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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Phaedrus, by Plato
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Phaedrus
+
+Author: Plato
+
+Translator: B. Jowett
+
+Posting Date: October 30, 2008 [EBook #1636]
+Release Date: February 1999
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PHAEDRUS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Sue Asscher
+
+
+
+
+
+PHAEDRUS
+
+By Plato
+
+
+Translated by Benjamin Jowett
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+The Phaedrus is closely connected with the Symposium, and may be
+regarded either as introducing or following it. The two Dialogues
+together contain the whole philosophy of Plato on the nature of love,
+which in the Republic and in the later writings of Plato is only
+introduced playfully or as a figure of speech. But in the Phaedrus and
+Symposium love and philosophy join hands, and one is an aspect of the
+other. The spiritual and emotional part is elevated into the ideal, to
+which in the Symposium mankind are described as looking forward, and
+which in the Phaedrus, as well as in the Phaedo, they are seeking to
+recover from a former state of existence. Whether the subject of the
+Dialogue is love or rhetoric, or the union of the two, or the relation
+of philosophy to love and to art in general, and to the human soul, will
+be hereafter considered. And perhaps we may arrive at some conclusion
+such as the following--that the dialogue is not strictly confined to a
+single subject, but passes from one to another with the natural freedom
+of conversation.
+
+Phaedrus has been spending the morning with Lysias, the celebrated
+rhetorician, and is going to refresh himself by taking a walk outside
+the wall, when he is met by Socrates, who professes that he will not
+leave him until he has delivered up the speech with which Lysias
+has regaled him, and which he is carrying about in his mind, or more
+probably in a book hidden under his cloak, and is intending to study
+as he walks. The imputation is not denied, and the two agree to direct
+their steps out of the public way along the stream of the Ilissus
+towards a plane-tree which is seen in the distance. There, lying down
+amidst pleasant sounds and scents, they will read the speech of Lysias.
+The country is a novelty to Socrates, who never goes out of the town;
+and hence he is full of admiration for the beauties of nature, which he
+seems to be drinking in for the first time.
+
+As they are on their way, Phaedrus asks the opinion of Socrates
+respecting the local tradition of Boreas and Oreithyia. Socrates, after
+a satirical allusion to the 'rationalizers' of his day, replies that he
+has no time for these 'nice' interpretations of mythology, and he pities
+anyone who has. When you once begin there is no end of them, and they
+spring from an uncritical philosophy after all. 'The proper study of
+mankind is man;' and he is a far more complex and wonderful being than
+the serpent Typho. Socrates as yet does not know himself; and why should
+he care to know about unearthly monsters? Engaged in such conversation,
+they arrive at the plane-tree; when they have found a convenient
+resting-place, Phaedrus pulls out the speech and reads:--
+
+The speech consists of a foolish paradox which is to the effect that the
+non-lover ought to be accepted rather than the lover--because he is more
+rational, more agreeable, more enduring, less suspicious, less hurtful,
+less boastful, less engrossing, and because there are more of them, and
+for a great many other reasons which are equally unmeaning. Phaedrus is
+captivated with the beauty of the periods, and wants to make Socrates
+say that nothing was or ever could be written better. Socrates does not
+think much of the matter, but then he has only attended to the form, and
+in that he has detected several repetitions and other marks of haste. He
+cannot agree with Phaedrus in the extreme value which he sets upon this
+performance, because he is afraid of doing injustice to Anacreon and
+Sappho and other great writers, and is almost inclined to think that he
+himself, or rather some power residing within him, could make a speech
+better than that of Lysias on the same theme, and also different from
+his, if he may be allowed the use of a few commonplaces which all
+speakers must equally employ.
+
+Phaedrus is delighted at the prospect of having another speech, and
+promises that he will set up a golden statue of Socrates at Delphi,
+if he keeps his word. Some raillery ensues, and at length Socrates,
+conquered by the threat that he shall never again hear a speech of
+Lysias unless he fulfils his promise, veils his face and begins.
+
+First, invoking the Muses and assuming ironically the person of the
+non-lover (who is a lover all the same), he will enquire into the nature
+and power of love. For this is a necessary preliminary to the other
+question--How is the non-lover to be distinguished from the lover? In
+all of us there are two principles--a better and a worse--reason and
+desire, which are generally at war with one another; and the victory
+of the rational is called temperance, and the victory of the irrational
+intemperance or excess. The latter takes many forms and has many bad
+names--gluttony, drunkenness, and the like. But of all the irrational
+desires or excesses the greatest is that which is led away by desires
+of a kindred nature to the enjoyment of personal beauty. And this is the
+master power of love.
+
+Here Socrates fancies that he detects in himself an unusual flow
+of eloquence--this newly-found gift he can only attribute to the
+inspiration of the place, which appears to be dedicated to the nymphs.
+Starting again from the philosophical basis which has been laid down, he
+proceeds to show how many advantages the non-lover has over the lover.
+The one encourages softness and effeminacy and exclusiveness; he cannot
+endure any superiority in his beloved; he will train him in luxury, he
+will keep him out of society, he will deprive him of parents, friends,
+money, knowledge, and of every other good, that he may have him all to
+himself. Then again his ways are not ways of pleasantness; he is mighty
+disagreeable; 'crabbed age and youth cannot live together.' At every
+hour of the night and day he is intruding upon him; there is the
+same old withered face and the remainder to match--and he is always
+repeating, in season or out of season, the praises or dispraises of his
+beloved, which are bad enough when he is sober, and published all over
+the world when he is drunk. At length his love ceases; he is converted
+into an enemy, and the spectacle may be seen of the lover running away
+from the beloved, who pursues him with vain reproaches, and demands
+his reward which the other refuses to pay. Too late the beloved learns,
+after all his pains and disagreeables, that 'As wolves love lambs so
+lovers love their loves.' (Compare Char.) Here is the end; the 'other'
+or 'non-lover' part of the speech had better be understood, for if in
+the censure of the lover Socrates has broken out in verse, what will
+he not do in his praise of the non-lover? He has said his say and is
+preparing to go away.
+
+Phaedrus begs him to remain, at any rate until the heat of noon has
+passed; he would like to have a little more conversation before they go.
+Socrates, who has risen, recognizes the oracular sign which forbids him
+to depart until he has done penance. His conscious has been awakened,
+and like Stesichorus when he had reviled the lovely Helen he will sing
+a palinode for having blasphemed the majesty of love. His palinode takes
+the form of a myth.
+
+Socrates begins his tale with a glorification of madness, which he
+divides into four kinds: first, there is the art of divination or
+prophecy--this, in a vein similar to that pervading the Cratylus and
+Io, he connects with madness by an etymological explanation (mantike,
+manike--compare oionoistike, oionistike, ''tis all one reckoning, save
+the phrase is a little variations'); secondly, there is the art of
+purification by mysteries; thirdly, poetry or the inspiration of the
+Muses (compare Ion), without which no man can enter their temple. All
+this shows that madness is one of heaven's blessings, and may sometimes
+be a great deal better than sense. There is also a fourth kind of
+madness--that of love--which cannot be explained without enquiring into
+the nature of the soul.
+
+All soul is immortal, for she is the source of all motion both in
+herself and in others. Her form may be described in a figure as a
+composite nature made up of a charioteer and a pair of winged steeds.
+The steeds of the gods are immortal, but ours are one mortal and the
+other immortal. The immortal soul soars upwards into the heavens, but
+the mortal drops her plumes and settles upon the earth.
+
+Now the use of the wing is to rise and carry the downward element into
+the upper world--there to behold beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the other
+things of God by which the soul is nourished. On a certain day Zeus the
+lord of heaven goes forth in a winged chariot; and an array of gods
+and demi-gods and of human souls in their train, follows him. There are
+glorious and blessed sights in the interior of heaven, and he who will
+may freely behold them. The great vision of all is seen at the feast of
+the gods, when they ascend the heights of the empyrean--all but Hestia,
+who is left at home to keep house. The chariots of the gods glide
+readily upwards and stand upon the outside; the revolution of the
+spheres carries them round, and they have a vision of the world beyond.
+But the others labour in vain; for the mortal steed, if he has not been
+properly trained, keeps them down and sinks them towards the earth. Of
+the world which is beyond the heavens, who can tell? There is an essence
+formless, colourless, intangible, perceived by the mind only, dwelling
+in the region of true knowledge. The divine mind in her revolution
+enjoys this fair prospect, and beholds justice, temperance, and
+knowledge in their everlasting essence. When fulfilled with the sight
+of them she returns home, and the charioteer puts up the horses in their
+stable, and gives them ambrosia to eat and nectar to drink. This is the
+life of the gods; the human soul tries to reach the same heights, but
+hardly succeeds; and sometimes the head of the charioteer rises above,
+and sometimes sinks below, the fair vision, and he is at last obliged,
+after much contention, to turn away and leave the plain of truth. But if
+the soul has followed in the train of her god and once beheld truth she
+is preserved from harm, and is carried round in the next revolution of
+the spheres; and if always following, and always seeing the truth, is
+then for ever unharmed. If, however, she drops her wings and falls to
+the earth, then she takes the form of man, and the soul which has seen
+most of the truth passes into a philosopher or lover; that which has
+seen truth in the second degree, into a king or warrior; the third, into
+a householder or money-maker; the fourth, into a gymnast; the fifth,
+into a prophet or mystic; the sixth, into a poet or imitator; the
+seventh, into a husbandman or craftsman; the eighth, into a sophist or
+demagogue; the ninth, into a tyrant. All these are states of probation,
+wherein he who lives righteously is improved, and he who lives
+unrighteously deteriorates. After death comes the judgment; the bad
+depart to houses of correction under the earth, the good to places
+of joy in heaven. When a thousand years have elapsed the souls meet
+together and choose the lives which they will lead for another period of
+existence. The soul which three times in succession has chosen the life
+of a philosopher or of a lover who is not without philosophy receives
+her wings at the close of the third millennium; the remainder have to
+complete a cycle of ten thousand years before their wings are restored
+to them. Each time there is full liberty of choice. The soul of a man
+may descend into a beast, and return again into the form of man. But the
+form of man will only be taken by the soul which has once seen truth and
+acquired some conception of the universal:--this is the recollection of
+the knowledge which she attained when in the company of the Gods. And
+men in general recall only with difficulty the things of another world,
+but the mind of the philosopher has a better remembrance of them. For
+when he beholds the visible beauty of earth his enraptured soul passes
+in thought to those glorious sights of justice and wisdom and temperance
+and truth which she once gazed upon in heaven. Then she celebrated holy
+mysteries and beheld blessed apparitions shining in pure light, herself
+pure, and not as yet entombed in the body. And still, like a bird eager
+to quit its cage, she flutters and looks upwards, and is therefore
+deemed mad. Such a recollection of past days she receives through sight,
+the keenest of our senses, because beauty, alone of the ideas, has any
+representation on earth: wisdom is invisible to mortal eyes. But the
+corrupted nature, blindly excited by this vision of beauty, rushes on
+to enjoy, and would fain wallow like a brute beast in sensual pleasures.
+Whereas the true mystic, who has seen the many sights of bliss, when he
+beholds a god-like form or face is amazed with delight, and if he were
+not afraid of being thought mad he would fall down and worship. Then
+the stiffened wing begins to relax and grow again; desire which has
+been imprisoned pours over the soul of the lover; the germ of the wing
+unfolds, and stings, and pangs of birth, like the cutting of teeth, are
+everywhere felt. (Compare Symp.) Father and mother, and goods and laws
+and proprieties are nothing to him; his beloved is his physician, who
+can alone cure his pain. An apocryphal sacred writer says that the power
+which thus works in him is by mortals called love, but the immortals
+call him dove, or the winged one, in order to represent the force of
+his wings--such at any rate is his nature. Now the characters of lovers
+depend upon the god whom they followed in the other world; and they
+choose their loves in this world accordingly. The followers of Ares
+are fierce and violent; those of Zeus seek out some philosophical and
+imperial nature; the attendants of Here find a royal love; and in like
+manner the followers of every god seek a love who is like their god; and
+to him they communicate the nature which they have received from their
+god. The manner in which they take their love is as follows:--
+
+I told you about the charioteer and his two steeds, the one a noble
+animal who is guided by word and admonition only, the other an
+ill-looking villain who will hardly yield to blow or spur. Together all
+three, who are a figure of the soul, approach the vision of love. And
+now a fierce conflict begins. The ill-conditioned steed rushes on to
+enjoy, but the charioteer, who beholds the beloved with awe, falls back
+in adoration, and forces both the steeds on their haunches; again the
+evil steed rushes forwards and pulls shamelessly. The conflict grows
+more and more severe; and at last the charioteer, throwing himself
+backwards, forces the bit out of the clenched teeth of the brute, and
+pulling harder than ever at the reins, covers his tongue and jaws with
+blood, and forces him to rest his legs and haunches with pain upon the
+ground. When this has happened several times, the villain is tamed and
+humbled, and from that time forward the soul of the lover follows the
+beloved in modesty and holy fear. And now their bliss is consummated;
+the same image of love dwells in the breast of either, and if they have
+self-control, they pass their lives in the greatest happiness which is
+attainable by man--they continue masters of themselves, and conquer in
+one of the three heavenly victories. But if they choose the lower
+life of ambition they may still have a happy destiny, though inferior,
+because they have not the approval of the whole soul. At last they leave
+the body and proceed on their pilgrim's progress, and those who have
+once begun can never go back. When the time comes they receive their
+wings and fly away, and the lovers have the same wings.
+
+Socrates concludes:--
+
+These are the blessings of love, and thus have I made my recantation in
+finer language than before: I did so in order to please Phaedrus. If I
+said what was wrong at first, please to attribute my error to Lysias,
+who ought to study philosophy instead of rhetoric, and then he will not
+mislead his disciple Phaedrus.
+
+Phaedrus is afraid that he will lose conceit of Lysias, and that Lysias
+will be out of conceit with himself, and leave off making speeches,
+for the politicians have been deriding him. Socrates is of opinion that
+there is small danger of this; the politicians are themselves the
+great rhetoricians of the age, who desire to attain immortality by the
+authorship of laws. And therefore there is nothing with which they can
+reproach Lysias in being a writer; but there may be disgrace in being a
+bad one.
+
+And what is good or bad writing or speaking? While the sun is hot in the
+sky above us, let us ask that question: since by rational conversation
+man lives, and not by the indulgence of bodily pleasures. And the
+grasshoppers who are chirruping around may carry our words to the
+Muses, who are their patronesses; for the grasshoppers were human beings
+themselves in a world before the Muses, and when the Muses came they
+died of hunger for the love of song. And they carry to them in heaven
+the report of those who honour them on earth.
+
+The first rule of good speaking is to know and speak the truth; as a
+Spartan proverb says, 'true art is truth'; whereas rhetoric is an art of
+enchantment, which makes things appear good and evil, like and unlike,
+as the speaker pleases. Its use is not confined, as people commonly
+suppose, to arguments in the law courts and speeches in the assembly;
+it is rather a part of the art of disputation, under which are included
+both the rules of Gorgias and the eristic of Zeno. But it is not wholly
+devoid of truth. Superior knowledge enables us to deceive another by the
+help of resemblances, and to escape from such a deception when employed
+against ourselves. We see therefore that even in rhetoric an element of
+truth is required. For if we do not know the truth, we can neither make
+the gradual departures from truth by which men are most easily deceived,
+nor guard ourselves against deception.
