Complete Works (118 page)

“There are other troubles in life, of course, but some divinity has mixed most of them with a dash of immediate pleasure. A flatterer, for example, [b] may be an awful beast and a dreadful nuisance, but nature makes flattery rather pleasant by mixing in a little culture with its words. So it is with a mistress—for all the harm we accuse her of causing—and with many other creatures of that character, and their callings: at least they are delightful company for a day. But besides being harmful to his boyfriend, a lover is [c] simply disgusting to spend the day with. ‘Youth delights youth,’ as the old proverb runs—because, I suppose, friendship grows from similarity, as boys of the same age go after the same pleasures. But you can even have too much of people your own age. Besides, as they say, it is miserable for anyone to be forced into anything by necessity—and this (to say nothing of the age difference) is most true for a boy with his lover. The older man clings to the younger day and night, never willing to leave him, driven [d] by necessity and goaded on by the sting that gives him pleasure every time he sees, hears, touches, or perceives his boy in any way at all, so that he follows him around like a servant, with pleasure.

“As for the boy, however, what comfort or pleasure will the lover give to him during all the time they spend together? Won’t it be disgusting in the extreme to see the face of that older man who’s lost his looks? And everything that goes with that face—why, it is a misery even to hear them mentioned, let alone actually handle them, as you would constantly be [e] forced to do! To be watched and guarded suspiciously all the time, with everyone! To hear praise of yourself that is out of place and excessive! And then to be falsely accused—which is unbearable when the man is sober and not only unbearable but positively shameful when he is drunk and lays into you with a pack of wild barefaced insults!

“While he is still in love he is harmful and disgusting, but after his love fades he breaks his trust with you for the future, in spite of all the promises he has made with all those oaths and entreaties which just barely kept
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you in a relationship that was troublesome at the time, in hope of future benefits. So, then, by the time he should pay up, he has made a change and installed a new ruling government in himself: right-minded reason in place of the madness of love. The boy does not even realize that his lover is a different man. He insists on his reward for past favors and reminds him of what they had done and said before—as if he were still talking to the same man! The lover, however, is so ashamed that he does not dare tell the boy how much he has changed or that there is no way, now that he is in his right mind and under control again, that he can stand by the promises he had sworn to uphold when he was under that old [b] mindless regime. He is afraid that if he acted as he had before he would turn out the same and revert to his old self. So now he is a refugee, fleeing from those old promises on which he must default by necessity; he, the former lover, has to switch roles and flee, since the coin has fallen the other way, while the boy must chase after him, angry and cursing. All along he has been completely unaware that he should never have given [c] his favors to a man who was in love—and who therefore had by necessity lost his mind. He should much rather have done it for a man who was not in love and had his wits about him. Otherwise it follows necessarily that he’d be giving himself to a man who is deceitful, irritable, jealous, disgusting, harmful to his property, harmful to his physical fitness, and absolutely devastating to the cultivation of his soul, which truly is, and will always be, the most valuable thing to gods and men.

“These are the points you should bear in mind, my boy. You should know that the friendship of a lover arises without any good will at all. [d] No, like food, its purpose is to sate hunger. ‘Do wolves love lambs? That’s how lovers befriend a boy!’ ”

That’s it, Phaedrus. You won’t hear another word from me, and you’ll have to accept this as the end of the speech.

P
HAEDRUS
: But I thought you were right in the middle—I thought you were about to speak at the same length about the non-lover, to list his good points and argue that it’s better to give one’s favors to him. So why are you stopping now, Socrates?

[e] S
OCRATES
: Didn’t you notice, my friend, that even though I am criticizing the lover, I have passed beyond lyric into epic poetry?
¹⁷
What do you suppose will happen to me if I begin to praise his opposite? Don’t you realize that the Nymphs to whom you so cleverly exposed me will take complete possession of me? So I say instead, in a word, that every shortcoming for which we blamed the lover has its contrary advantage, and the non-lover possesses it. Why make a long speech of it? That’s enough about
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them both. This way my story will meet the end it deserves, and I will cross the river and leave before you make me do something even worse.

