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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:
My boy, if anyone means to deliberate successfully about anything, there is one thing he must do at the outset: he must know what it is he is deliberating about; otherwise he is bound to go utterly astray. Now most people fail to realise that they don't know what this or that really is: consequently when they start discussing something, they dispense with any agreed definition, assuming that they know the thing; then later on they naturally find, to their cost, that they agree neither with each other nor with themselves.
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.
Turning to his own two speeches, Socrates points out that their contradiction in substance sprang from the identification of love with two opposite kinds of madness, the human and the divine. A consideration of them from this point of view will show that taken together they exemplify the method of dialectic, proper to philosophy, in its two branches, Collection (σνναγωγή) and Division (διαίρεσις). Everything else that he had said was, he now asserts, of little importance in comparison with this method, of which he is an enthusiastic practitioner.
Soc. Well, to avoid distressing you, let us say no more of that—though indeed I think it provides many examples which it would be profitable to notice, provided one were chary of imitating them—and let us pass to the other speeches; for they, I think, presented a certain feature which everyone desirous of examining oratory would do well to observe.
Ph. To what do you refer?
Soc. They were of opposite purport, one maintaining that the lover should be favoured, the other the non-lover.
Ph. Yes, they did so very manfully.
Soc. I thought you were going to say—and with truth—madly; but that reminds me of what I was about to ask. We said, did we not, that love is a sort of madness?
Ph. Yes.
Soc. And that there are two kinds of madness, one resulting from human ailments, the other from a divine disturbance of our conventions of conduct.
Can we find any easier substitute for this admittedly laborious procedure? To convince Phaedrus that we cannot, Socrates recalls the contention that the orator need not concern himself with the truth, but only with plausibility or (it is now added) probability. After quoting from Tisias's manual an example of forensic argument based on ‘the probable’, and showing its absurdity, Socrates remarks that this is really no new point, and has already been met.
The way of the true rhetoric is difficult and laborious, but its justification is that in seeking the truth we are seeking to do the pleasure of the gods. They are our good and gracious masters, and it is they, not our fellow-slaves, that we should seek to please.
Soc. You are right, and that makes it necessary thoroughly to overhaul all our arguments, and see whether there is some easier and shorter way of arriving at the art; we don't want to waste effort in going off on a long rough road, when we might take a short smooth one. But if you can help us at all through what you have heard from Lysias or anyone else, do try to recall it.
Ph. As far as trying goes, I might; but I can suggest nothing on the spur of the moment.
Soc. Then would you like me to tell you something I have heard from those concerned with these matters?
Rhetoric, Socrates proceeds, as a method of influencing men's minds (ψνχαγωγία) commonly involves disputation (άντιλογία the presentation of opposed arguments), as may be seen not only in the fields of forensic and deliberative oratory, but also in the arguments of Zeno the Eleatic. And since disputation involves the ability to represent, or misrepresent, one thing as like another, the successful speaker must know the truth as to how things resemble and differ from one another.
An examination of Lysias's speech reveals its deficiency in this respect, and also its lack of orderly arrangement.
Soc. Must not the art of rhetoric, taken as a whole, be a kind of A influencing of the mind by means of words, not only in courts of law and other public gatherings, but in private places also? And must it not be the same art that is concerned with great issues and small, its right employment commanding no more respect when dealing with important matters than with unimportant? Is that what you have been told about it?
Ph. No indeed, not exactly that: it is principally, I should say, to lawsuits that an art of speaking and writing is applied—and of course to public harangues also. I know of no wider application.
Socrates meets Phaedrus, who is about to take a walk outside the city wall, after spending the whole morning listening to a speech by Lysias and studying it. Socrates expresses great interest in the speech, and is told that he may well do so, for its subject was love; it took the form of an address to a boy by one who was not his lover, but claimed his favour for that very reason. Phaedrus, entreated to repeat the discourse, professes his inability to do so; but before long it transpires that he has the actual manuscript with him, and he agrees to read it.
The two turn their steps along the bank of the Ilissus, and pass the spot reputed to be the scene of the rape of Oreithuia by Boreas. Phaedrus mentions a rationalised version of the legend, but Socrates professes indifference to such ‘scientific’ interpretations: his time is better spent in ‘knowing himself’. Finally a cool shady spot is reached, hard by a sanctuary of the Nymphs. Socrates grows enthusiastic over the delightful scene, and Phaedrus rallies him on his unfamiliarity with the countryside. Fields and trees, replies Socrates, have nothing to teach him; yet Phaedrus has discovered the way to lure him out: to hear a literary composition he would be ready to go anywhere.
Socrates. Where do you come from, Phaedrus my friend, and where are you going?
Phaedrus is full of admiration for the speech, but Socrates professes doubt as to the correctness of its substance, while in point of style he finds it clear and polished, but repetitive. He fancies he has heard the subject better dealt with, though he cannot remember by whom—possibly by Sappho or Anacreon; and this emboldens him to offer a speech of his own, with the proviso that, if he is to support Lysias's thesis, he cannot be wholly original but must adopt Lysias's basic assumptions. Phaedrus agrees that this is reasonable, but Socrates now appears reluctant; after some banter, however, and a playful threat by Phaedrus to use physical force, he submits, calling upon the Muses for aid and veiling his face to avoid embarrassment.
Ph. What do you think of the speech, Socrates? Isn't it extraordinarily fine, especially in point of language?
Soc. Amazingly fine indeed, my friend: I was thrilled by it. And it was you, Phaedrus, that made me feel as I did: I watched your apparent delight in the words as you read. And as I'm sure that you understand such matters better than I do, I took my cue from you, and therefore joined in the ecstasy of my right worshipful companion.
The nature of the Soul must be described in a myth. We may compare it to a winged charioteer driving a team of winged horses. Now the horses belonging to the souls of gods are all good, but a human soul has one good horse and one evil. So long as its wings are undamaged, the soul travels through the heavens; but some souls lose their wings, fall to earth and take to themselves earthly bodies. There follows a vivid picture of the procession of souls, headed by Zeus, to the rim of heaven, and of the difficulty experienced by the human souls in following the divine. The latter finally pass outside the heaven and stand upon its back, contemplating the sights beyond as they are carried round by its revolution.
As to soul's immortality then we have said enough, but as to its nature there is this that must be said: what manner of thing it is would be a long tale to tell, and most assuredly a god alone could tell it; but what it resembles, that a man might tell in briefer compass: let this therefore be our manner of discourse. Let it be likened to the union of powers in a team of winged steeds and their winged charioteer.