+
+Socrates then proposes that they shall use the two speeches as
+illustrations of the art of rhetoric; first distinguishing between the
+debatable and undisputed class of subjects. In the debatable class there
+ought to be a definition of all disputed matters. But there was no such
+definition in the speech of Lysias; nor is there any order or connection
+in his words any more than in a nursery rhyme. With this he compares the
+regular divisions of the other speech, which was his own (and yet not
+his own, for the local deities must have inspired him). Although only a
+playful composition, it will be found to embody two principles: first,
+that of synthesis or the comprehension of parts in a whole; secondly,
+analysis, or the resolution of the whole into parts. These are the
+processes of division and generalization which are so dear to the
+dialectician, that king of men. They are effected by dialectic, and
+not by rhetoric, of which the remains are but scanty after order and
+arrangement have been subtracted. There is nothing left but a heap
+of 'ologies' and other technical terms invented by Polus, Theodorus,
+Evenus, Tisias, Gorgias, and others, who have rules for everything, and
+who teach how to be short or long at pleasure. Prodicus showed his good
+sense when he said that there was a better thing than either to be short
+or long, which was to be of convenient length.
+
+Still, notwithstanding the absurdities of Polus and others, rhetoric has
+great power in public assemblies. This power, however, is not given by
+any technical rules, but is the gift of genius. The real art is always
+being confused by rhetoricians with the preliminaries of the art. The
+perfection of oratory is like the perfection of anything else; natural
+power must be aided by art. But the art is not that which is taught in
+the schools of rhetoric; it is nearer akin to philosophy. Pericles, for
+instance, who was the most accomplished of all speakers, derived his
+eloquence not from rhetoric but from the philosophy of nature which
+he learnt of Anaxagoras. True rhetoric is like medicine, and the
+rhetorician has to consider the natures of men's souls as the physician
+considers the natures of their bodies. Such and such persons are to be
+affected in this way, such and such others in that; and he must know the
+times and the seasons for saying this or that. This is not an easy task,
+and this, if there be such an art, is the art of rhetoric.
+
+I know that there are some professors of the art who maintain
+probability to be stronger than truth. But we maintain that probability
+is engendered by likeness of the truth which can only be attained by
+the knowledge of it, and that the aim of the good man should not be to
+please or persuade his fellow-servants, but to please his good masters
+who are the gods. Rhetoric has a fair beginning in this.
+
+Enough of the art of speaking; let us now proceed to consider the true
+use of writing. There is an old Egyptian tale of Theuth, the inventor of
+writing, showing his invention to the god Thamus, who told him that he
+would only spoil men's memories and take away their understandings. From
+this tale, of which young Athens will probably make fun, may be gathered
+the lesson that writing is inferior to speech. For it is like a picture,
+which can give no answer to a question, and has only a deceitful
+likeness of a living creature. It has no power of adaptation, but uses
+the same words for all. It is not a legitimate son of knowledge, but a
+bastard, and when an attack is made upon this bastard neither parent
+nor anyone else is there to defend it. The husbandman will not seriously
+incline to sow his seed in such a hot-bed or garden of Adonis; he will
+rather sow in the natural soil of the human soul which has depth of
+earth; and he will anticipate the inner growth of the mind, by writing
+only, if at all, as a remedy against old age. The natural process will
+be far nobler, and will bring forth fruit in the minds of others as well
+as in his own.
+
+The conclusion of the whole matter is just this,--that until a man knows
+the truth, and the manner of adapting the truth to the natures of other
+men, he cannot be a good orator; also, that the living is better than
+the written word, and that the principles of justice and truth when
+delivered by word of mouth are the legitimate offspring of a man's own
+bosom, and their lawful descendants take up their abode in others.
+Such an orator as he is who is possessed of them, you and I would fain
+become. And to all composers in the world, poets, orators, legislators,
+we hereby announce that if their compositions are based upon these
+principles, then they are not only poets, orators, legislators, but
+philosophers. All others are mere flatterers and putters together of
+words. This is the message which Phaedrus undertakes to carry to Lysias
+from the local deities, and Socrates himself will carry a similar
+message to his favourite Isocrates, whose future distinction as a great
+rhetorician he prophesies. The heat of the day has passed, and after
+offering up a prayer to Pan and the nymphs, Socrates and Phaedrus
+depart.
+
+There are two principal controversies which have been raised about the
+Phaedrus; the first relates to the subject, the second to the date of
+the Dialogue.
+
+There seems to be a notion that the work of a great artist like Plato
+cannot fail in unity, and that the unity of a dialogue requires a single
+subject. But the conception of unity really applies in very different
+degrees and ways to different kinds of art; to a statue, for example,
+far more than to any kind of literary composition, and to some species
+of literature far more than to others. Nor does the dialogue appear
+to be a style of composition in which the requirement of unity is most
+stringent; nor should the idea of unity derived from one sort of art
+be hastily transferred to another. The double titles of several of the
+Platonic Dialogues are a further proof that the severer rule was not
+observed by Plato. The Republic is divided between the search after
+justice and the construction of the ideal state; the Parmenides between
+the criticism of the Platonic ideas and of the Eleatic one or being;
+the Gorgias between the art of speaking and the nature of the good;
+the Sophist between the detection of the Sophist and the correlation
+of ideas. The Theaetetus, the Politicus, and the Philebus have also
+digressions which are but remotely connected with the main subject.
+
+Thus the comparison of Plato's other writings, as well as the reason of
+the thing, lead us to the conclusion that we must not expect to find one
+idea pervading a whole work, but one, two, or more, as the invention
+of the writer may suggest, or his fancy wander. If each dialogue were
+confined to the development of a single idea, this would appear on the
+face of the dialogue, nor could any controversy be raised as to whether
+the Phaedrus treated of love or rhetoric. But the truth is that Plato
+subjects himself to no rule of this sort. Like every great artist he
+gives unity of form to the different and apparently distracting topics
+which he brings together. He works freely and is not to be supposed to
+have arranged every part of the dialogue before he begins to write.
+He fastens or weaves together the frame of his discourse loosely and
+imperfectly, and which is the warp and which is the woof cannot always
+be determined.
+
+The subjects of the Phaedrus (exclusive of the short introductory
+passage about mythology which is suggested by the local tradition) are
+first the false or conventional art of rhetoric; secondly, love or the
+inspiration of beauty and knowledge, which is described as madness;
+thirdly, dialectic or the art of composition and division; fourthly, the
+true rhetoric, which is based upon dialectic, and is neither the art of
+persuasion nor knowledge of the truth alone, but the art of persuasion
+founded on knowledge of truth and knowledge of character; fifthly, the
+superiority of the spoken over the written word. The continuous thread
+which appears and reappears throughout is rhetoric; this is the ground
+into which the rest of the Dialogue is worked, in parts embroidered with
+fine words which are not in Socrates' manner, as he says, 'in order to
+please Phaedrus.' The speech of Lysias which has thrown Phaedrus into an
+ecstacy is adduced as an example of the false rhetoric; the first speech
+of Socrates, though an improvement, partakes of the same character; his
+second speech, which is full of that higher element said to have been
+learned of Anaxagoras by Pericles, and which in the midst of poetry does
+not forget order, is an illustration of the higher or true rhetoric.
+This higher rhetoric is based upon dialectic, and dialectic is a sort
+of inspiration akin to love (compare Symp.); in these two aspects of
+philosophy the technicalities of rhetoric are absorbed. And so the
+example becomes also the deeper theme of discourse. The true knowledge
+of things in heaven and earth is based upon enthusiasm or love of
+the ideas going before us and ever present to us in this world and in
+another; and the true order of speech or writing proceeds accordingly.
+Love, again, has three degrees: first, of interested love corresponding
+to the conventionalities of rhetoric; secondly, of disinterested or
+mad love, fixed on objects of sense, and answering, perhaps, to poetry;
+thirdly, of disinterested love directed towards the unseen, answering
+to dialectic or the science of the ideas. Lastly, the art of rhetoric
+in the lower sense is found to rest on a knowledge of the natures and
+characters of men, which Socrates at the commencement of the Dialogue
+has described as his own peculiar study.
+
+Thus amid discord a harmony begins to appear; there are many links of
+connection which are not visible at first sight. At the same time the
+Phaedrus, although one of the most beautiful of the Platonic Dialogues,
+is also more irregular than any other. For insight into the world, for
+sustained irony, for depth of thought, there is no Dialogue superior,
+or perhaps equal to it. Nevertheless the form of the work has tended to
+obscure some of Plato's higher aims.
+
+The first speech is composed 'in that balanced style in which the wise
+love to talk' (Symp.). The characteristics of rhetoric are insipidity,
+mannerism, and monotonous parallelism of clauses. There is more rhythm
+than reason; the creative power of imagination is wanting.
+
+''Tis Greece, but living Greece no more.'
+
+Plato has seized by anticipation the spirit which hung over Greek
+literature for a thousand years afterwards. Yet doubtless there were
+some who, like Phaedrus, felt a delight in the harmonious cadence and
+the pedantic reasoning of the rhetoricians newly imported from Sicily,
+which had ceased to be awakened in them by really great works, such as
+the odes of Anacreon or Sappho or the orations of Pericles. That the
+first speech was really written by Lysias is improbable. Like the poem
+of Solon, or the story of Thamus and Theuth, or the funeral oration of
+Aspasia (if genuine), or the pretence of Socrates in the Cratylus that
+his knowledge of philology is derived from Euthyphro, the invention
+is really due to the imagination of Plato, and may be compared to the
+parodies of the Sophists in the Protagoras. Numerous fictions of this
+sort occur in the Dialogues, and the gravity of Plato has sometimes
+imposed upon his commentators. The introduction of a considerable
+writing of another would seem not to be in keeping with a great work of
+art, and has no parallel elsewhere.
+
+In the second speech Socrates is exhibited as beating the rhetoricians
+at their own weapons; he 'an unpractised man and they masters of the
+art.' True to his character, he must, however, profess that the speech
+which he makes is not his own, for he knows nothing of himself. (Compare
+Symp.) Regarded as a rhetorical exercise, the superiority of his speech
+seems to consist chiefly in a better arrangement of the topics; he
+begins with a definition of love, and he gives weight to his words by
+going back to general maxims; a lesser merit is the greater liveliness
+of Socrates, which hurries him into verse and relieves the monotony of
+the style.
+
+But Plato had doubtless a higher purpose than to exhibit Socrates as the
+rival or superior of the Athenian rhetoricians. Even in the speech of
+Lysias there is a germ of truth, and this is further developed in the
+parallel oration of Socrates. First, passionate love is overthrown by
+the sophistical or interested, and then both yield to that higher view
+of love which is afterwards revealed to us. The extreme of commonplace
+is contrasted with the most ideal and imaginative of speculations.
+Socrates, half in jest and to satisfy his own wild humour, takes the
+disguise of Lysias, but he is also in profound earnest and in a deeper
+vein of irony than usual. Having improvised his own speech, which is
+based upon the model of the preceding, he condemns them both. Yet the
+condemnation is not to be taken seriously, for he is evidently trying
+to express an aspect of the truth. To understand him, we must make
+abstraction of morality and of the Greek manner of regarding the
+relation of the sexes. In this, as in his other discussions about love,
+what Plato says of the loves of men must be transferred to the loves
+of women before we can attach any serious meaning to his words. Had he
+lived in our times he would have made the transposition himself. But
+seeing in his own age the impossibility of woman being the intellectual
+helpmate or friend of man (except in the rare instances of a Diotima
+or an Aspasia), seeing that, even as to personal beauty, her place was
+taken by young mankind instead of womankind, he tries to work out the
+problem of love without regard to the distinctions of nature. And full
+of the evils which he recognized as flowing from the spurious form of
+love, he proceeds with a deep meaning, though partly in joke, to show
+that the 'non-lover's' love is better than the 'lover's.'
+
+We may raise the same question in another form: Is marriage preferable
+with or without love? 'Among ourselves,' as we may say, a little
+parodying the words of Pausanias in the Symposium, 'there would be
+one answer to this question: the practice and feeling of some foreign
+countries appears to be more doubtful.' Suppose a modern Socrates,
+in defiance of the received notions of society and the sentimental
+literature of the day, alone against all the writers and readers of
+novels, to suggest this enquiry, would not the younger 'part of the
+world be ready to take off its coat and run at him might and main?'
+(Republic.) Yet, if like Peisthetaerus in Aristophanes, he could
+persuade the 'birds' to hear him, retiring a little behind a rampart,
+not of pots and dishes, but of unreadable books, he might have something
+to say for himself. Might he not argue, 'that a rational being should
+not follow the dictates of passion in the most important act of his or
+her life'? Who would willingly enter into a contract at first sight,
+almost without thought, against the advice and opinion of his friends,
+at a time when he acknowledges that he is not in his right mind? And yet
+they are praised by the authors of romances, who reject the warnings of
+their friends or parents, rather than those who listen to them in such
+matters. Two inexperienced persons, ignorant of the world and of one
+another, how can they be said to choose?--they draw lots, whence also
+the saying, 'marriage is a lottery.' Then he would describe their way of
+life after marriage; how they monopolize one another's affections to
+the exclusion of friends and relations: how they pass their days in
+unmeaning fondness or trivial conversation; how the inferior of the
+two drags the other down to his or her level; how the cares of a family
+'breed meanness in their souls.' In the fulfilment of military or public
+duties, they are not helpers but hinderers of one another: they cannot
+undertake any noble enterprise, such as makes the names of men and women
+famous, from domestic considerations. Too late their eyes are opened;
+they were taken unawares and desire to part company. Better, he would
+say, a 'little love at the beginning,' for heaven might have increased
+it; but now their foolish fondness has changed into mutual dislike. In
+the days of their honeymoon they never understood that they must provide
+against offences, that they must have interests, that they must learn
+the art of living as well as loving. Our misogamist will not appeal to
+Anacreon or Sappho for a confirmation of his view, but to the universal
+experience of mankind. How much nobler, in conclusion, he will say, is
+friendship, which does not receive unmeaning praises from novelists and
+poets, is not exacting or exclusive, is not impaired by familiarity, is
+much less expensive, is not so likely to take offence, seldom changes,
+and may be dissolved from time to time without the assistance of the
+courts. Besides, he will remark that there is a much greater choice of
+friends than of wives--you may have more of them and they will be far
+more improving to your mind. They will not keep you dawdling at home, or
+dancing attendance upon them; or withdraw you from the great world and
+stirring scenes of life and action which would make a man of you.
+
+In such a manner, turning the seamy side outwards, a modern Socrates
+might describe the evils of married and domestic life. They are evils
+which mankind in general have agreed to conceal, partly because they are
+compensated by greater goods. Socrates or Archilochus would soon have
+to sing a palinode for the injustice done to lovely Helen, or some
+misfortune worse than blindness might be fall them. Then they would take
+up their parable again and say:--that there were two loves, a higher and
+a lower, holy and unholy, a love of the mind and a love of the body.
+
+     'Let me not to the marriage of true minds
+     Admit impediments.  Love is not love
+     Which alters when it alteration finds.
+
+               .....
+
+     Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
+     Within his bending sickle's compass come;
+     Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
+     But bears it out even to the edge of doom.'
+
+But this true love of the mind cannot exist between two souls, until
+they are purified from the grossness of earthly passion: they must pass
+through a time of trial and conflict first; in the language of religion
+they must be converted or born again. Then they would see the world
+transformed into a scene of heavenly beauty; a divine idea would
+accompany them in all their thoughts and actions. Something too of the
+recollections of childhood might float about them still; they might
+regain that old simplicity which had been theirs in other days at their
+first entrance on life. And although their love of one another was ever
+present to them, they would acknowledge also a higher love of duty and
+of God, which united them. And their happiness would depend upon their
+preserving in them this principle--not losing the ideals of justice and
+holiness and truth, but renewing them at the fountain of light. When
+they have attained to this exalted state, let them marry (something too
+may be conceded to the animal nature of man): or live together in holy
+and innocent friendship. The poet might describe in eloquent words
+the nature of such a union; how after many struggles the true love was
+found: how the two passed their lives together in the service of God and
+man; how their characters were reflected upon one another, and seemed
+to grow more like year by year; how they read in one another's eyes the
+thoughts, wishes, actions of the other; how they saw each other in God;
+how in a figure they grew wings like doves, and were 'ready to fly away
+together and be at rest.' And lastly, he might tell how, after a time
+at no long intervals, first one and then the other fell asleep, and
+'appeared to the unwise' to die, but were reunited in another state of
+being, in which they saw justice and holiness and truth, not according
+to the imperfect copies of them which are found in this world, but
+justice absolute in existence absolute, and so of the rest. And they
+would hold converse not only with each other, but with blessed souls
+everywhere; and would be employed in the service of God, every soul
+fulfilling his own nature and character, and would see into the wonders
+of earth and heaven, and trace the works of creation to their author.