P
HAEDRUS
: Not yet, Socrates, not until this heat is over. Don’t you see that it is almost exactly noon, “straight-up” as they say? Let’s wait and discuss the speeches, and go as soon as it turns cooler.

S
OCRATES
: You’re really superhuman when it comes to speeches, Phaedrus; you’re truly amazing. I’m sure you’ve brought into being more of [b] the speeches that have been given during your lifetime than anyone else, whether you composed them yourself or in one way or another forced others to make them; with the single exception of Simmias the Theban, you are far ahead of the rest.
¹⁸
Even as we speak, I think, you’re managing to cause me to produce yet another one.

P
HAEDRUS
: Oh, how wonderful! But what do you mean? What speech?

S
OCRATES
: My friend, just as I was about to cross the river, the familiar [c] divine sign came to me which, whenever it occurs, holds me back from something I am about to do. I thought I heard a voice coming from this very spot, forbidding me to leave until I made atonement for some offense against the gods. In effect, you see, I am a seer, and though I am not particularly good at it, still—like people who are just barely able to read and write—I am good enough for my own purposes. I recognize my offense clearly now. In fact, the soul too, my friend, is itself a sort of seer; that’s why, almost from the beginning of my speech, I was disturbed by a very [d] uneasy feeling, as Ibycus puts it, that “for offending the gods I am honored by men.”
¹⁹
But now I understand exactly what my offense has been.

P
HAEDRUS
: Tell me, what is it?

S
OCRATES
: Phaedrus, that speech you carried with you here—it was horrible, as horrible as the speech you made me give.

P
HAEDRUS
: How could that be?

S
OCRATES
: It was foolish, and close to being impious. What could be more horrible than that?

P
HAEDRUS
: Nothing—if, of course, what you say is right.

S
OCRATES
: Well, then? Don’t you believe that Love is the son of Aphrodite? Isn’t he one of the gods?

P
HAEDRUS
: This is certainly what people say.

S
OCRATES
: Well, Lysias certainly doesn’t and neither does your speech, which you charmed me through your potion into delivering myself. But if Love is a god or something divine—which he is—he can’t be bad in [e] any way; and yet our speeches just now spoke of him as if he were. That is their offense against Love. And they’ve compounded it with their utter foolishness in parading their dangerous falsehoods and preening themselves
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over perhaps deceiving a few silly people and coming to be admired by them.

And so, my friend, I must purify myself. Now for those whose offense lies in telling false stories about matters divine, there is an ancient rite of purification—Homer did not know it, but Stesichorus did. When he lost his sight for speaking ill of Helen, he did not, like Homer, remain in the dark about the reason why. On the contrary, true follower of the Muses that he was, he understood it and immediately composed these lines:

There’s no truth to that story:

You never sailed that lovely ship,

You never reached the tower of Troy.
²⁰
[b]

And as soon as he completed the poem we call the Palinode, he immediately regained his sight. Now I will prove to be wiser than Homer and Stesichorus to this small extent: I will try to offer my Palinode to Love before I am punished for speaking ill of him—with my head bare, no longer covered in shame.

P
HAEDRUS
: No words could be sweeter to my ears, Socrates.

[c] S
OCRATES
: You see, my dear Phaedrus, you understand how shameless the speeches were, my own as well as the one in your book. Suppose a noble and gentle man, who was (or had once been) in love with a boy of similar character, were to hear us say that lovers start serious quarrels for trivial reasons and that, jealous of their beloved, they do him harm—don’t you think that man would think we had been brought up among the most [d] vulgar of sailors, totally ignorant of love among the freeborn? Wouldn’t he most certainly refuse to acknowledge the flaws we attributed to Love?

P
HAEDRUS
: Most probably, Socrates.

