense to know notes or how to compose individual speeches without the ability to put them into whole compositions (268A-269B). To be a great rhetorician, three things are needed: knowledge, practice, and innate ability (269D). Pericles was a great speaker, Socrates says, because his mind had been elevated by study with Anaxagoras.

Now begins a discussion of how a rhetorician ought to be educated. First, the rhetorician ought to study the human soul, then how it acts and is acted upon, and finally the various types of discourse and how they affect the soul. Since this is in fact exactly what Aristotle does in his Rhetoric, one may wonder whether that book does not represent either his carrying out of the Platonic programme or indeed his class notes of a course in rhetoric that he took at the Academy. He is, in fact, widely believed to have taught rhetoric in the Academy.^[13]

Next there is some discussion concerning whether the orator ought to deal with truth or with probabilities. Some, Socrates says, believe that the orator need not even know the truth, only what is plausible, and some say that facts should be omitted if they are inconsistent with probability. Tisias is cited as an example of one who has made a “scientific” study of probability. But in an imaginary speech to Tisias, Socrates asserts that the wise man ought to speak to please the gods, not to gratify slaves. In short, Socrates puts truth above probability.

The conversation seems rather to have rambled from the analysis of speeches on love to questions of oratory generally and of its relation to truth. Surely Plato has pointed out defects in the way rhetoric is being taught, and surely he has mocked those blindly enthusiastic lovers of speeches like Phaedrus. His audience must be asking where one can go to learn rhetoric aright. If we acknowledge that Aristotle’s Rhetoric represents the very sort of handbook that Socrates suggests to Phaedrus needs to be written, can we not suppose that just such a course in rhetoric was offered at the Academy?^[14]

The dialogue ends, rather strangely, with a discussion about writing and its value. Socrates begins by telling how the old Egyptian god Theuth invented writing and tried to introduce it to King Thamus, boasting that it would aid memory. Instead of accepting the invention, Thamus scorned it as likely to destroy people’s memory, giving them a semblance of memory instead of real memory (274D-275B). Socrates adds that writing can provide only a reminder and that written words, like pictures, cannot answer questions: they are silent. Moreover, anyone at all can have access to written words (275E), those who can understand them and those who have no business with them. Speech, on the contrary, goes to the soul of the learner (276A). Socrates draws a comparison between farmers and teachers. Those farmers who plant seeds and expect them to grow in eight days must do so in a playful spirit. They are like authors who think that their books will effect a real change in the souls of the readers. No, suggests Socrates, the nurturing of souls takes a long time. Real education, Plato’s dialogue seems to be saying, is that which involves the constant and prolonged argument with students, not the assigning of an article or book. Is it possible that Plato gives us here an insight into his own work and methods?

Writing is a pastime (276D), Socrates continues. It is a better pastime than attendance at drinking parties, but it is still a pastime. Phaedrus assents and says that the recreation is especially valuable when the writing is about justice and such topics (276E). Ah, but better still, Socrates adjures, is the serious treatment of these topics by a dialecti­cian, for the dialectician selects the proper type of soul and sows the seeds in it.

After a brief review of the conclusions reached (277B-C), Socrates scolds those who would try to teach permanent truths by written speech (277D). Instead, the one to be praised is the man who thinks written discourses contain much that is fanciful. Compositions are mere reminders of the truth, not arguments for the truth (277E-278B). Socrates ends with a challenge to Lysias and Homer and Solon to defend their propositions; if they can, only then do they deserve to be called lovers of wisdom. The dialogue ends with Socrates’ prophecy of a great future for the promising youth Isocrates and with a prayer to Pan for inward fairness, wisdom, and temperate wealth.

The dialogue had opened with Phaedrus’s enthusiasm over Lysias’s speech. By the end of the conversation, Phaedrus has realized vividly the deficiencies in Lysias’s speech; he has heard Socrates’ outrageous speeches on love and has examined the means by which Socrates was able to manipulate his remarks and give them plausibility; he has examined rhetoric’s general preference for plausibility and probability rather than truth; he has, moreover, been informed that the kind of written speeches of which he is so fond can do very little other than amuse. Does not the dialogue constitute a warning to all similar lovers of speeches to be wary of them? Hasn’t Socrates in effect exposed the whole speech business? Won’t the salutary effect of the dialogue be to make the audience harder to manipulate in the future?

And what of the peculiar reference to Plato’s rival schoolmaster Isocrates? Surely Plato meant to suggest that lsocrates did not in fact fulfill his promise, that he became too much interested in conventional views of politics and in speechwriting and too little devoted to philos­ophy. Hasn’t Plato indicated in the arguments about the education of the rhetorician that he knows how to go about such education? Is he not suggesting that he can produce better rhetors than Isocrates-men who understand the human soul and who also understand good and evil?