+
+So, partly in jest but also 'with a certain degree of seriousness,'
+we may appropriate to ourselves the words of Plato. The use of such a
+parody, though very imperfect, is to transfer his thoughts to our sphere
+of religion and feeling, to bring him nearer to us and us to him. Like
+the Scriptures, Plato admits of endless applications, if we allow for
+the difference of times and manners; and we lose the better half of
+him when we regard his Dialogues merely as literary compositions. Any
+ancient work which is worth reading has a practical and speculative as
+well as a literary interest. And in Plato, more than in any other Greek
+writer, the local and transitory is inextricably blended with what is
+spiritual and eternal. Socrates is necessarily ironical; for he has to
+withdraw from the received opinions and beliefs of mankind. We cannot
+separate the transitory from the permanent; nor can we translate the
+language of irony into that of plain reflection and common sense. But we
+can imagine the mind of Socrates in another age and country; and we can
+interpret him by analogy with reference to the errors and prejudices
+which prevail among ourselves. To return to the Phaedrus:--
+
+Both speeches are strongly condemned by Socrates as sinful and
+blasphemous towards the god Love, and as worthy only of some haunt of
+sailors to which good manners were unknown. The meaning of this and
+other wild language to the same effect, which is introduced by way of
+contrast to the formality of the two speeches (Socrates has a sense of
+relief when he has escaped from the trammels of rhetoric), seems to
+be that the two speeches proceed upon the supposition that love is
+and ought to be interested, and that no such thing as a real or
+disinterested passion, which would be at the same time lasting, could
+be conceived. 'But did I call this "love"? O God, forgive my blasphemy.
+This is not love. Rather it is the love of the world. But there is
+another kingdom of love, a kingdom not of this world, divine, eternal.
+And this other love I will now show you in a mystery.'
+
+Then follows the famous myth, which is a sort of parable, and like other
+parables ought not to receive too minute an interpretation. In all such
+allegories there is a great deal which is merely ornamental, and the
+interpreter has to separate the important from the unimportant. Socrates
+himself has given the right clue when, in using his own discourse
+afterwards as the text for his examination of rhetoric, he characterizes
+it as a 'partly true and tolerably credible mythus,' in which amid
+poetical figures, order and arrangement were not forgotten.
+
+The soul is described in magnificent language as the self-moved and the
+source of motion in all other things. This is the philosophical theme or
+proem of the whole. But ideas must be given through something, and under
+the pretext that to realize the true nature of the soul would be not
+only tedious but impossible, we at once pass on to describe the souls
+of gods as well as men under the figure of two winged steeds and a
+charioteer. No connection is traced between the soul as the great motive
+power and the triple soul which is thus imaged. There is no difficulty
+in seeing that the charioteer represents the reason, or that the black
+horse is the symbol of the sensual or concupiscent element of human
+nature. The white horse also represents rational impulse, but the
+description, 'a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and a
+follower of true glory,' though similar, does not at once recall the
+'spirit' (thumos) of the Republic. The two steeds really correspond in a
+figure more nearly to the appetitive and moral or semi-rational soul
+of Aristotle. And thus, for the first time perhaps in the history
+of philosophy, we have represented to us the threefold division of
+psychology. The image of the charioteer and the steeds has been compared
+with a similar image which occurs in the verses of Parmenides; but it
+is important to remark that the horses of Parmenides have no allegorical
+meaning, and that the poet is only describing his own approach in a
+chariot to the regions of light and the house of the goddess of truth.
+
+The triple soul has had a previous existence, in which following in
+the train of some god, from whom she derived her character, she beheld
+partially and imperfectly the vision of absolute truth. All her
+after existence, passed in many forms of men and animals, is spent in
+regaining this. The stages of the conflict are many and various; and
+she is sorely let and hindered by the animal desires of the inferior or
+concupiscent steed. Again and again she beholds the flashing beauty of
+the beloved. But before that vision can be finally enjoyed the animal
+desires must be subjected.
+
+The moral or spiritual element in man is represented by the immortal
+steed which, like thumos in the Republic, always sides with the reason.
+Both are dragged out of their course by the furious impulses of desire.
+In the end something is conceded to the desires, after they have been
+finally humbled and overpowered. And yet the way of philosophy, or
+perfect love of the unseen, is total abstinence from bodily delights.
+'But all men cannot receive this saying': in the lower life of ambition
+they may be taken off their guard and stoop to folly unawares, and then,
+although they do not attain to the highest bliss, yet if they have once
+conquered they may be happy enough.
+
+The language of the Meno and the Phaedo as well as of the Phaedrus
+seems to show that at one time of his life Plato was quite serious in
+maintaining a former state of existence. His mission was to realize the
+abstract; in that, all good and truth, all the hopes of this and another
+life seemed to centre. To him abstractions, as we call them, were
+another kind of knowledge--an inner and unseen world, which seemed
+to exist far more truly than the fleeting objects of sense which were
+without him. When we are once able to imagine the intense power which
+abstract ideas exercised over the mind of Plato, we see that there was
+no more difficulty to him in realizing the eternal existence of them
+and of the human minds which were associated with them, in the past and
+future than in the present. The difficulty was not how they could exist,
+but how they could fail to exist. In the attempt to regain this 'saving'
+knowledge of the ideas, the sense was found to be as great an enemy as
+the desires; and hence two things which to us seem quite distinct are
+inextricably blended in the representation of Plato.
+
+Thus far we may believe that Plato was serious in his conception of the
+soul as a motive power, in his reminiscence of a former state of being,
+in his elevation of the reason over sense and passion, and perhaps in
+his doctrine of transmigration. Was he equally serious in the rest? For
+example, are we to attribute his tripartite division of the soul to the
+gods? Or is this merely assigned to them by way of parallelism with men?
+The latter is the more probable; for the horses of the gods are both
+white, i.e. their every impulse is in harmony with reason; their
+dualism, on the other hand, only carries out the figure of the chariot.
+Is he serious, again, in regarding love as 'a madness'? That seems to
+arise out of the antithesis to the former conception of love. At the
+same time he appears to intimate here, as in the Ion, Apology, Meno,
+and elsewhere, that there is a faculty in man, whether to be termed in
+modern language genius, or inspiration, or imagination, or idealism,
+or communion with God, which cannot be reduced to rule and measure.
+Perhaps, too, he is ironically repeating the common language of mankind
+about philosophy, and is turning their jest into a sort of earnest.
+(Compare Phaedo, Symp.) Or is he serious in holding that each soul bears
+the character of a god? He may have had no other account to give of
+the differences of human characters to which he afterwards refers. Or,
+again, in his absurd derivation of mantike and oionistike and imeros
+(compare Cratylus)? It is characteristic of the irony of Socrates to
+mix up sense and nonsense in such a way that no exact line can be drawn
+between them. And allegory helps to increase this sort of confusion.
+
+As is often the case in the parables and prophecies of Scripture, the
+meaning is allowed to break through the figure, and the details are not
+always consistent. When the charioteers and their steeds stand upon the
+dome of heaven they behold the intangible invisible essences which
+are not objects of sight. This is because the force of language can
+no further go. Nor can we dwell much on the circumstance, that at the
+completion of ten thousand years all are to return to the place from
+whence they came; because he represents their return as dependent on
+their own good conduct in the successive stages of existence. Nor again
+can we attribute anything to the accidental inference which would also
+follow, that even a tyrant may live righteously in the condition of life
+to which fate has called him ('he aiblins might, I dinna ken'). But
+to suppose this would be at variance with Plato himself and with Greek
+notions generally. He is much more serious in distinguishing men from
+animals by their recognition of the universal which they have known in
+a former state, and in denying that this gift of reason can ever be
+obliterated or lost. In the language of some modern theologians he might
+be said to maintain the 'final perseverance' of those who have entered
+on their pilgrim's progress. Other intimations of a 'metaphysic' or
+'theology' of the future may also be discerned in him: (1) The moderate
+predestinarianism which here, as in the Republic, acknowledges the
+element of chance in human life, and yet asserts the freedom and
+responsibility of man; (2) The recognition of a moral as well as an
+intellectual principle in man under the image of an immortal steed; (3)
+The notion that the divine nature exists by the contemplation of
+ideas of virtue and justice--or, in other words, the assertion of the
+essentially moral nature of God; (4) Again, there is the hint that human
+life is a life of aspiration only, and that the true ideal is not to
+be found in art; (5) There occurs the first trace of the distinction
+between necessary and contingent matter; (6) The conception of the soul
+itself as the motive power and reason of the universe.
+
+The conception of the philosopher, or the philosopher and lover in one,
+as a sort of madman, may be compared with the Republic and Theaetetus,
+in both of which the philosopher is regarded as a stranger and monster
+upon the earth. The whole myth, like the other myths of Plato, describes
+in a figure things which are beyond the range of human faculties, or
+inaccessible to the knowledge of the age. That philosophy should be
+represented as the inspiration of love is a conception that has already
+become familiar to us in the Symposium, and is the expression partly of
+Plato's enthusiasm for the idea, and is also an indication of the real
+power exercised by the passion of friendship over the mind of the Greek.
+The master in the art of love knew that there was a mystery in these
+feelings and their associations, and especially in the contrast of
+the sensible and permanent which is afforded by them; and he sought
+to explain this, as he explained universal ideas, by a reference to a
+former state of existence. The capriciousness of love is also derived
+by him from an attachment to some god in a former world. The singular
+remark that the beloved is more affected than the lover at the final
+consummation of their love, seems likewise to hint at a psychological
+truth.
+
+It is difficult to exhaust the meanings of a work like the Phaedrus,
+which indicates so much more than it expresses; and is full of
+inconsistencies and ambiguities which were not perceived by Plato
+himself. For example, when he is speaking of the soul does he mean the
+human or the divine soul? and are they both equally self-moving and
+constructed on the same threefold principle? We should certainly be
+disposed to reply that the self-motive is to be attributed to God only;
+and on the other hand that the appetitive and passionate elements have
+no place in His nature. So we should infer from the reason of the thing,
+but there is no indication in Plato's own writings that this was his
+meaning. Or, again, when he explains the different characters of men
+by referring them back to the nature of the God whom they served in a
+former state of existence, we are inclined to ask whether he is serious:
+Is he not rather using a mythological figure, here as elsewhere, to draw
+a veil over things which are beyond the limits of mortal knowledge? Once
+more, in speaking of beauty is he really thinking of some external form
+such as might have been expressed in the works of Phidias or Praxiteles;
+and not rather of an imaginary beauty, of a sort which extinguishes
+rather than stimulates vulgar love,--a heavenly beauty like that which
+flashed from time to time before the eyes of Dante or Bunyan? Surely
+the latter. But it would be idle to reconcile all the details of the
+passage: it is a picture, not a system, and a picture which is for the
+greater part an allegory, and an allegory which allows the meaning to
+come through. The image of the charioteer and his steeds is placed side
+by side with the absolute forms of justice, temperance, and the like,
+which are abstract ideas only, and which are seen with the eye of the
+soul in her heavenly journey. The first impression of such a passage, in
+which no attempt is made to separate the substance from the form, is far
+truer than an elaborate philosophical analysis.
+
+It is too often forgotten that the whole of the second discourse of
+Socrates is only an allegory, or figure of speech. For this reason, it
+is unnecessary to enquire whether the love of which Plato speaks is
+the love of men or of women. It is really a general idea which includes
+both, and in which the sensual element, though not wholly eradicated, is
+reduced to order and measure. We must not attribute a meaning to
+every fanciful detail. Nor is there any need to call up revolting
+associations, which as a matter of good taste should be banished, and
+which were far enough away from the mind of Plato. These and similar
+passages should be interpreted by the Laws. Nor is there anything in the
+Symposium, or in the Charmides, in reality inconsistent with the sterner
+rule which Plato lays down in the Laws. At the same time it is not to be
+denied that love and philosophy are described by Socrates in figures
+of speech which would not be used in Christian times; or that nameless
+vices were prevalent at Athens and in other Greek cities; or that
+friendships between men were a more sacred tie, and had a more important
+social and educational influence than among ourselves. (See note on
+Symposium.)
+
+In the Phaedrus, as well as in the Symposium, there are two kinds of
+love, a lower and a higher, the one answering to the natural wants of
+the animal, the other rising above them and contemplating with religious
+awe the forms of justice, temperance, holiness, yet finding them
+also 'too dazzling bright for mortal eye,' and shrinking from them
+in amazement. The opposition between these two kinds of love may be
+compared to the opposition between the flesh and the spirit in the
+Epistles of St. Paul. It would be unmeaning to suppose that Plato, in
+describing the spiritual combat, in which the rational soul is
+finally victor and master of both the steeds, condescends to allow any
+indulgence of unnatural lusts.
+
+Two other thoughts about love are suggested by this passage. First of
+all, love is represented here, as in the Symposium, as one of the great
+powers of nature, which takes many forms and two principal ones, having
+a predominant influence over the lives of men. And these two, though
+opposed, are not absolutely separated the one from the other. Plato,
+with his great knowledge of human nature, was well aware how easily
+one is transformed into the other, or how soon the noble but fleeting
+aspiration may return into the nature of the animal, while the
+lower instinct which is latent always remains. The intermediate
+sentimentalism, which has exercised so great an influence on the
+literature of modern Europe, had no place in the classical times of
+Hellas; the higher love, of which Plato speaks, is the subject, not of
+poetry or fiction, but of philosophy.
+
+Secondly, there seems to be indicated a natural yearning of the human
+mind that the great ideas of justice, temperance, wisdom, should be
+expressed in some form of visible beauty, like the absolute purity and
+goodness which Christian art has sought to realize in the person of
+the Madonna. But although human nature has often attempted to represent
+outwardly what can be only 'spiritually discerned,' men feel that in
+pictures and images, whether painted or carved, or described in words
+only, we have not the substance but the shadow of the truth which is in
+heaven. There is no reason to suppose that in the fairest works of Greek
+art, Plato ever conceived himself to behold an image, however faint, of
+ideal truths. 'Not in that way was wisdom seen.'
+
+We may now pass on to the second part of the Dialogue, which is a
+criticism on the first. Rhetoric is assailed on various grounds: first,
+as desiring to persuade, without a knowledge of the truth; and secondly,
+as ignoring the distinction between certain and probable matter. The
+three speeches are then passed in review: the first of them has no
+definition of the nature of love, and no order in the topics (being in
+these respects far inferior to the second); while the third of them is
+found (though a fancy of the hour) to be framed upon real dialectical
+principles. But dialectic is not rhetoric; nothing on that subject is to
+be found in the endless treatises of rhetoric, however prolific in hard
+names. When Plato has sufficiently put them to the test of ridicule he
+touches, as with the point of a needle, the real error, which is the
+confusion of preliminary knowledge with creative power. No attainments
+will provide the speaker with genius; and the sort of attainments which
+can alone be of any value are the higher philosophy and the power of
+psychological analysis, which is given by dialectic, but not by the
+rules of the rhetoricians.
