Complete Works (115 page)

27
. At 186b.

28
. Euripides,
Stheneboea
(frg. 666 Nauck).

29
. After these two lines of poetry, Agathon continues with an extremely poetical prose peroration.

30
. Accepting the emendation
aganos
at d5.

31
. “Gorgian head” is a pun on “Gorgon’s head.” In his peroration Agathon had spoken in the style of Gorgias, and this style was considered to be irresistibly powerful. The sight of a Gorgon’s head would turn a man to stone.

32
. The allusion is to Euripides,
Hippolytus
612.

33
. Cf. 197b.

34
. 197b3–5.

35
. The Greek is ambiguous between “Love loves beautiful things” and “Love is one of the beautiful things.” Agathon had asserted the former (197b5, 201a5), and this will be a premise in Diotima’s argument, but he asserted the latter as well (195a7), and this is what Diotima proceeds to refute.

36
.
Poros
means “way,” “resource.” His mother’s name,
M
ē
tis
, means “cunning.”
Penia
means “poverty.”

37
. I.e., a philosopher.

38
.
Eudaimonia
: no English word catches the full range of this term, which is used for the whole of well-being and the good, flourishing life.

39
. “Poetry” translates
poi
ē
sis
, lit. ‘making’, which can be used for any kind of production or creation. However, the word
poi
ē
t
ē
s
, lit. ‘maker’, was used mainly for poets—writers of metrical verses that were actually set to music.

40
. Accepting the emendation
toutou
in b1.

41
. The preposition is ambiguous between “within” and “in the presence of.” Diotima may mean that the lover causes the newborn (which may be an idea) to come to be within a beautiful person; or she may mean that he is stimulated to give birth to it in the presence of a beautiful person.

42
. Moira is known mainly as a Fate, but she was also a birth goddess (
Iliad
xxiv.209), and was identified with the birth-goddess Eilithuia (Pindar,
Olympian Odes
vi.42,
Nemean
Odes
vii.1).

43
. Codrus was the legendary last king of Athens. He gave his life to satisfy a prophecy that promised victory to Athens and salvation from the invading Dorians if their king was killed by the enemy.

44
. Lycurgus was supposed to have been the founder of the oligarchic laws and stern customs of Sparta.

45
. The leader: Love.

46
. I.e., philosophy.

47
. Reading
teleut
ē
s
ē
i
at c7.

48
. Cf. 205d–e.

49
.
Iliad
xi.514.

50
. This is the conventional translation of the word, but the
aulos
was in fact a reed instrument and not a flute. It was held by the ancients to be the instrument that most strongly arouses the emotions.

51
. Satyrs had the sexual appetites and manners of wild beasts and were usually portrayed with large erections. Sometimes they had horses’ tails or ears, sometimes the traits of goats. Marsyas, in myth, dared to compete in music with Apollo and was skinned alive for his impudence.

52
. Olympus was a legendary musician who was said to be loved by Marsyas (
Minos
318b5) and to have made music that moved its listeners out of their senses.

53
. Legendary worshippers of Cybele, who brought about their own derangement through music and dance.

54
.
Iliad
vi.232–36 tells the famous story of the exchange by Glaucus of golden armor for bronze.

55
. Ajax, a hero of the Greek army at Troy, carried an enormous shield and so was virtually invulnerable to enemy weapons.

56
. Potidaea, a city in Thrace allied to Athens, was induced by Corinth to revolt in 432
B.C.
The city was besieged by the Athenians and eventually defeated in a bloody local war, 432–430
B.C.

57
.
Odyssey
iv.242, 271.

58
. At Delium, a town on the Boeotian coastline just north of Attica, a major Athenian expeditionary force was routed by a Boeotian army in 424
B.C.
For another description of Socrates’ action during the retreat, see
Laches
181b.

59
. Cf. Aristophanes,
Clouds
362.

60
. Brasidas, among the most effective Spartan generals during the Peloponnesian War, was mortally wounded while defeating the Athenians at Amphipolis in 422
B.C.
Antenor (for the Trojans) and Nestor (for the Greeks) were legendary wise counsellors during the Trojan War.

61
. Cf.
Iliad
xvii.32.

PHAEDRUS

Translated by A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff.

Phaedrus
is commonly paired on the one hand with
Gorgias
and on the other
with
Symposium
—with the former in sharing its principal theme, the nature
and limitations of rhetoric, with the latter in containing speeches devoted to the
nature and value of erotic love. Here the two interests combine in manifold
ways. Socrates, a city dweller little experienced in the pleasures of the country,
walks out from Athens along the river Ilisus, alone with his friend Phaedrus,
an impassioned admirer of oratory, for a private conversation: in Plato most of
his conversations take place in a larger company, and no other in the private
beauty of a rural retreat. There he is inspired to employ his knowledge of philosophy
in crafting two speeches on the subject of erotic love, to show how paltry
is the best effort on the same subject of the best orator in Athens, Lysias, who
knows no philosophy. In the second half of the dialogue he explains to Phaedrus
exactly how philosophical understanding of the truth about any matter
discoursed upon, and about the varieties of human soul and their rhetorical susceptibilities,
is an indispensable basis for a rhetorically accomplished speech—
such as he himself delivered in the first part of the dialogue. By rights, Phaedrus’
passionate admiration for oratory ought therefore to be transformed into
an even more passionate love of philosophical knowledge, fine oratory’s essential
prerequisite. Socrates’ own speeches about erotic love and his dialectical presentation
of rhetoric’s subservience to philosophy are both aimed at persuading
Phaedrus to this transformation.