S
OCRATES
: Well, that man makes me feel ashamed, and as I’m also afraid of Love himself, I want to wash out the bitterness of what we’ve heard with a more tasteful speech. And my advice to Lysias, too, is to write as soon as possible a speech urging one to give similar favors to a lover rather than to a non-lover.

P
HAEDRUS
: You can be sure he will. For once you have spoken in praise [e] of the lover, I will most definitely make Lysias write a speech on the same topic.

S
OCRATES
: I do believe you will, so long as you are who you are.

P
HAEDRUS
: Speak on, then, in full confidence.

S
OCRATES
: Where, then, is the boy to whom I was speaking? Let him hear this speech, too. Otherwise he may be too quick to give his favors to the non-lover.

P
HAEDRUS
: He is here, always right by your side, whenever you want him.

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S
OCRATES
: You’ll have to understand, beautiful boy, that the previous speech was by Phaedrus, Pythocles’ son, from Myrrhinus, while the one I am about to deliver is by Stesichorus, Euphemus’ son, from Himera.
²¹
And here is how the speech should go:

“‘There’s no truth to that story’—that when a lover is available you should give your favors to a man who doesn’t love you instead, because he is in control of himself while the lover has lost his head. That would have been fine to say if madness were bad, pure and simple; but in fact the best things we have come from madness, when it is given as a gift of the god.

[b] “The prophetess of Delphi and the priestesses at Dodona are out of their minds when they perform that fine work of theirs for all of Greece, either for an individual person or for a whole city, but they accomplish little or nothing when they are in control of themselves. We will not mention the Sybil or the others who foretell many things by means of god-inspired prophetic trances and give sound guidance to many people—that would take too much time for a point that’s obvious to everyone. But here’s some evidence worth adding to our case: The people who designed our language in the old days never thought of madness as something to be ashamed of or worthy of blame; otherwise they would not have used the word ‘manic’ for the finest experts of all—the ones who tell the future—thereby weaving [c] insanity into prophecy. They thought it was wonderful when it came as a gift of the god, and that’s why they gave its name to prophecy; but nowadays people don’t know the fine points, so they stick in a ‘t’ and call it ‘
mantic
.’ Similarly, the clear-headed study of the future, which uses birds and other signs, was originally called
oionoïstic
, since it uses reasoning to bring intelligence (
nous
) and learning (
historia
) into human thought; but now modern speakers call it
oi
ō
nistic
, putting on airs with their long ‘
ō
’. [d] To the extent, then, that prophecy,
mantic
, is more perfect and more admirable than sign-based prediction,
oi
ō
nistic
, in both name and achievement, madness (
mania
) from a god is finer than self-control of human origin, according to the testimony of the ancient language givers.

“Next, madness can provide relief from the greatest plagues of trouble that beset certain families because of their guilt for ancient crimes: it turns up among those who need a way out; it gives prophecies and takes refuge [e] in prayers to the gods and in worship, discovering mystic rites and purifications that bring the man it touches
²²
through to safety for this and all time to come. So it is that the right sort of madness finds relief from present hardships for a man it has possessed.

“Third comes the kind of madness that is possession by the Muses,
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which takes a tender virgin soul and awakens it to a Bacchic frenzy of songs and poetry that glorifies the achievements of the past and teaches them to future generations. If anyone comes to the gates of poetry and expects to become an adequate poet by acquiring expert knowledge of the subject without the Muses’ madness, he will fail, and his self-controlled verses will be eclipsed by the poetry of men who have been driven out of their minds.

“There you have some of the fine achievements—and I could tell you [b] even more—that are due to god-sent madness. We must not have any fear on this particular point, then, and we must not let anyone disturb us or frighten us with the claim that you should prefer a friend who is in control of himself to one who is disturbed. Besides proving that point, if he is to win his case, our opponent must show that love is not sent by the gods as a benefit to a lover and his boy. And we, for our part, must prove the opposite, that this sort of madness is given us by the gods to ensure our greatest good fortune. It will be a proof that convinces the wise if not [c] the clever.