+
+In this latter portion of the Dialogue there are many texts which may
+help us to speak and to think. The names dialectic and rhetoric are
+passing out of use; we hardly examine seriously into their nature and
+limits, and probably the arts both of speaking and of conversation have
+been unduly neglected by us. But the mind of Socrates pierces through
+the differences of times and countries into the essential nature of man;
+and his words apply equally to the modern world and to the Athenians of
+old. Would he not have asked of us, or rather is he not asking of us,
+Whether we have ceased to prefer appearances to reality? Let us take
+a survey of the professions to which he refers and try them by his
+standard. Is not all literature passing into criticism, just as Athenian
+literature in the age of Plato was degenerating into sophistry and
+rhetoric? We can discourse and write about poems and paintings, but we
+seem to have lost the gift of creating them. Can we wonder that few
+of them 'come sweetly from nature,' while ten thousand reviewers (mala
+murioi) are engaged in dissecting them? Young men, like Phaedrus, are
+enamoured of their own literary clique and have but a feeble sympathy
+with the master-minds of former ages. They recognize 'a POETICAL
+necessity in the writings of their favourite author, even when he boldly
+wrote off just what came in his head.' They are beginning to think that
+Art is enough, just at the time when Art is about to disappear from the
+world. And would not a great painter, such as Michael Angelo, or a great
+poet, such as Shakespeare, returning to earth, 'courteously rebuke'
+us--would he not say that we are putting 'in the place of Art the
+preliminaries of Art,' confusing Art the expression of mind and truth
+with Art the composition of colours and forms; and perhaps he might
+more severely chastise some of us for trying to invent 'a new shudder'
+instead of bringing to the birth living and healthy creations? These he
+would regard as the signs of an age wanting in original power.
+
+Turning from literature and the arts to law and politics, again we fall
+under the lash of Socrates. For do we not often make 'the worse appear
+the better cause;' and do not 'both parties sometimes agree to tell
+lies'? Is not pleading 'an art of speaking unconnected with the truth'?
+There is another text of Socrates which must not be forgotten in
+relation to this subject. In the endless maze of English law is there
+any 'dividing the whole into parts or reuniting the parts into a
+whole'--any semblance of an organized being 'having hands and feet and
+other members'? Instead of a system there is the Chaos of Anaxagoras
+(omou panta chremata) and no Mind or Order. Then again in the noble
+art of politics, who thinks of first principles and of true ideas?
+We avowedly follow not the truth but the will of the many (compare
+Republic). Is not legislation too a sort of literary effort, and might
+not statesmanship be described as the 'art of enchanting' the house?
+While there are some politicians who have no knowledge of the truth, but
+only of what is likely to be approved by 'the many who sit in judgment,'
+there are others who can give no form to their ideal, neither having
+learned 'the art of persuasion,' nor having any insight into the
+'characters of men.' Once more, has not medical science become a
+professional routine, which many 'practise without being able to say
+who were their instructors'--the application of a few drugs taken from
+a book instead of a life-long study of the natures and constitutions of
+human beings? Do we see as clearly as Hippocrates 'that the nature of
+the body can only be understood as a whole'? (Compare Charm.) And are
+not they held to be the wisest physicians who have the greatest distrust
+of their art? What would Socrates think of our newspapers, of our
+theology? Perhaps he would be afraid to speak of them;--the one vox
+populi, the other vox Dei, he might hesitate to attack them; or he might
+trace a fanciful connexion between them, and ask doubtfully, whether
+they are not equally inspired? He would remark that we are always
+searching for a belief and deploring our unbelief, seeming to prefer
+popular opinions unverified and contradictory to unpopular truths which
+are assured to us by the most certain proofs: that our preachers are
+in the habit of praising God 'without regard to truth and falsehood,
+attributing to Him every species of greatness and glory, saying that He
+is all this and the cause of all that, in order that we may exhibit Him
+as the fairest and best of all' (Symp.) without any consideration of
+His real nature and character or of the laws by which He governs the
+world--seeking for a 'private judgment' and not for the truth or 'God's
+judgment.' What would he say of the Church, which we praise in like
+manner, 'meaning ourselves,' without regard to history or experience?
+Might he not ask, whether we 'care more for the truth of religion, or
+for the speaker and the country from which the truth comes'? or, whether
+the 'select wise' are not 'the many' after all? (Symp.) So we may fill
+up the sketch of Socrates, lest, as Phaedrus says, the argument should
+be too 'abstract and barren of illustrations.' (Compare Symp., Apol.,
+Euthyphro.)
+
+He next proceeds with enthusiasm to define the royal art of dialectic as
+the power of dividing a whole into parts, and of uniting the parts in a
+whole, and which may also be regarded (compare Soph.) as the process of
+the mind talking with herself. The latter view has probably led Plato
+to the paradox that speech is superior to writing, in which he may seem
+also to be doing an injustice to himself. For the two cannot be fairly
+compared in the manner which Plato suggests. The contrast of the living
+and dead word, and the example of Socrates, which he has represented
+in the form of the Dialogue, seem to have misled him. For speech and
+writing have really different functions; the one is more transitory,
+more diffuse, more elastic and capable of adaptation to moods and times;
+the other is more permanent, more concentrated, and is uttered not to
+this or that person or audience, but to all the world. In the Politicus
+the paradox is carried further; the mind or will of the king is
+preferred to the written law; he is supposed to be the Law personified,
+the ideal made Life.
+
+Yet in both these statements there is also contained a truth; they may
+be compared with one another, and also with the other famous paradox,
+that 'knowledge cannot be taught.' Socrates means to say, that what is
+truly written is written in the soul, just as what is truly taught grows
+up in the soul from within and is not forced upon it from without. When
+planted in a congenial soil the little seed becomes a tree, and 'the
+birds of the air build their nests in the branches.' There is an echo
+of this in the prayer at the end of the Dialogue, 'Give me beauty in
+the inward soul, and may the inward and outward man be at one.' We may
+further compare the words of St. Paul, 'Written not on tables of stone,
+but on fleshly tables of the heart;' and again, 'Ye are my epistles
+known and read of all men.' There may be a use in writing as a
+preservative against the forgetfulness of old age, but to live is higher
+far, to be ourselves the book, or the epistle, the truth embodied in a
+person, the Word made flesh. Something like this we may believe to have
+passed before Plato's mind when he affirmed that speech was superior to
+writing. So in other ages, weary of literature and criticism, of making
+many books, of writing articles in reviews, some have desired to live
+more closely in communion with their fellow-men, to speak heart to
+heart, to speak and act only, and not to write, following the example of
+Socrates and of Christ...
+
+Some other touches of inimitable grace and art and of the deepest wisdom
+may be also noted; such as the prayer or 'collect' which has just been
+cited, 'Give me beauty,' etc.; or 'the great name which belongs to God
+alone;' or 'the saying of wiser men than ourselves that a man of sense
+should try to please not his fellow-servants, but his good and noble
+masters,' like St. Paul again; or the description of the 'heavenly
+originals'...
+
+The chief criteria for determining the date of the Dialogue are (1) the
+ages of Lysias and Isocrates; (2) the character of the work.
+
+Lysias was born in the year 458; Isocrates in the year 436, about seven
+years before the birth of Plato. The first of the two great rhetoricians
+is described as in the zenith of his fame; the second is still young and
+full of promise. Now it is argued that this must have been written in
+the youth of Isocrates, when the promise was not yet fulfilled. And thus
+we should have to assign the Dialogue to a year not later than 406,
+when Isocrates was thirty and Plato twenty-three years of age, and while
+Socrates himself was still alive.
+
+Those who argue in this way seem not to reflect how easily Plato
+can 'invent Egyptians or anything else,' and how careless he is of
+historical truth or probability. Who would suspect that the wise
+Critias, the virtuous Charmides, had ended their lives among the
+thirty tyrants? Who would imagine that Lysias, who is here assailed
+by Socrates, is the son of his old friend Cephalus? Or that Isocrates
+himself is the enemy of Plato and his school? No arguments can be drawn
+from the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the characters of
+Plato. (Else, perhaps, it might be further argued that, judging from
+their extant remains, insipid rhetoric is far more characteristic of
+Isocrates than of Lysias.) But Plato makes use of names which have
+often hardly any connection with the historical characters to whom they
+belong. In this instance the comparative favour shown to Isocrates may
+possibly be accounted for by the circumstance of his belonging to the
+aristocratical, as Lysias to the democratical party.
+
+Few persons will be inclined to suppose, in the superficial manner
+of some ancient critics, that a dialogue which treats of love must
+necessarily have been written in youth. As little weight can be attached
+to the argument that Plato must have visited Egypt before he wrote the
+story of Theuth and Thamus. For there is no real proof that he ever went
+to Egypt; and even if he did, he might have known or invented Egyptian
+traditions before he went there. The late date of the Phaedrus will have
+to be established by other arguments than these: the maturity of the
+thought, the perfection of the style, the insight, the relation to the
+other Platonic Dialogues, seem to contradict the notion that it could
+have been the work of a youth of twenty or twenty-three years of age.
+The cosmological notion of the mind as the primum mobile, and the
+admission of impulse into the immortal nature, also afford grounds for
+assigning a later date. (Compare Tim., Soph., Laws.) Add to this that
+the picture of Socrates, though in some lesser particulars,--e.g. his
+going without sandals, his habit of remaining within the walls,
+his emphatic declaration that his study is human nature,--an exact
+resemblance, is in the main the Platonic and not the real Socrates. Can
+we suppose 'the young man to have told such lies' about his master
+while he was still alive? Moreover, when two Dialogues are so closely
+connected as the Phaedrus and Symposium, there is great improbability in
+supposing that one of them was written at least twenty years after the
+other. The conclusion seems to be, that the Dialogue was written at
+some comparatively late but unknown period of Plato's life, after he had
+deserted the purely Socratic point of view, but before he had entered
+on the more abstract speculations of the Sophist or the Philebus. Taking
+into account the divisions of the soul, the doctrine of transmigration,
+the contemplative nature of the philosophic life, and the character
+of the style, we shall not be far wrong in placing the Phaedrus in the
+neighbourhood of the Republic; remarking only that allowance must be
+made for the poetical element in the Phaedrus, which, while falling
+short of the Republic in definite philosophic results, seems to have
+glimpses of a truth beyond.
+
+Two short passages, which are unconnected with the main subject of the
+Dialogue, may seem to merit a more particular notice: (1) the locus
+classicus about mythology; (2) the tale of the grasshoppers.
+
+The first passage is remarkable as showing that Plato was entirely
+free from what may be termed the Euhemerism of his age. For there were
+Euhemerists in Hellas long before Euhemerus. Early philosophers, like
+Anaxagoras and Metrodorus, had found in Homer and mythology hidden
+meanings. Plato, with a truer instinct, rejects these attractive
+interpretations; he regards the inventor of them as 'unfortunate;' and
+they draw a man off from the knowledge of himself. There is a latent
+criticism, and also a poetical sense in Plato, which enable him to
+discard them, and yet in another way to make use of poetry and mythology
+as a vehicle of thought and feeling. What would he have said of the
+discovery of Christian doctrines in these old Greek legends? While
+acknowledging that such interpretations are 'very nice,' would he not
+have remarked that they are found in all sacred literatures? They cannot
+be tested by any criterion of truth, or used to establish any truth;
+they add nothing to the sum of human knowledge; they are--what we
+please, and if employed as 'peacemakers' between the new and old are
+liable to serious misconstruction, as he elsewhere remarks (Republic).
+And therefore he would have 'bid Farewell to them; the study of them
+would take up too much of his time; and he has not as yet learned the
+true nature of religion.' The 'sophistical' interest of Phaedrus, the
+little touch about the two versions of the story, the ironical manner in
+which these explanations are set aside--'the common opinion about them
+is enough for me'--the allusion to the serpent Typho may be noted in
+passing; also the general agreement between the tone of this speech and
+the remark of Socrates which follows afterwards, 'I am a diviner, but a
+poor one.'
+
+The tale of the grasshoppers is naturally suggested by the surrounding
+scene. They are also the representatives of the Athenians as children
+of the soil. Under the image of the lively chirruping grasshoppers who
+inform the Muses in heaven about those who honour them on earth, Plato
+intends to represent an Athenian audience (tettigessin eoikotes). The
+story is introduced, apparently, to mark a change of subject, and also,
+like several other allusions which occur in the course of the Dialogue,
+in order to preserve the scene in the recollection of the reader.
+
+*****
+
+No one can duly appreciate the dialogues of Plato, especially the
+Phaedrus, Symposium, and portions of the Republic, who has not a
+sympathy with mysticism. To the uninitiated, as he would himself
+have acknowledged, they will appear to be the dreams of a poet who
+is disguised as a philosopher. There is a twofold difficulty in
+apprehending this aspect of the Platonic writings. First, we do not
+immediately realize that under the marble exterior of Greek literature
+was concealed a soul thrilling with spiritual emotion. Secondly, the
+forms or figures which the Platonic philosophy assumes, are not like the
+images of the prophet Isaiah, or of the Apocalypse, familiar to us in
+the days of our youth. By mysticism we mean, not the extravagance of
+an erring fancy, but the concentration of reason in feeling, the
+enthusiastic love of the good, the true, the one, the sense of the
+infinity of knowledge and of the marvel of the human faculties. When
+feeding upon such thoughts the 'wing of the soul' is renewed and
+gains strength; she is raised above 'the manikins of earth' and their
+opinions, waiting in wonder to know, and working with reverence to find
+out what God in this or in another life may reveal to her.
+
+
+ON THE DECLINE OF GREEK LITERATURE.
+
+One of the main purposes of Plato in the Phaedrus is to satirize
+Rhetoric, or rather the Professors of Rhetoric who swarmed at Athens in
+the fourth century before Christ. As in the opening of the Dialogue he
+ridicules the interpreters of mythology; as in the Protagoras he mocks
+at the Sophists; as in the Euthydemus he makes fun of the word-splitting
+Eristics; as in the Cratylus he ridicules the fancies of Etymologers;
+as in the Meno and Gorgias and some other dialogues he makes reflections
+and casts sly imputation upon the higher classes at Athens; so in
+the Phaedrus, chiefly in the latter part, he aims his shafts at the
+rhetoricians. The profession of rhetoric was the greatest and most
+popular in Athens, necessary 'to a man's salvation,' or at any rate to
+his attainment of wealth or power; but Plato finds nothing wholesome
+or genuine in the purpose of it. It is a veritable 'sham,' having no
+relation to fact, or to truth of any kind. It is antipathetic to him not
+only as a philosopher, but also as a great writer. He cannot abide the
+tricks of the rhetoricians, or the pedantries and mannerisms which they
+introduce into speech and writing. He sees clearly how far removed they
+are from the ways of simplicity and truth, and how ignorant of the very
+elements of the art which they are professing to teach. The thing which
+is most necessary of all, the knowledge of human nature, is hardly if
+at all considered by them. The true rules of composition, which are
+very few, are not to be found in their voluminous systems. Their
+pretentiousness, their omniscience, their large fortunes, their
+impatience of argument, their indifference to first principles, their
+stupidity, their progresses through Hellas accompanied by a troop
+of their disciples--these things were very distasteful to Plato, who
+esteemed genius far above art, and was quite sensible of the interval
+which separated them (Phaedrus). It is the interval which separates
+Sophists and rhetoricians from ancient famous men and women such as
+Homer and Hesiod, Anacreon and Sappho, Aeschylus and Sophocles; and the
+Platonic Socrates is afraid that, if he approves the former, he will be
+disowned by the latter. The spirit of rhetoric was soon to overspread
+all Hellas; and Plato with prophetic insight may have seen, from afar,
+the great literary waste or dead level, or interminable marsh, in which
+Greek literature was soon to disappear. A similar vision of the decline
+of the Greek drama and of the contrast of the old literature and the
+new was present to the mind of Aristophanes after the death of the three
+great tragedians (Frogs). After about a hundred, or at most two hundred
+years if we exclude Homer, the genius of Hellas had ceased to flower or
+blossom. The dreary waste which follows, beginning with the Alexandrian
+writers and even before them in the platitudes of Isocrates and his
+school, spreads over much more than a thousand years. And from this
+decline the Greek language and literature, unlike the Latin, which has
+come to life in new forms and been developed into the great European
+languages, never recovered.