In his great second speech Socrates draws upon the psychological theory of
the
Republic
and the metaphysics of resplendent Forms common to that dialogue
and several others (notably
Phaedo
and
Symposium
) to inspire in Phaedrus
a love for philosophy. By contrast, the philosophy drawn upon in the second,
dialectical, half of the dialogue is linked closely to the much more austere,
logically oriented investigations via the ‘method of divisions’ that we find in
Sophist, Statesman,
and
Philebus
—where the grasp of any important philosophical
idea (any Form) proceeds by patient, detailed mapping of its relations
to other concepts and to its own subvarieties, not through an awe-inspiring vision
of a self-confined, single brilliant entity. One of Socrates’ central claims in
the second part of the dialogue is that a rhetorical composition, of which his second
speech is a paragon, must construct in words mere resemblances of the
real truth, ones selected to appeal to the specific type of ‘soul’ that its hearers
possess, so as to draw them on toward knowledge of the truth—or else to disguise
it! A rhetorical composition does not actually convey the truth; the truth
is known only through philosophical study—of the sort whose results are presented
in the second half of the dialogue. So Socrates himself warns us that the
‘philosophical theories’ embodied in his speech are resemblances only, motivated
in fact by his desire to win Phaedrus away from an indiscriminate love of rhetoric
to a controlled but elevated love of philosophical study.

Phaedrus
is one of Plato’s most admired literary masterpieces. Yet toward
its end Socrates criticizes severely those who take their own writing seriously—
any writing, not just orators’ speeches. Writings cannot contain or constitute
knowledge of any important matter. Knowledge can only be lodged in a
mind, and its essential feature there is an endless capacity to express, interpret,
and reinterpret itself suitably, in response to every challenge—something a
written text once let go by its author plainly lacks:
it
can only keep on repeating
the same words to whoever picks it up. But does not a Platonic dialogue,
in engaging its reader in a creative, multilayered intellectual encounter, have a
similar capacity for ever-deeper reading, for the discovery of underlying meaning
beyond the simple presentation of its surface ideas? Knowledge is only in
souls, but, despite the
Phaedrus’
own critique of writing, reading such a dialogue
may be a good way of working to attain it.

J.M.C.

S
OCRATES
: Phaedrus, my friend! Where have you been? And where are
[227]
you going?

P
HAEDRUS
: I was with Lysias, the son of Cephalus,
¹
Socrates, and I am going for a walk outside the city walls because I was with him for a long time, sitting there the whole morning. You see, I’m keeping in mind the advice of our mutual friend Acumenus,
²
who says it’s more refreshing to [b] walk along country roads than city streets.

S
OCRATES
: He is quite right, too, my friend. So Lysias, I take it, is in the city?

P
HAEDRUS
: Yes, at the house of Epicrates, which used to belong to Morychus,
³
near the temple of the Olympian Zeus.

S
OCRATES
: What were you doing there? Oh, I know: Lysias must have been entertaining you with a feast of eloquence.

P
HAEDRUS
: You’ll hear about it, if you are free to come along and listen.

S
OCRATES
: What? Don’t you think I would consider it “more important than the most pressing engagement,” as Pindar says, to hear how you and Lysias spent your time?
⁴

P
HAEDRUS
: Lead the way, then.

[c] S
OCRATES
: If only you will tell me.

P
HAEDRUS
: In fact, Socrates, you’re just the right person to hear the speech that occupied us, since, in a roundabout way, it was about love. It is aimed at seducing a beautiful boy, but the speaker is not in love with him—this is actually what is so clever and elegant about it: Lysias argues that it is better to give your favors to someone who does not love you than to someone who does.

S
OCRATES
: What a wonderful man! I wish he would write that you should [d] give your favors to a poor rather than to a rich man, to an older rather than to a younger one—that is, to someone like me and most other people: then his speeches would be really sophisticated, and they’d contribute to the public good besides! In any case, I am so eager to hear it that I would follow you even if you were walking all the way to Megara, as Herodicus recommends, to touch the wall and come back again.
⁵

P
HAEDRUS
: What on earth do you mean, Socrates? Do you think that a
[228]
mere dilettante like me could recite from memory in a manner worthy of him a speech that Lysias, the best of our writers, took such time and trouble to compose? Far from it—though actually I would rather be able to do that than come into a large fortune!

S
OCRATES
: Oh, Phaedrus, if I don’t know my Phaedrus I must be forgetting who I am myself—and neither is the case. I know very well that he did not hear Lysias’ speech only once: he asked him to repeat it over and over again, and Lysias was eager to oblige. But not even that was enough for [b] him. In the end, he took the book himself and pored over the parts he liked best. He sat reading all morning long, and when he got tired, he went for a walk, having learned—I am quite sure—the whole speech by heart, unless it was extraordinarily long. So he started for the country, where he could practice reciting it. And running into a man who is sick with passion for hearing speeches, seeing him—just seeing him—he was filled with delight: he had found a partner for his frenzied dance, and he [c] urged him to lead the way. But when that lover of speeches asked him to recite it, he played coy and pretended that he did not want to. In the end, of course, he was going to recite it even if he had to force an unwilling audience to listen. So, please, Phaedrus, beg him to do it right now. He’ll do it soon enough anyway.

P
HAEDRUS
: Well, I’d better try to recite it as best I can: you’ll obviously not leave me in peace until I do so one way or another.

S
OCRATES
: You are absolutely right.

P
HAEDRUS
: That’s what I’ll do, then. But, Socrates, it really is true that I [d] did not memorize the speech word for word; instead, I will give a careful summary of its general sense, listing all the ways he said the lover differs from the non-lover, in the proper order.

S
OCRATES
: Only if you first show me what you are holding in your left hand under your cloak, my friend. I strongly suspect you have the speech itself. And if I’m right, you can be sure that, though I love you dearly, I’ll never, as long as Lysias himself is present, allow you to practice your own [e] speechmaking on me. Come on, then, show me.