In a short peroration Socrates first contrasts the ideal love that he has described with the false theory of Lysias's speaker, and then addresses the God of Love directly with a prayer that Lysias may be turned to philosophy, and that his admirer Phaedrus may cease to hesitate between two ways of life.

These then, my boy, are the blessings great and glorious which will come to you from the friendship of a lover. He who is not a lover can offer a mere acquaintance flavoured with worldly wisdom, dispensing a niggardly measure of worldly goods; in the soul to which he is attached he will engender an ignoble quality extolled by the multitude as virtue, and condemn it to float for nine thousand years hither and thither, around the earth and beneath it, bereft of understanding.

Thus then, dear God of Love, I have offered the fairest recantation and fullest atonement that my powers could compass; some of its language, in particular, was perforce poetical, to please Phaedrus. Grant me thy pardon for what went before, and thy favour for what ensued: be merciful and gracious, and take not from me the lover's talent wherewith thou hast blest me, neither let it wither by reason of thy displeasure, but grant me still to increase in the esteem of the fair.

The nature of the lover, his choice of and demeanour towards the beloved, will vary according as he has followed in the train of this god or of that, and all his effort will be towards shaping him into the likeness of the god whose image he sees in the person of the beloved. A follower of Zeus, the ‘great leader’ (246 E), looks for one who shall be a philosopher and a leader of men; and the inspiration which he draws from Zeus he pours out again into the soul of the other.

Now if he whom Love has caught be amongst the followers of Zeus, he is able to bear the burden of the winged one with some constancy; but they that attend upon Ares, and did range the heavens in his train, when they are caught by Love and fancy that their beloved is doing them some injury, will shed blood and not scruple to offer both themselves and their loved ones in sacrifice. And so does each lover live, after the manner of the god in whose company he once was, honouring him and copying him so far as may be, so long as he remains uncorrupt and is still living in his first earthly period; and in like manner does he comport himself towards his beloved and all his other associates. And so each selects a fair one for his love after his disposition, and even as if the beloved himself were a god he fashions for himself as it were an image, and adorns it to be the object of his veneration and worship.

In this book I have slightly altered the form adopted in my earlier work Plato's Examination of Pleasure (Philebus) by prefixing a brief analysis to each section of the translation, and reserving the whole commentary to the end of the section. This will, I hope, prove a convenience to readers.

No English commentary on the Phaedrus has appeared, so far as I know, since that of W. H. Thompson, published in 1868. Of that excellent work I have naturally made much use. Another obvious source of help has been L. Robin's edition (1933) in what is commonly known as the Budé series. Next to these I am probably most indebted to the well-known Mythes de Platon of Perceval Frutiger, and to P. Friedländer's Die Platonischen Schriften and his earlier volume of essays Eidos, Paideia, Dialogos. Specific acknowledgements to these and other works will be found in my footnotes.

I am most grateful to Prof. D. S. Robertson, who read the whole of my typescript, and to Prof. Dorothy Tarrant, who read the translation at the manuscript stage and also checked the proofs. Both these friends have made valuable suggestions and saved me from many mistakes. Some of the central sections were also read in their first draft by Mr W. K. C. Guthrie, whose helpful comments I am also glad to acknowledge. Lastly I am indebted to the late Dr R. G. Bury, that fine scholar and lover of Plato, for advice on a number of points.

The speaker begins by insisting that in any deliberation the first essential is to understand clearly the nature of the subject on which we are deliberating: otherwise confusion must result. He therefore proceeds to determine the nature of love, which is found to be a form of irrational desire, or of wantonness (ϋβρις), directed towards physical beauty; and the definition is so worded as to reveal an etymological connexion between love (έρως) and the strength (ῥὠμη) of uncontrolled passion.

Soc. Well then, once upon a time there was a very handsome boy, or rather young man, who had a host of lovers; and one of them was wily, and had persuaded the boy that he was not in love with him, though really he was, quite as much as the others. And on one occasion, in pressing his suit he actually sought to convince him that he ought to favour a non-lover rather than a lover. And this is the purport of what he said:

Excusing himself from fulfilling Phaedrus's expectation that he would continue with an encomium of the non-lover, Socrates is about to depart, when Phaedrus suggests that they should stay awhile to discuss the two speeches. Socrates however now announces that he has just been checked by his ‘divine sign’: he is forbidden to go until he has atoned for his offence against Eros: his speech, like that of Lysias, had spoken evil of a god. He must imitate the poet Stesichorus, who recanted his defamation of Helen in the famous Palinode.

After enlarging on the shamefulness of the two speeches Socrates suggests that Lysias ought to write another speech to contradict his former one, and Phaedrus says that he will see that this is done. All is now ready for the speech of recantation.

Ph. Why, I thought you were only half-way through and would have an equal amount to say about the non-lover, enumerating his good points and showing that he should be the favoured suitor. Why is it, Socrates, that instead of that you break off?

Soc. My dear good man, haven't you noticed that I've got beyond dithyramb, and am breaking out into epic verse, despite my fault-finding? What do you suppose I shall do if I start extolling the other type? Don't you see that I shall clearly be possessed by those nymphs into whose clutches you deliberately threw me? I therefore tell you, in one short sentence, that to each evil for which I have abused the one party there is a corresponding good belonging to the other.