+
+This monotony of literature, without merit, without genius and without
+character, is a phenomenon which deserves more attention than it has
+hitherto received; it is a phenomenon unique in the literary history
+of the world. How could there have been so much cultivation, so much
+diligence in writing, and so little mind or real creative power? Why
+did a thousand years invent nothing better than Sibylline books,
+Orphic poems, Byzantine imitations of classical histories, Christian
+reproductions of Greek plays, novels like the silly and obscene romances
+of Longus and Heliodorus, innumerable forged epistles, a great many
+epigrams, biographies of the meanest and most meagre description, a sham
+philosophy which was the bastard progeny of the union between Hellas
+and the East? Only in Plutarch, in Lucian, in Longinus, in the Roman
+emperors Marcus Aurelius and Julian, in some of the Christian fathers
+are there any traces of good sense or originality, or any power of
+arousing the interest of later ages. And when new books ceased to be
+written, why did hosts of grammarians and interpreters flock in, who
+never attain to any sound notion either of grammar or interpretation?
+Why did the physical sciences never arrive at any true knowledge or make
+any real progress? Why did poetry droop and languish? Why did history
+degenerate into fable? Why did words lose their power of expression?
+Why were ages of external greatness and magnificence attended by all the
+signs of decay in the human mind which are possible?
+
+To these questions many answers may be given, which if not the true
+causes, are at least to be reckoned among the symptoms of the decline.
+There is the want of method in physical science, the want of criticism
+in history, the want of simplicity or delicacy in poetry, the want of
+political freedom, which is the true atmosphere of public speaking, in
+oratory. The ways of life were luxurious and commonplace. Philosophy had
+become extravagant, eclectic, abstract, devoid of any real content. At
+length it ceased to exist. It had spread words like plaster over the
+whole field of knowledge. It had grown ascetic on one side, mystical
+on the other. Neither of these tendencies was favourable to literature.
+There was no sense of beauty either in language or in art. The Greek
+world became vacant, barbaric, oriental. No one had anything new to say,
+or any conviction of truth. The age had no remembrance of the past, no
+power of understanding what other ages thought and felt. The Catholic
+faith had degenerated into dogma and controversy. For more than
+a thousand years not a single writer of first-rate, or even of
+second-rate, reputation has a place in the innumerable rolls of Greek
+literature.
+
+If we seek to go deeper, we can still only describe the outward nature
+of the clouds or darkness which were spread over the heavens during so
+many ages without relief or light. We may say that this, like several
+other long periods in the history of the human race, was destitute,
+or deprived of the moral qualities which are the root of literary
+excellence. It had no life or aspiration, no national or political
+force, no desire for consistency, no love of knowledge for its own sake.
+It did not attempt to pierce the mists which surrounded it. It did not
+propose to itself to go forward and scale the heights of knowledge, but
+to go backwards and seek at the beginning what can only be found towards
+the end. It was lost in doubt and ignorance. It rested upon tradition
+and authority. It had none of the higher play of fancy which creates
+poetry; and where there is no true poetry, neither can there be any
+good prose. It had no great characters, and therefore it had no great
+writers. It was incapable of distinguishing between words and things. It
+was so hopelessly below the ancient standard of classical Greek art and
+literature that it had no power of understanding or of valuing them. It
+is doubtful whether any Greek author was justly appreciated in antiquity
+except by his own contemporaries; and this neglect of the great authors
+of the past led to the disappearance of the larger part of them, while
+the Greek fathers were mostly preserved. There is no reason to suppose
+that, in the century before the taking of Constantinople, much more was
+in existence than the scholars of the Renaissance carried away with them
+to Italy.
+
+The character of Greek literature sank lower as time went on. It
+consisted more and more of compilations, of scholia, of extracts, of
+commentaries, forgeries, imitations. The commentator or interpreter had
+no conception of his author as a whole, and very little of the context
+of any passage which he was explaining. The least things were preferred
+by him to the greatest. The question of a reading, or a grammatical
+form, or an accent, or the uses of a word, took the place of the aim or
+subject of the book. He had no sense of the beauties of an author, and
+very little light is thrown by him on real difficulties. He interprets
+past ages by his own. The greatest classical writers are the least
+appreciated by him. This seems to be the reason why so many of them have
+perished, why the lyric poets have almost wholly disappeared; why, out
+of the eighty or ninety tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, only seven
+of each had been preserved.
+
+Such an age of sciolism and scholasticism may possibly once more get
+the better of the literary world. There are those who prophesy that the
+signs of such a day are again appearing among us, and that at the end
+of the present century no writer of the first class will be still alive.
+They think that the Muse of Literature may transfer herself to other
+countries less dried up or worn out than our own. They seem to see the
+withering effect of criticism on original genius. No one can doubt that
+such a decay or decline of literature and of art seriously affects
+the manners and character of a nation. It takes away half the joys and
+refinements of life; it increases its dulness and grossness. Hence it
+becomes a matter of great interest to consider how, if at all, such a
+degeneracy may be averted. Is there any elixir which can restore life
+and youth to the literature of a nation, or at any rate which can
+prevent it becoming unmanned and enfeebled?
+
+First there is the progress of education. It is possible, and even
+probable, that the extension of the means of knowledge over a wider
+area and to persons living under new conditions may lead to many new
+combinations of thought and language. But, as yet, experience does
+not favour the realization of such a hope or promise. It may be truly
+answered that at present the training of teachers and the methods of
+education are very imperfect, and therefore that we cannot judge of the
+future by the present. When more of our youth are trained in the best
+literatures, and in the best parts of them, their minds may be expected
+to have a larger growth. They will have more interests, more thoughts,
+more material for conversation; they will have a higher standard and
+begin to think for themselves. The number of persons who will have the
+opportunity of receiving the highest education through the cheap press,
+and by the help of high schools and colleges, may increase tenfold. It
+is likely that in every thousand persons there is at least one who is
+far above the average in natural capacity, but the seed which is in him
+dies for want of cultivation. It has never had any stimulus to grow,
+or any field in which to blossom and produce fruit. Here is a great
+reservoir or treasure-house of human intelligence out of which new
+waters may flow and cover the earth. If at any time the great men of
+the world should die out, and originality or genius appear to suffer
+a partial eclipse, there is a boundless hope in the multitude of
+intelligences for future generations. They may bring gifts to men such
+as the world has never received before. They may begin at a higher point
+and yet take with them all the results of the past. The co-operation of
+many may have effects not less striking, though different in character
+from those which the creative genius of a single man, such as Bacon or
+Newton, formerly produced. There is also great hope to be derived, not
+merely from the extension of education over a wider area, but from the
+continuance of it during many generations. Educated parents will have
+children fit to receive education; and these again will grow up under
+circumstances far more favourable to the growth of intelligence than any
+which have hitherto existed in our own or in former ages.
+
+Even if we were to suppose no more men of genius to be produced, the
+great writers of ancient or of modern times will remain to furnish
+abundant materials of education to the coming generation. Now that
+every nation holds communication with every other, we may truly say in
+a fuller sense than formerly that 'the thoughts of men are widened
+with the process of the suns.' They will not be 'cribbed, cabined, and
+confined' within a province or an island. The East will provide elements
+of culture to the West as well as the West to the East. The religions
+and literatures of the world will be open books, which he who wills may
+read. The human race may not be always ground down by bodily toil, but
+may have greater leisure for the improvement of the mind. The increasing
+sense of the greatness and infinity of nature will tend to awaken in men
+larger and more liberal thoughts. The love of mankind may be the source
+of a greater development of literature than nationality has ever been.
+There may be a greater freedom from prejudice and party; we may better
+understand the whereabouts of truth, and therefore there may be more
+success and fewer failures in the search for it. Lastly, in the coming
+ages we shall carry with us the recollection of the past, in which
+are necessarily contained many seeds of revival and renaissance in the
+future. So far is the world from becoming exhausted, so groundless is
+the fear that literature will ever die out.
+
+
+
+
+PHAEDRUS
+
+
+PERSONS OF THE DIALOGUE: Socrates, Phaedrus.
+
+SCENE: Under a plane-tree, by the banks of the Ilissus.
+
+
+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.
+
+SOCRATES: I believe that I know Phaedrus about as well as I know myself,
+and I am very sure that the speech of Lysias was repeated to him, not
+once only, but again and again;--he insisted on hearing it many times
+over and Lysias was very willing to gratify him; at last, when nothing
+else would do, he got hold of the book, and looked at what he most
+wanted to see,--this occupied him during the whole morning;--and then
+when he was tired with sitting, he went out to take a walk, not until,
+by the dog, as I believe, he had simply learned by heart the entire
+discourse, unless it was unusually long, and he went to a place outside
+the wall that he might practise his lesson. There he saw a certain
+lover of discourse who had a similar weakness;--he saw and rejoiced; now
+thought he, 'I shall have a partner in my revels.' And he invited him to
+come and walk with him. But when the lover of discourse begged that he
+would repeat the tale, he gave himself airs and said, 'No I cannot,'
+as if he were indisposed; although, if the hearer had refused, he would
+sooner or later have been compelled by him to listen whether he would or
+no. Therefore, Phaedrus, bid him do at once what he will soon do whether
+bidden or not.
+
+PHAEDRUS: I see that you will not let me off until I speak in some
+fashion or other; verily therefore my best plan is to speak as I best
+can.
+
+SOCRATES: A very true remark, that of yours.
+
+PHAEDRUS: I will do as I say; but believe me, Socrates, I did not learn
+the very words--O no; nevertheless I have a general notion of what
+he said, and will give you a summary of the points in which the lover
+differed from the non-lover. Let me begin at the beginning.
+
+SOCRATES: Yes, my sweet one; but you must first of all show what you
+have in your left hand under your cloak, for that roll, as I suspect,
+is the actual discourse. Now, much as I love you, I would not have you
+suppose that I am going to have your memory exercised at my expense, if
+you have Lysias himself here.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Enough; I see that I have no hope of practising my art upon
+you. But if I am to read, where would you please to sit?
+
+SOCRATES: Let us turn aside and go by the Ilissus; we will sit down at
+some quiet spot.
+
+PHAEDRUS: I am fortunate in not having my sandals, and as you never have
+any, I think that we may go along the brook and cool our feet in the
+water; this will be the easiest way, and at midday and in the summer is
+far from being unpleasant.
+
+SOCRATES: Lead on, and look out for a place in which we can sit down.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Do you see the tallest plane-tree in the distance?
+
+SOCRATES: Yes.
+
+PHAEDRUS: There are shade and gentle breezes, and grass on which we may
+either sit or lie down.
+
+SOCRATES: Move forward.
+
+PHAEDRUS: I should like to know, Socrates, whether the place is not
+somewhere here at which Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia from
+the banks of the Ilissus?
+
+SOCRATES: Such is the tradition.
+
+PHAEDRUS: And is this the exact spot? The little stream is delightfully
+clear and bright; I can fancy that there might be maidens playing near.
+
+SOCRATES: I believe that the spot is not exactly here, but about a
+quarter of a mile lower down, where you cross to the temple of Artemis,
+and there is, I think, some sort of an altar of Boreas at the place.
+
+PHAEDRUS: I have never noticed it; but I beseech you to tell me,
+Socrates, do you believe this tale?
+
+SOCRATES: The wise are doubtful, and I should not be singular if, like
+them, I too doubted. I might have a rational explanation that Orithyia
+was playing with Pharmacia, when a northern gust carried her over the
+neighbouring rocks; and this being the manner of her death, she was said
+to have been carried away by Boreas. There is a discrepancy, however,
+about the locality; according to another version of the story she was
+taken from Areopagus, and not from this place. Now I quite acknowledge
+that these allegories are very nice, but he is not to be envied who has
+to invent them; much labour and ingenuity will be required of him; and
+when he has once begun, he must go on and rehabilitate Hippocentaurs and
+chimeras dire. Gorgons and winged steeds flow in apace, and numberless
+other inconceivable and portentous natures. And if he is sceptical
+about them, and would fain reduce them one after another to the rules of
+probability, this sort of crude philosophy will take up a great deal of
+time. Now I have no leisure for such enquiries; shall I tell you why? I
+must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious
+about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my
+own self, would be ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this;
+the common opinion is enough for me. For, as I was saying, I want to
+know not about this, but about myself: am I a monster more complicated
+and swollen with passion than the serpent Typho, or a creature of a
+gentler and simpler sort, to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier
+destiny? But let me ask you, friend: have we not reached the plane-tree
+to which you were conducting us?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes, this is the tree.
+
+SOCRATES: By Here, a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and
+scents. Here is this lofty and spreading plane-tree, and the agnus
+castus high and clustering, in the fullest blossom and the greatest
+fragrance; and the stream which flows beneath the plane-tree is
+deliciously cold to the feet. Judging from the ornaments and images,
+this must be a spot sacred to Achelous and the Nymphs. How delightful is
+the breeze:--so very sweet; and there is a sound in the air shrill and
+summerlike which makes answer to the chorus of the cicadae. But the
+greatest charm of all is the grass, like a pillow gently sloping to the
+head. My dear Phaedrus, you have been an admirable guide.
+
+PHAEDRUS: What an incomprehensible being you are, Socrates: when you are
+in the country, as you say, you really are like some stranger who is led
+about by a guide. Do you ever cross the border? I rather think that you
+never venture even outside the gates.
+
+SOCRATES: Very true, my good friend; and I hope that you will excuse me
+when you hear the reason, which is, that I am a lover of knowledge, and
+the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the
+country. Though I do indeed believe that you have found a spell with
+which to draw me out of the city into the country, like a hungry cow
+before whom a bough or a bunch of fruit is waved. For only hold up
+before me in like manner a book, and you may lead me all round Attica,
+and over the wide world. And now having arrived, I intend to lie down,
+and do you choose any posture in which you can read best. Begin.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Listen. You know how matters stand with me; and how, as I
+conceive, this affair may be arranged for the advantage of both of us.
