ΦΑΙΔΡΟΣ
Benjamin Jowett
Plato · Benjamin Jowett
Scene: outside the city walls of Athens, by the Ilissus river
Set in the countryside outside Athens, the Phaedrus moves from speeches on love to a profound myth of the soul as a winged charioteer drawn by two horses, which once beheld the Forms in the train of the gods and, fallen into body, may regain its wings through love of beauty. Beauty alone, Plato says, shines through to the senses and so awakens recollection of the divine.
The dialogue then turns to rhetoric and the art of dialectic — defined here as 'collection and division' — and ends with a famous critique of the written word, which, unlike living speech, cannot answer when questioned.
From the Plato Scroll Encyclopedia · open this entry in the reader
Socrates: My dear Phaedrus, whence come you, and whither are you going?
Phaedrus: I come from Lysias the son of Cephalus, and I am going to take a walk outside the wall, for I have been sitting with him the whole morning; and our common friend Acumenus tells me that it is much more refreshing to walk in the open air than to be shut up in a cloister.
Socrates: There he is right. Lysias then, I suppose, was in the town?
Phaedrus: Yes, he was staying with Epicrates, here at the house of Morychus; that house which is near the temple of Olympian Zeus.
Socrates: And how did he entertain you? Can I be wrong in supposing that Lysias gave you a feast of discourse?
Phaedrus: You shall hear, if you can spare time to accompany me.
Socrates: And should I not deem the conversation of you and Lysias ‘a thing of higher import,’ as I may say in the words of Pindar, ‘than any business’?
Phaedrus: Will you go on?
Socrates: And will you go on with the narration?
Phaedrus: My tale, Socrates, is one of your sort, for love was the theme which occupied us — love after a fashion: Lysias has been writing about a fair youth who was being tempted, but not by a lover; and this was the point: he ingeniously proved that the non-lover should be accepted rather than the lover.
Socrates: O that is noble of him! I wish that he would say the poor man rather than the rich, and the old man rather than the young one; — then he would meet the case of me and of many a man; his words would be quite refreshing, and he would be a public benefactor. For my part, I do so long to hear his speech, that if you walk all the way to Megara, and when you have reached the wall come back, as Herodicus recommends, without going in, I will keep you company.
Phaedrus: What do you mean, my good Socrates? How can you imagine that my unpractised memory can do justice to an elaborate work, which the greatest rhetorician of the age spent a long time in composing. Indeed, I cannot; I would give a great deal if I could.
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The Athenian who turned Socratic conversation into a written philosophy and founded the Academy.
Plato was born around 428 BCE into a wealthy and politically prominent Athenian family; through his mother Perictione the family traced kinship to the lawgiver Solon, and his relatives Critias and Charmides were among the oligarchs of the Thirty. A late tradition says his given name was Aristocles and that 'Plato' — from the word for 'broad' — was a nickname. He grew up during the long agony of the Peloponnesian War and came of age amid the violence and disillusion that followed Athens' defeat.
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