ΦΑΙΔΡΟΣ
Thomas Taylor (1804)
Plato · Thomas Taylor (1804)
Scene: The Banks of the Ilissus
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: Whither are you going, my dear Phædrus, and from whence came you?
Phædrus: From Lysias, the son of Cephalus, Socrates; but I am going, for the sake of walking, beyond the walls of the city. For I have been sitting with him a long time, indeed from very early in the morning till now. But being persuaded by Acumenus, who is your associate as well as mine, to take some exercise, I determined upon that of walking. For he said that this kind of exercise was not so laborious, and at the same time was more healthful, than that of the course.
Socrates: He speaks well, my friend, on this subject: and so Lysias then, as it seems, was in the city.
Phædrus: He was. For he dwells with Epicrates in this house of Morychus, which is next to that of Olympius.
Socrates: But what was his employment there? Or did not Lysias treat you with a banquet of orations?
Phædrus: You shall hear, if you have but leisure to walk along with me, and attend.
Socrates: But what, do you not think that I, according to Pindar, would consider as a thing superior to business, the relation of your conversation with Lysias?
Phædrus: Go on then.
Socrates: Begin the relation then.
Phædrus: And indeed, Socrates, the hearing of this is proper for you. For I do not know how it happened so, but our discourse was amatory. For Lysias, through the persuasion of some beautiful person, though not one of his lovers, had composed an oration on love, and this in a very elegant manner: in the course of which he asserts that one who does not love ought to be gratified rather than a lover.
Socrates: Generous man! I wish he had likewise asserted that this should be the case with the poor rather than the rich, the old than the young, and so in all the rest, that thus I myself, and many more of us, might be gratified: for then his discourse would have been both polite and publicly useful. I am therefore so desirous of hearing his oration, that if you should even walk as far as to Megara, and, like Herodicus, when you had reached the walls, immediately turn back again, I should not leave you.
Phædrus: What do you say, most excellent Socrates? Do you think me so much of an idiot as to suppose myself capable of relating, in such a manner as it deserves, a discourse which Lysias, the most skilful writer of the present age, was a long time in composing at his leisure? I am certainly very far from entertaining such a supposition: though I would rather be able to do this than be the possesser of a great quantity of gold.
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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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