+And I maintain that I ought not to fail in my suit, because I am not
+your lover: for lovers repent of the kindnesses which they have shown
+when their passion ceases, but to the non-lovers who are free and not
+under any compulsion, no time of repentance ever comes; for they confer
+their benefits according to the measure of their ability, in the way
+which is most conducive to their own interest. Then again, lovers
+consider how by reason of their love they have neglected their own
+concerns and rendered service to others: and when to these benefits
+conferred they add on the troubles which they have endured, they think
+that they have long ago made to the beloved a very ample return. But the
+non-lover has no such tormenting recollections; he has never neglected
+his affairs or quarrelled with his relations; he has no troubles to
+add up or excuses to invent; and being well rid of all these evils, why
+should he not freely do what will gratify the beloved? If you say that
+the lover is more to be esteemed, because his love is thought to be
+greater; for he is willing to say and do what is hateful to other men,
+in order to please his beloved;--that, if true, is only a proof that he
+will prefer any future love to his present, and will injure his old
+love at the pleasure of the new. And how, in a matter of such infinite
+importance, can a man be right in trusting himself to one who is
+afflicted with a malady which no experienced person would attempt to
+cure, for the patient himself admits that he is not in his right mind,
+and acknowledges that he is wrong in his mind, but says that he is
+unable to control himself? And if he came to his right mind, would he
+ever imagine that the desires were good which he conceived when in his
+wrong mind? Once more, there are many more non-lovers than lovers; and
+if you choose the best of the lovers, you will not have many to choose
+from; but if from the non-lovers, the choice will be larger, and you
+will be far more likely to find among them a person who is worthy of
+your friendship. If public opinion be your dread, and you would avoid
+reproach, in all probability the lover, who is always thinking that
+other men are as emulous of him as he is of them, will boast to some
+one of his successes, and make a show of them openly in the pride of his
+heart;--he wants others to know that his labour has not been lost; but
+the non-lover is more his own master, and is desirous of solid good, and
+not of the opinion of mankind. Again, the lover may be generally noted
+or seen following the beloved (this is his regular occupation), and
+whenever they are observed to exchange two words they are supposed to
+meet about some affair of love either past or in contemplation; but when
+non-lovers meet, no one asks the reason why, because people know that
+talking to another is natural, whether friendship or mere pleasure
+be the motive. Once more, if you fear the fickleness of friendship,
+consider that in any other case a quarrel might be a mutual calamity;
+but now, when you have given up what is most precious to you, you will
+be the greater loser, and therefore, you will have more reason in
+being afraid of the lover, for his vexations are many, and he is always
+fancying that every one is leagued against him. Wherefore also he
+debars his beloved from society; he will not have you intimate with
+the wealthy, lest they should exceed him in wealth, or with men of
+education, lest they should be his superiors in understanding; and he is
+equally afraid of anybody's influence who has any other advantage over
+himself. If he can persuade you to break with them, you are left without
+a friend in the world; or if, out of a regard to your own interest, you
+have more sense than to comply with his desire, you will have to quarrel
+with him. But those who are non-lovers, and whose success in love is the
+reward of their merit, will not be jealous of the companions of their
+beloved, and will rather hate those who refuse to be his associates,
+thinking that their favourite is slighted by the latter and benefited by
+the former; for more love than hatred may be expected to come to him out
+of his friendship with others. Many lovers too have loved the person of
+a youth before they knew his character or his belongings; so that when
+their passion has passed away, there is no knowing whether they will
+continue to be his friends; whereas, in the case of non-lovers who were
+always friends, the friendship is not lessened by the favours granted;
+but the recollection of these remains with them, and is an earnest of
+good things to come.
+
+Further, I say that you are likely to be improved by me, whereas the
+lover will spoil you. For they praise your words and actions in a wrong
+way; partly, because they are afraid of offending you, and also, their
+judgment is weakened by passion. Such are the feats which love exhibits;
+he makes things painful to the disappointed which give no pain to
+others; he compels the successful lover to praise what ought not to
+give him pleasure, and therefore the beloved is to be pitied rather
+than envied. But if you listen to me, in the first place, I, in my
+intercourse with you, shall not merely regard present enjoyment, but
+also future advantage, being not mastered by love, but my own master;
+nor for small causes taking violent dislikes, but even when the cause
+is great, slowly laying up little wrath--unintentional offences I shall
+forgive, and intentional ones I shall try to prevent; and these are the
+marks of a friendship which will last.
+
+Do you think that a lover only can be a firm friend? reflect:--if this
+were true, we should set small value on sons, or fathers, or mothers;
+nor should we ever have loyal friends, for our love of them arises
+not from passion, but from other associations. Further, if we ought
+to shower favours on those who are the most eager suitors,--on that
+principle, we ought always to do good, not to the most virtuous, but to
+the most needy; for they are the persons who will be most relieved,
+and will therefore be the most grateful; and when you make a feast you
+should invite not your friend, but the beggar and the empty soul; for
+they will love you, and attend you, and come about your doors, and
+will be the best pleased, and the most grateful, and will invoke many a
+blessing on your head. Yet surely you ought not to be granting favours
+to those who besiege you with prayer, but to those who are best able to
+reward you; nor to the lover only, but to those who are worthy of love;
+nor to those who will enjoy the bloom of your youth, but to those who
+will share their possessions with you in age; nor to those who, having
+succeeded, will glory in their success to others, but to those who
+will be modest and tell no tales; nor to those who care about you for a
+moment only, but to those who will continue your friends through life;
+nor to those who, when their passion is over, will pick a quarrel with
+you, but rather to those who, when the charm of youth has left you, will
+show their own virtue. Remember what I have said; and consider yet this
+further point: friends admonish the lover under the idea that his way of
+life is bad, but no one of his kindred ever yet censured the non-lover,
+or thought that he was ill-advised about his own interests.
+
+'Perhaps you will ask me whether I propose that you should indulge every
+non-lover. To which I reply that not even the lover would advise you to
+indulge all lovers, for the indiscriminate favour is less esteemed by
+the rational recipient, and less easily hidden by him who would escape
+the censure of the world. Now love ought to be for the advantage of both
+parties, and for the injury of neither.
+
+'I believe that I have said enough; but if there is anything more which
+you desire or which in your opinion needs to be supplied, ask and I will
+answer.'
+
+Now, Socrates, what do you think? Is not the discourse excellent, more
+especially in the matter of the language?
+
+SOCRATES: Yes, quite admirable; the effect on me was ravishing. And this
+I owe to you, Phaedrus, for I observed you while reading to be in an
+ecstasy, and thinking that you are more experienced in these matters
+than I am, I followed your example, and, like you, my divine darling, I
+became inspired with a phrenzy.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Indeed, you are pleased to be merry.
+
+SOCRATES: Do you mean that I am not in earnest?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Now don't talk in that way, Socrates, but let me have your
+real opinion; I adjure you, by Zeus, the god of friendship, to tell me
+whether you think that any Hellene could have said more or spoken better
+on the same subject.
+
+SOCRATES: Well, but are you and I expected to praise the sentiments
+of the author, or only the clearness, and roundness, and finish, and
+tournure of the language? As to the first I willingly submit to your
+better judgment, for I am not worthy to form an opinion, having only
+attended to the rhetorical manner; and I was doubting whether this could
+have been defended even by Lysias himself; I thought, though I speak
+under correction, that he repeated himself two or three times, either
+from want of words or from want of pains; and also, he appeared to me
+ostentatiously to exult in showing how well he could say the same thing
+in two or three ways.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Nonsense, Socrates; what you call repetition was the especial
+merit of the speech; for he omitted no topic of which the subject
+rightly allowed, and I do not think that any one could have spoken
+better or more exhaustively.
+
+SOCRATES: There I cannot go along with you. Ancient sages, men and
+women, who have spoken and written of these things, would rise up in
+judgment against me, if out of complaisance I assented to you.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Who are they, and where did you hear anything better than
+this?
+
+SOCRATES: I am sure that I must have heard; but at this moment I do not
+remember from whom; perhaps from Sappho the fair, or Anacreon the wise;
+or, possibly, from a prose writer. Why do I say so? Why, because I
+perceive that my bosom is full, and that I could make another speech as
+good as that of Lysias, and different. Now I am certain that this is
+not an invention of my own, who am well aware that I know nothing, and
+therefore I can only infer that I have been filled through the ears,
+like a pitcher, from the waters of another, though I have actually
+forgotten in my stupidity who was my informant.
+
+PHAEDRUS: That is grand:--but never mind where you heard the discourse
+or from whom; let that be a mystery not to be divulged even at my
+earnest desire. Only, as you say, promise to make another and better
+oration, equal in length and entirely new, on the same subject; and I,
+like the nine Archons, will promise to set up a golden image at Delphi,
+not only of myself, but of you, and as large as life.
+
+SOCRATES: You are a dear golden ass if you suppose me to mean that
+Lysias has altogether missed the mark, and that I can make a speech from
+which all his arguments are to be excluded. The worst of authors will
+say something which is to the point. Who, for example, could speak on
+this thesis of yours without praising the discretion of the non-lover
+and blaming the indiscretion of the lover? These are the commonplaces of
+the subject which must come in (for what else is there to be said?) and
+must be allowed and excused; the only merit is in the arrangement of
+them, for there can be none in the invention; but when you leave the
+commonplaces, then there may be some originality.
+
+PHAEDRUS: I admit that there is reason in what you say, and I too will
+be reasonable, and will allow you to start with the premiss that the
+lover is more disordered in his wits than the non-lover; if in what
+remains you make a longer and better speech than Lysias, and use other
+arguments, then I say again, that a statue you shall have of beaten
+gold, and take your place by the colossal offerings of the Cypselids at
+Olympia.
+
+SOCRATES: How profoundly in earnest is the lover, because to tease him I
+lay a finger upon his love! And so, Phaedrus, you really imagine that I
+am going to improve upon the ingenuity of Lysias?
+
+PHAEDRUS: There I have you as you had me, and you must just speak 'as
+you best can.' Do not let us exchange 'tu quoque' as in a farce, or
+compel me to say to you as you said to me, 'I know Socrates as well as
+I know myself, and he was wanting to speak, but he gave himself airs.'
+Rather I would have you consider that from this place we stir not until
+you have unbosomed yourself of the speech; for here are we all alone,
+and I am stronger, remember, and younger than you:--Wherefore perpend,
+and do not compel me to use violence.
+
+SOCRATES: But, my sweet Phaedrus, how ridiculous it would be of me to
+compete with Lysias in an extempore speech! He is a master in his art
+and I am an untaught man.
+
+PHAEDRUS: You see how matters stand; and therefore let there be no more
+pretences; for, indeed, I know the word that is irresistible.
+
+SOCRATES: Then don't say it.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes, but I will; and my word shall be an oath. 'I say, or
+rather swear'--but what god will be witness of my oath?--'By this
+plane-tree I swear, that unless you repeat the discourse here in the
+face of this very plane-tree, I will never tell you another; never let
+you have word of another!'
+
+SOCRATES: Villain! I am conquered; the poor lover of discourse has no
+more to say.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Then why are you still at your tricks?
+
+SOCRATES: I am not going to play tricks now that you have taken the
+oath, for I cannot allow myself to be starved.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Proceed.
+
+SOCRATES: Shall I tell you what I will do?
+
+PHAEDRUS: What?
+
+SOCRATES: I will veil my face and gallop through the discourse as fast
+as I can, for if I see you I shall feel ashamed and not know what to
+say.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Only go on and you may do anything else which you please.
+
+SOCRATES: Come, O ye Muses, melodious, as ye are called, whether you
+have received this name from the character of your strains, or because
+the Melians are a musical race, help, O help me in the tale which my
+good friend here desires me to rehearse, in order that his friend whom
+he always deemed wise may seem to him to be wiser than ever.
+
+Once upon a time there was a fair boy, or, more properly speaking, a
+youth; he was very fair and had a great many lovers; and there was one
+special cunning one, who had persuaded the youth that he did not love
+him, but he really loved him all the same; and one day when he was
+paying his addresses to him, he used this very argument--that he
+ought to accept the non-lover rather than the lover; his words were as
+follows:--
+
+'All good counsel begins in the same way; a man should know what he
+is advising about, or his counsel will all come to nought. But people
+imagine that they know about the nature of things, when they don't know
+about them, and, not having come to an understanding at first
+because they think that they know, they end, as might be expected, in
+contradicting one another and themselves. Now you and I must not be
+guilty of this fundamental error which we condemn in others; but as our
+question is whether the lover or non-lover is to be preferred, let us
+first of all agree in defining the nature and power of love, and then,
+keeping our eyes upon the definition and to this appealing, let us
+further enquire whether love brings advantage or disadvantage.
+
+'Every one sees that love is a desire, and we know also that non-lovers
+desire the beautiful and good. Now in what way is the lover to be
+distinguished from the non-lover? Let us note that in every one of us
+there are two guiding and ruling principles which lead us whither they
+will; one is the natural desire of pleasure, the other is an acquired
+opinion which aspires after the best; and these two are sometimes in
+harmony and then again at war, and sometimes the one, sometimes the
+other conquers. When opinion by the help of reason leads us to the best,
+the conquering principle is called temperance; but when desire, which
+is devoid of reason, rules in us and drags us to pleasure, that power of
+misrule is called excess. Now excess has many names, and many members,
+and many forms, and any of these forms when very marked gives a name,
+neither honourable nor creditable, to the bearer of the name. The desire
+of eating, for example, which gets the better of the higher reason and
+the other desires, is called gluttony, and he who is possessed by it
+is called a glutton; the tyrannical desire of drink, which inclines the
+possessor of the desire to drink, has a name which is only too obvious,
+and there can be as little doubt by what name any other appetite of the
+same family would be called;--it will be the name of that which happens
+to be dominant. And now I think that you will perceive the drift of
+my discourse; but as every spoken word is in a manner plainer than the
+unspoken, I had better say further that the irrational desire which
+overcomes the tendency of opinion towards right, and is led away to the
+enjoyment of beauty, and especially of personal beauty, by the desires
+which are her own kindred--that supreme desire, I say, which by leading
+conquers and by the force of passion is reinforced, from this very
+force, receiving a name, is called love (erromenos eros).'
+
+And now, dear Phaedrus, I shall pause for an instant to ask whether you
+do not think me, as I appear to myself, inspired?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes, Socrates, you seem to have a very unusual flow of words.
+
+SOCRATES: Listen to me, then, in silence; for surely the place is holy;
+so that you must not wonder, if, as I proceed, I appear to be in a
+divine fury, for already I am getting into dithyrambics.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Nothing can be truer.
+
+SOCRATES: The responsibility rests with you. But hear what follows, and
+perhaps the fit may be averted; all is in their hands above. I will go
+on talking to my youth. Listen:--
+
+Thus, my friend, we have declared and defined the nature of the subject.
+Keeping the definition in view, let us now enquire what advantage or
+disadvantage is likely to ensue from the lover or the non-lover to him
+who accepts their advances.
+
+He who is the victim of his passions and the slave of pleasure will of
+course desire to make his beloved as agreeable to himself as possible.
+Now to him who has a mind diseased anything is agreeable which is not
+opposed to him, but that which is equal or superior is hateful to him,
+and therefore the lover will not brook any superiority or equality
+on the part of his beloved; he is always employed in reducing him to
+inferiority. And the ignorant is the inferior of the wise, the coward
+of the brave, the slow of speech of the speaker, the dull of the
+clever. These, and not these only, are the mental defects of the
+beloved;--defects which, when implanted by nature, are necessarily
+a delight to the lover, and when not implanted, he must contrive to
+implant them in him, if he would not be deprived of his fleeting joy.
+And therefore he cannot help being jealous, and will debar his beloved
+from the advantages of society which would make a man of him, and
+especially from that society which would have given him wisdom, and
+thereby he cannot fail to do him great harm. That is to say, in his
+excessive fear lest he should come to be despised in his eyes he will be
+compelled to banish from him divine philosophy; and there is no greater
+injury which he can inflict upon him than this. He will contrive that
+his beloved shall be wholly ignorant, and in everything shall look
+to him; he is to be the delight of the lover's heart, and a curse to
+himself. Verily, a lover is a profitable guardian and associate for him
+in all that relates to his mind.
+
+Let us next see how his master, whose law of life is pleasure and not
+good, will keep and train the body of his servant. Will he not choose a
+beloved who is delicate rather than sturdy and strong? One brought up
+in shady bowers and not in the bright sun, a stranger to manly exercises
+and the sweat of toil, accustomed only to a soft and luxurious diet,
+instead of the hues of health having the colours of paint and ornament,
+and the rest of a piece?--such a life as any one can imagine and which I
+need not detail at length. But I may sum up all that I have to say in a
+word, and pass on. Such a person in war, or in any of the great crises
+of life, will be the anxiety of his friends and also of his lover, and
+certainly not the terror of his enemies; which nobody can deny.
+
+And now let us tell what advantage or disadvantage the beloved will
+receive from the guardianship and society of his lover in the matter of
+his property; this is the next point to be considered. The lover will be
+the first to see what, indeed, will be sufficiently evident to all men,
+that he desires above all things to deprive his beloved of his dearest
+and best and holiest possessions, father, mother, kindred, friends, of
+all whom he thinks may be hinderers or reprovers of their most sweet
+converse; he will even cast a jealous eye upon his gold and silver or
+other property, because these make him a less easy prey, and when caught
+less manageable; hence he is of necessity displeased at his possession
+of them and rejoices at their loss; and he would like him to be
+wifeless, childless, homeless, as well; and the longer the better, for
+the longer he is all this, the longer he will enjoy him.
+
+There are some sort of animals, such as flatterers, who are dangerous
+and mischievous enough, and yet nature has mingled a temporary pleasure
+and grace in their composition. You may say that a courtesan is hurtful,
+and disapprove of such creatures and their practices, and yet for the
+time they are very pleasant. But the lover is not only hurtful to his
+love; he is also an extremely disagreeable companion. The old proverb
+says that 'birds of a feather flock together'; I suppose that equality
+of years inclines them to the same pleasures, and similarity begets
+friendship; yet you may have more than enough even of this; and verily
+constraint is always said to be grievous. Now the lover is not only
+unlike his beloved, but he forces himself upon him. For he is old and
+his love is young, and neither day nor night will he leave him if he
+can help; necessity and the sting of desire drive him on, and allure
+him with the pleasure which he receives from seeing, hearing, touching,
+perceiving him in every way. And therefore he is delighted to fasten
+upon him and to minister to him. But what pleasure or consolation can
+the beloved be receiving all this time? Must he not feel the extremity
+of disgust when he looks at an old shrivelled face and the remainder to
+match, which even in a description is disagreeable, and quite detestable
+when he is forced into daily contact with his lover; moreover he is
+jealously watched and guarded against everything and everybody, and
+has to hear misplaced and exaggerated praises of himself, and censures
+equally inappropriate, which are intolerable when the man is sober, and,
+besides being intolerable, are published all over the world in all their
+indelicacy and wearisomeness when he is drunk.
+
+And not only while his love continues is he mischievous and unpleasant,
+but when his love ceases he becomes a perfidious enemy of him on whom
+he showered his oaths and prayers and promises, and yet could hardly
+prevail upon him to tolerate the tedium of his company even from motives
+of interest. The hour of payment arrives, and now he is the servant of
+another master; instead of love and infatuation, wisdom and temperance
+are his bosom's lords; but the beloved has not discovered the change
+which has taken place in him, when he asks for a return and recalls to
+his recollection former sayings and doings; he believes himself to be
+speaking to the same person, and the other, not having the courage to
+confess the truth, and not knowing how to fulfil the oaths and promises
+which he made when under the dominion of folly, and having now grown
+wise and temperate, does not want to do as he did or to be as he was
+before. And so he runs away and is constrained to be a defaulter; the
+oyster-shell (In allusion to a game in which two parties fled or pursued
+according as an oyster-shell which was thrown into the air fell with
+the dark or light side uppermost.) has fallen with the other side
+uppermost--he changes pursuit into flight, while the other is compelled
+to follow him with passion and imprecation, not knowing that he ought
+never from the first to have accepted a demented lover instead of a
+sensible non-lover; and that in making such a choice he was giving
+himself up to a faithless, morose, envious, disagreeable being, hurtful
+to his estate, hurtful to his bodily health, and still more hurtful to
+the cultivation of his mind, than which there neither is nor ever will
+be anything more honoured in the eyes both of gods and men. Consider
+this, fair youth, and know that in the friendship of the lover there is
+no real kindness; he has an appetite and wants to feed upon you:
+
+'As wolves love lambs so lovers love their loves.'
+
+But I told you so, I am speaking in verse, and therefore I had better
+make an end; enough.
+
+PHAEDRUS: I thought that you were only half-way and were going to make a
+similar speech about all the advantages of accepting the non-lover. Why
+do you not proceed?
+
+SOCRATES: Does not your simplicity observe that I have got out of
+dithyrambics into heroics, when only uttering a censure on the lover?
+And if I am to add the praises of the non-lover what will become of me?
+Do you not perceive that I am already overtaken by the Nymphs to whom
+you have mischievously exposed me? And therefore I will only add that
+the non-lover has all the advantages in which the lover is accused of
+being deficient. And now I will say no more; there has been enough of
+both of them. Leaving the tale to its fate, I will cross the river and
+make the best of my way home, lest a worse thing be inflicted upon me by
+you.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Not yet, Socrates; not until the heat of the day has passed;
+do you not see that the hour is almost noon? there is the midday sun
+standing still, as people say, in the meridian. Let us rather stay and
+talk over what has been said, and then return in the cool.
+
+SOCRATES: Your love of discourse, Phaedrus, is superhuman, simply
+marvellous, and I do not believe that there is any one of your
+contemporaries who has either made or in one way or another has
+compelled others to make an equal number of speeches. I would except
+Simmias the Theban, but all the rest are far behind you. And now I do
+verily believe that you have been the cause of another.
+
+PHAEDRUS: That is good news. But what do you mean?
+
+SOCRATES: I mean to say that as I was about to cross the stream the
+usual sign was given to me,--that sign which always forbids, but never
+bids, me to do anything which I am going to do; and I thought that I
+heard a voice saying in my ear that I had been guilty of impiety,
+and that I must not go away until I had made an atonement. Now I am a
+diviner, though not a very good one, but I have enough religion for my
+own use, as you might say of a bad writer--his writing is good enough
+for him; and I am beginning to see that I was in error. O my friend, how
+prophetic is the human soul! At the time I had a sort of misgiving, and,
+like Ibycus, 'I was troubled; I feared that I might be buying honour
+from men at the price of sinning against the gods.' Now I recognize my
+error.
+
+PHAEDRUS: What error?
+
+SOCRATES: That was a dreadful speech which you brought with you, and you
+made me utter one as bad.
+
+PHAEDRUS: How so?
+
+SOCRATES: It was foolish, I say,--to a certain extent, impious; can
+anything be more dreadful?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Nothing, if the speech was really such as you describe.
+
+SOCRATES: Well, and is not Eros the son of Aphrodite, and a god?
+
+PHAEDRUS: So men say.
+
+SOCRATES: But that was not acknowledged by Lysias in his speech, nor by
+you in that other speech which you by a charm drew from my lips. For if
+love be, as he surely is, a divinity, he cannot be evil. Yet this was
+the error of both the speeches. There was also a simplicity about them
+which was refreshing; having no truth or honesty in them, nevertheless
+they pretended to be something, hoping to succeed in deceiving the
+manikins of earth and gain celebrity among them. Wherefore I must have
+a purgation. And I bethink me of an ancient purgation of mythological
+error which was devised, not by Homer, for he never had the wit to
+discover why he was blind, but by Stesichorus, who was a philosopher and
+knew the reason why; and therefore, when he lost his eyes, for that was
+the penalty which was inflicted upon him for reviling the lovely Helen,
+he at once purged himself. And the purgation was a recantation, which
+began thus,--
+
+ 'False is that word of mine--the truth is that thou didst not embark in
+ ships, nor ever go to the walls of Troy;'
+
+and when he had completed his poem, which is called 'the recantation,'
+immediately his sight returned to him. Now I will be wiser than either
+Stesichorus or Homer, in that I am going to make my recantation for
+reviling love before I suffer; and this I will attempt, not as before,
+veiled and ashamed, but with forehead bold and bare.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Nothing could be more agreeable to me than to hear you say so.
+
+SOCRATES: Only think, my good Phaedrus, what an utter want of delicacy
+was shown in the two discourses; I mean, in my own and in that which you
+recited out of the book. Would not any one who was himself of a noble
+and gentle nature, and who loved or ever had loved a nature like his
+own, when we tell of the petty causes of lovers' jealousies, and of
+their exceeding animosities, and of the injuries which they do to their
+beloved, have imagined that our ideas of love were taken from some haunt
+of sailors to which good manners were unknown--he would certainly never
+have admitted the justice of our censure?
+
+PHAEDRUS: I dare say not, Socrates.
+
+SOCRATES: Therefore, because I blush at the thought of this person, and
+also because I am afraid of Love himself, I desire to wash the brine out
+of my ears with water from the spring; and I would counsel Lysias not to
+delay, but to write another discourse, which shall prove that 'ceteris
+paribus' the lover ought to be accepted rather than the non-lover.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Be assured that he shall. You shall speak the praises of the
+lover, and Lysias shall be compelled by me to write another discourse on
+the same theme.
+
+SOCRATES: You will be true to your nature in that, and therefore I
+believe you.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Speak, and fear not.
+
+SOCRATES: But where is the fair youth whom I was addressing before, and
+who ought to listen now; lest, if he hear me not, he should accept a
+non-lover before he knows what he is doing?
+
+PHAEDRUS: He is close at hand, and always at your service.
+
+SOCRATES: Know then, fair youth, that the former discourse was the word
+of Phaedrus, the son of Vain Man, who dwells in the city of Myrrhina
+(Myrrhinusius). And this which I am about to utter is the recantation of
+Stesichorus the son of Godly Man (Euphemus), who comes from the town of
+Desire (Himera), and is to the following effect: 'I told a lie when I
+said' that the beloved ought to accept the non-lover when he might have
+the lover, because the one is sane, and the other mad. It might be so
+if madness were simply an evil; but there is also a madness which is a
+divine gift, and the source of the chiefest blessings granted to
+men. For prophecy is a madness, and the prophetess at Delphi and the
+priestesses at Dodona when out of their senses have conferred great
+benefits on Hellas, both in public and private life, but when in their
+senses few or none. And I might also tell you how the Sibyl and other
+inspired persons have given to many an one many an intimation of the
+future which has saved them from falling. But it would be tedious to
+speak of what every one knows.
+
+There will be more reason in appealing to the ancient inventors of names
+(compare Cratylus), who would never have connected prophecy (mantike)
+which foretells the future and is the noblest of arts, with madness
+(manike), or called them both by the same name, if they had deemed
+madness to be a disgrace or dishonour;--they must have thought that
+there was an inspired madness which was a noble thing; for the two
+words, mantike and manike, are really the same, and the letter tau is
+only a modern and tasteless insertion. And this is confirmed by the
+name which was given by them to the rational investigation of futurity,
+whether made by the help of birds or of other signs--this, for as much
+as it is an art which supplies from the reasoning faculty mind (nous)
+and information (istoria) to human thought (oiesis) they originally
+termed oionoistike, but the word has been lately altered and made
+sonorous by the modern introduction of the letter Omega (oionoistike and
+oionistike), and in proportion as prophecy (mantike) is more perfect and
+august than augury, both in name and fact, in the same proportion, as
+the ancients testify, is madness superior to a sane mind (sophrosune)
+for the one is only of human, but the other of divine origin. Again,
+where plagues and mightiest woes have bred in certain families, owing
+to some ancient blood-guiltiness, there madness has entered with holy
+prayers and rites, and by inspired utterances found a way of deliverance
+for those who are in need; and he who has part in this gift, and is
+truly possessed and duly out of his mind, is by the use of purifications
+and mysteries made whole and exempt from evil, future as well as
+present, and has a release from the calamity which was afflicting him.
+The third kind is the madness of those who are possessed by the Muses;
+which taking hold of a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring
+frenzy, awakens lyrical and all other numbers; with these adorning the
+myriad actions of ancient heroes for the instruction of posterity. But
+he who, having no touch of the Muses' madness in his soul, comes to the
+door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art--he,
+I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man disappears and is
+nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.
+
+I might tell of many other noble deeds which have sprung from inspired
+madness. And therefore, let no one frighten or flutter us by saying that
+the temperate friend is to be chosen rather than the inspired, but let
+him further show that love is not sent by the gods for any good to lover
+or beloved; if he can do so we will allow him to carry off the palm. And
+we, on our part, will prove in answer to him that the madness of love is
+the greatest of heaven's blessings, and the proof shall be one which the
+wise will receive, and the witling disbelieve. But first of all, let us
+view the affections and actions of the soul divine and human, and try
+to ascertain the truth about them. The beginning of our proof is as
+follows:--
+
+(Translated by Cic. Tus. Quaest.) The soul through all her being is
+immortal, for that which is ever in motion is immortal; but that which
+moves another and is moved by another, in ceasing to move ceases also to
+live. Only the self-moving, never leaving self, never ceases to move,
+and is the fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves besides.
+Now, the beginning is unbegotten, for that which is begotten has a
+beginning; but the beginning is begotten of nothing, for if it were
+begotten of something, then the begotten would not come from a
+beginning. But if unbegotten, it must also be indestructible; for if
+beginning were destroyed, there could be no beginning out of anything,
+nor anything out of a beginning; and all things must have a beginning.
+And therefore the self-moving is the beginning of motion; and this can
+neither be destroyed nor begotten, else the whole heavens and all
+creation would collapse and stand still, and never again have motion or
+birth. But if the self-moving is proved to be immortal, he who affirms
+that self-motion is the very idea and essence of the soul will not be
+put to confusion. For the body which is moved from without is soulless;
+but that which is moved from within has a soul, for such is the nature
+of the soul. But if this be true, must not the soul be the self-moving,
+and therefore of necessity unbegotten and immortal? Enough of the soul's
+immortality.
+
+Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large
+and more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a
+figure. And let the figure be composite--a pair of winged horses and a
+charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteers of the gods are
+all of them noble and of noble descent, but those of other races are
+mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of them is
+noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed;
+and the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to
+him. I will endeavour to explain to you in what way the mortal differs
+from the immortal creature. The soul in her totality has the care of
+inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the whole heaven in divers
+forms appearing--when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and
+orders the whole world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings
+and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground--there,
+finding a home, she receives an earthly frame which appears to be
+self-moved, but is really moved by her power; and this composition of
+soul and body is called a living and mortal creature. For immortal no
+such union can be reasonably believed to be; although fancy, not
+having seen nor surely known the nature of God, may imagine an immortal
+creature having both a body and also a soul which are united throughout
+all time. Let that, however, be as God wills, and be spoken of
+acceptably to him. And now let us ask the reason why the soul loses her
+wings!
+
+The wing is the corporeal element which is most akin to the divine,
+and which by nature tends to soar aloft and carry that which gravitates
+downwards into the upper region, which is the habitation of the gods.
+The divine is beauty, wisdom, goodness, and the like; and by these the
+wing of the soul is nourished, and grows apace; but when fed upon evil
+and foulness and the opposite of good, wastes and falls away. Zeus, the
+mighty lord, holding the reins of a winged chariot, leads the way in
+heaven, ordering all and taking care of all; and there follows him the
+array of gods and demi-gods, marshalled in eleven bands; Hestia alone
+abides at home in the house of heaven; of the rest they who are reckoned
+among the princely twelve march in their appointed order. They see many
+blessed sights in the inner heaven, and there are many ways to and fro,
+along which the blessed gods are passing, every one doing his own
+work; he may follow who will and can, for jealousy has no place in the
+celestial choir. But when they go to banquet and festival, then they
+move up the steep to the top of the vault of heaven. The chariots of
+the gods in even poise, obeying the rein, glide rapidly; but the others
+labour, for the vicious steed goes heavily, weighing down the charioteer
+to the earth when his steed has not been thoroughly trained:--and
+this is the hour of agony and extremest conflict for the soul. For the
+immortals, when they are at the end of their course, go forth and stand
+upon the outside of heaven, and the revolution of the spheres carries
+them round, and they behold the things beyond. But of the heaven which
+is above the heavens, what earthly poet ever did or ever will sing
+worthily? It is such as I will describe; for I must dare to speak the
+truth, when truth is my theme. There abides the very being with which
+true knowledge is concerned; the colourless, formless, intangible
+essence, visible only to mind, the pilot of the soul. The divine
+intelligence, being nurtured upon mind and pure knowledge, and the
+intelligence of every soul which is capable of receiving the food proper
+to it, rejoices at beholding reality, and once more gazing upon truth,
+is replenished and made glad, until the revolution of the worlds
+brings her round again to the same place. In the revolution she beholds
+justice, and temperance, and knowledge absolute, not in the form of
+generation or of relation, which men call existence, but knowledge
+absolute in existence absolute; and beholding the other true existences
+in like manner, and feasting upon them, she passes down into the
+interior of the heavens and returns home; and there the charioteer
+putting up his horses at the stall, gives them ambrosia to eat and
+nectar to drink.
+
+Such is the life of the gods; but of other souls, that which follows
+God best and is likest to him lifts the head of the charioteer into the
+outer world, and is carried round in the revolution, troubled indeed by
+the steeds, and with difficulty beholding true being; while another
+only rises and falls, and sees, and again fails to see by reason of the
+unruliness of the steeds. The rest of the souls are also longing after
+the upper world and they all follow, but not being strong enough they
+are carried round below the surface, plunging, treading on one another,
+each striving to be first; and there is confusion and perspiration and
+the extremity of effort; and many of them are lamed or have their wings
+broken through the ill-driving of the charioteers; and all of them after
+a fruitless toil, not having attained to the mysteries of true being,
+go away, and feed upon opinion. The reason why the souls exhibit this
+exceeding eagerness to behold the plain of truth is that pasturage is
+found there, which is suited to the highest part of the soul; and the
+wing on which the soul soars is nourished with this. And there is a law
+of Destiny, that the soul which attains any vision of truth in company
+with a god is preserved from harm until the next period, and if
+attaining always is always unharmed. But when she is unable to follow,
+and fails to behold the truth, and through some ill-hap sinks beneath
+the double load of forgetfulness and vice, and her wings fall from her
+and she drops to the ground, then the law ordains that this soul shall
+at her first birth pass, not into any other animal, but only into man;
+and the soul which has seen most of truth shall come to the birth as a
+philosopher, or artist, or some musical and loving nature; that which
+has seen truth in the second degree shall be some righteous king
+or warrior chief; the soul which is of the third class shall be a
+politician, or economist, or trader; the fourth shall be a lover of
+gymnastic toils, or a physician; the fifth shall lead the life of a
+prophet or hierophant; to the sixth the character of poet or some other
+imitative artist will be assigned; to the seventh the life of an artisan
+or husbandman; to the eighth that of a sophist or demagogue; to the
+ninth that of a tyrant--all these are states of probation, in which
+he who does righteously improves, and he who does unrighteously,
+deteriorates his lot.
+
+Ten thousand years must elapse before the soul of each one can return to
+the place from whence she came, for she cannot grow her wings in less;
+only the soul of a philosopher, guileless and true, or the soul of a
+lover, who is not devoid of philosophy, may acquire wings in the third
+of the recurring periods of a thousand years; he is distinguished from
+the ordinary good man who gains wings in three thousand years:--and they
+who choose this life three times in succession have wings given them,
+and go away at the end of three thousand years. But the others (The
+philosopher alone is not subject to judgment (krisis), for he has never
+lost the vision of truth.) receive judgment when they have completed
+their first life, and after the judgment they go, some of them to the
+houses of correction which are under the earth, and are punished; others
+to some place in heaven whither they are lightly borne by justice, and
+there they live in a manner worthy of the life which they led here when
+in the form of men. And at the end of the first thousand years the good
+souls and also the evil souls both come to draw lots and choose their
+second life, and they may take any which they please. The soul of a man
+may pass into the life of a beast, or from the beast return again into
+the man. But the soul which has never seen the truth will not pass into
+the human form. For a man must have intelligence of universals, and be
+able to proceed from the many particulars of sense to one conception of
+reason;--this is the recollection of those things which our soul once
+saw while following God--when regardless of that which we now call being
+she raised her head up towards the true being. And therefore the mind
+of the philosopher alone has wings; and this is just, for he is always,
+according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in recollection to
+those things in which God abides, and in beholding which He is what He
+is. And he who employs aright these memories is ever being initiated
+into perfect mysteries and alone becomes truly perfect. But, as he
+forgets earthly interests and is rapt in the divine, the vulgar deem him
+mad, and rebuke him; they do not see that he is inspired.
+
+Thus far I have been speaking of the fourth and last kind of madness,
+which is imputed to him who, when he sees the beauty of earth, is
+transported with the recollection of the true beauty; he would like to
+fly away, but he cannot; he is like a bird fluttering and looking upward
+and careless of the world below; and he is therefore thought to be mad.
+And I have shown this of all inspirations to be the noblest and highest
+and the offspring of the highest to him who has or shares in it, and
+that he who loves the beautiful is called a lover because he partakes of
+it. For, as has been already said, every soul of man has in the way of
+nature beheld true being; this was the condition of her passing into the
+form of man. But all souls do not easily recall the things of the other
+world; they may have seen them for a short time only, or they may have
+been unfortunate in their earthly lot, and, having had their hearts
+turned to unrighteousness through some corrupting influence, they may
+have lost the memory of the holy things which once they saw. Few only
+retain an adequate remembrance of them; and they, when they behold
+here any image of that other world, are rapt in amazement; but they
+are ignorant of what this rapture means, because they do not clearly
+perceive. For there is no light of justice or temperance or any of the
+higher ideas which are precious to souls in the earthly copies of them:
+they are seen through a glass dimly; and there are few who, going to the
+images, behold in them the realities, and these only with difficulty.
+There was a time when with the rest of the happy band they saw beauty
+shining in brightness,--we philosophers following in the train of Zeus,
+others in company with other gods; and then we beheld the beatific
+vision and were initiated into a mystery which may be truly called most
+blessed, celebrated by us in our state of innocence, before we had
+any experience of evils to come, when we were admitted to the sight
+of apparitions innocent and simple and calm and happy, which we beheld
+shining in pure light, pure ourselves and not yet enshrined in that
+living tomb which we carry about, now that we are imprisoned in the
+body, like an oyster in his shell. Let me linger over the memory of
+scenes which have passed away.
+
+But of beauty, I repeat again that we saw her there shining in company
+with the celestial forms; and coming to earth we find her here too,
+shining in clearness through the clearest aperture of sense. For sight
+is the most piercing of our bodily senses; though not by that is wisdom
+seen; her loveliness would have been transporting if there had been
+a visible image of her, and the other ideas, if they had visible
+counterparts, would be equally lovely. But this is the privilege of
+beauty, that being the loveliest she is also the most palpable to sight.
+Now he who is not newly initiated or who has become corrupted, does not
+easily rise out of this world to the sight of true beauty in the other;
+he looks only at her earthly namesake, and instead of being awed at the
+sight of her, he is given over to pleasure, and like a brutish beast he
+rushes on to enjoy and beget; he consorts with wantonness, and is not
+afraid or ashamed of pursuing pleasure in violation of nature. But
+he whose initiation is recent, and who has been the spectator of many
+glories in the other world, is amazed when he sees any one having a
+godlike face or form, which is the expression of divine beauty; and at
+first a shudder runs through him, and again the old awe steals over him;
+then looking upon the face of his beloved as of a god he reverences him,
+and if he were not afraid of being thought a downright madman, he would
+sacrifice to his beloved as to the image of a god; then while he gazes
+on him there is a sort of reaction, and the shudder passes into an
+unusual heat and perspiration; for, as he receives the effluence of
+beauty through the eyes, the wing moistens and he warms. And as he
+warms, the parts out of which the wing grew, and which had been hitherto
+closed and rigid, and had prevented the wing from shooting forth, are
+melted, and as nourishment streams upon him, the lower end of the wing
+begins to swell and grow from the root upwards; and the growth extends
+under the whole soul--for once the whole was winged. During this process
+the whole soul is all in a state of ebullition and effervescence,--which
+may be compared to the irritation and uneasiness in the gums at the
+time of cutting teeth,--bubbles up, and has a feeling of uneasiness and
+tickling; but when in like manner the soul is beginning to grow wings,
+the beauty of the beloved meets her eye and she receives the sensible
+warm motion of particles which flow towards her, therefore called
+emotion (imeros), and is refreshed and warmed by them, and then she
+ceases from her pain with joy. But when she is parted from her beloved
+and her moisture fails, then the orifices of the passage out of which
+the wing shoots dry up and close, and intercept the germ of the wing;
+which, being shut up with the emotion, throbbing as with the pulsations
+of an artery, pricks the aperture which is nearest, until at length the
+entire soul is pierced and maddened and pained, and at the recollection
+of beauty is again delighted. And from both of them together the soul is
+oppressed at the strangeness of her condition, and is in a great strait
+and excitement, and in her madness can neither sleep by night nor abide
+in her place by day. And wherever she thinks that she will behold the
+beautiful one, thither in her desire she runs. And when she has seen
+him, and bathed herself in the waters of beauty, her constraint is
+loosened, and she is refreshed, and has no more pangs and pains; and
+this is the sweetest of all pleasures at the time, and is the reason
+why the soul of the lover will never forsake his beautiful one, whom he
+esteems above all; he has forgotten mother and brethren and companions,
+and he thinks nothing of the neglect and loss of his property; the rules
+and proprieties of life, on which he formerly prided himself, he now
+despises, and is ready to sleep like a servant, wherever he is allowed,
+as near as he can to his desired one, who is the object of his worship,
+and the physician who can alone assuage the greatness of his pain. And
+this state, my dear imaginary youth to whom I am talking, is by men
+called love, and among the gods has a name at which you, in your
+simplicity, may be inclined to mock; there are two lines in the
+apocryphal writings of Homer in which the name occurs. One of them is
+rather outrageous, and not altogether metrical. They are as follows:
+
+'Mortals call him fluttering love, But the immortals call him winged
+one, Because the growing of wings (Or, reading pterothoiton, 'the
+movement of wings.') is a necessity to him.'
+
+You may believe this, but not unless you like. At any rate the loves of
+lovers and their causes are such as I have described.
+
+Now the lover who is taken to be the attendant of Zeus is better able to
+bear the winged god, and can endure a heavier burden; but the attendants
+and companions of Ares, when under the influence of love, if they fancy
+that they have been at all wronged, are ready to kill and put an end
+to themselves and their beloved. And he who follows in the train of any
+other god, while he is unspoiled and the impression lasts, honours and
+imitates him, as far as he is able; and after the manner of his God he
+behaves in his intercourse with his beloved and with the rest of the
+world during the first period of his earthly existence. Every one
+chooses his love from the ranks of beauty according to his character,
+and this he makes his god, and fashions and adorns as a sort of image
+which he is to fall down and worship. The followers of Zeus desire that
+their beloved should have a soul like him; and therefore they seek out
+some one of a philosophical and imperial nature, and when they have
+found him and loved him, they do all they can to confirm such a nature
+in him, and if they have no experience of such a disposition hitherto,
+they learn of any one who can teach them, and themselves follow in the
+same way. And they have the less difficulty in finding the nature of
+their own god in themselves, because they have been compelled to gaze
+intensely on him; their recollection clings to him, and they become
+possessed of him, and receive from him their character and disposition,
+so far as man can participate in God. The qualities of their god they
+attribute to the beloved, wherefore they love him all the more, and if,
+like the Bacchic Nymphs, they draw inspiration from Zeus, they pour out
+their own fountain upon him, wanting to make him as like as possible
+to their own god. But those who are the followers of Here seek a royal
+love, and when they have found him they do just the same with him; and
+in like manner the followers of Apollo, and of every other god walking
+in the ways of their god, seek a love who is to be made like him whom
+they serve, and when they have found him, they themselves imitate their
+god, and persuade their love to do the same, and educate him into the
+manner and nature of the god as far as they each can; for no feelings of
+envy or jealousy are entertained by them towards their beloved, but they
+do their utmost to create in him the greatest likeness of themselves and
+of the god whom they honour. Thus fair and blissful to the beloved is
+the desire of the inspired lover, and the initiation of which I speak
+into the mysteries of true love, if he be captured by the lover and
+their purpose is effected. Now the beloved is taken captive in the
+following manner:--
+
+As I said at the beginning of this tale, I divided each soul into
+three--two horses and a charioteer; and one of the horses was good and
+the other bad: the division may remain, but I have not yet explained in
+what the goodness or badness of either consists, and to that I will
+now proceed. The right-hand horse is upright and cleanly made; he has a
+lofty neck and an aquiline nose; his colour is white, and his eyes dark;
+he is a lover of honour and modesty and temperance, and the follower
+of true glory; he needs no touch of the whip, but is guided by word and
+admonition only. The other is a crooked lumbering animal, put together
+anyhow; he has a short thick neck; he is flat-faced and of a dark
+colour, with grey eyes and blood-red complexion (Or with grey and
+blood-shot eyes.); the mate of insolence and pride, shag-eared and deaf,
+hardly yielding to whip and spur. Now when the charioteer beholds the
+vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed through sense, and is full
+of the prickings and ticklings of desire, the obedient steed, then
+as always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the
+beloved; but the other, heedless of the pricks and of the blows of
+the whip, plunges and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his
+companion and the charioteer, whom he forces to approach the beloved and
+to remember the joys of love. They at first indignantly oppose him and
+will not be urged on to do terrible and unlawful deeds; but at last,
+when he persists in plaguing them, they yield and agree to do as he bids
+them. And now they are at the spot and behold the flashing beauty of the
+beloved; which when the charioteer sees, his memory is carried to the
+true beauty, whom he beholds in company with Modesty like an image
+placed upon a holy pedestal. He sees her, but he is afraid and falls
+backwards in adoration, and by his fall is compelled to pull back the
+reins with such violence as to bring both the steeds on their haunches,
+the one willing and unresisting, the unruly one very unwilling; and when
+they have gone back a little, the one is overcome with shame and wonder,
+and his whole soul is bathed in perspiration; the other, when the
+pain is over which the bridle and the fall had given him, having with
+difficulty taken breath, is full of wrath and reproaches, which he
+heaps upon the charioteer and his fellow-steed, for want of courage
+and manhood, declaring that they have been false to their agreement and
+guilty of desertion. Again they refuse, and again he urges them on, and
+will scarce yield to their prayer that he would wait until another time.
+When the appointed hour comes, they make as if they had forgotten, and
+he reminds them, fighting and neighing and dragging them on, until at
+length he on the same thoughts intent, forces them to draw near again.
+And when they are near he stoops his head and puts up his tail, and
+takes the bit in his teeth and pulls shamelessly. Then the charioteer is
+worse off than ever; he falls back like a racer at the barrier, and with
+a still more violent wrench drags the bit out of the teeth of the wild
+steed and covers his abusive tongue and jaws with blood, and forces his
+legs and haunches to the ground and punishes him sorely. And when this
+has happened several times and the villain has ceased from his wanton
+way, he is tamed and humbled, and follows the will of the charioteer,
+and when he sees the beautiful one he is ready to die of fear. And from
+that time forward the soul of the lover follows the beloved in modesty
+and holy fear.
+
+And so the beloved who, like a god, has received every true and loyal
+service from his lover, not in pretence but in reality, being also
+himself of a nature friendly to his admirer, if in former days he
+has blushed to own his passion and turned away his lover, because his
+youthful companions or others slanderously told him that he would be
+disgraced, now as years advance, at the appointed age and time, is led
+to receive him into communion. For fate which has ordained that there
+shall be no friendship among the evil has also ordained that there shall
+ever be friendship among the good. And the beloved when he has received
+him into communion and intimacy, is quite amazed at the good-will of the
+lover; he recognises that the inspired friend is worth all other
+friends or kinsmen; they have nothing of friendship in them worthy to be
+compared with his. And when this feeling continues and he is nearer
+to him and embraces him, in gymnastic exercises and at other times of
+meeting, then the fountain of that stream, which Zeus when he was in
+love with Ganymede named Desire, overflows upon the lover, and some
+enters into his soul, and some when he is filled flows out again; and as
+a breeze or an echo rebounds from the smooth rocks and returns whence it
+came, so does the stream of beauty, passing through the eyes which are
+the windows of the soul, come back to the beautiful one; there arriving
+and quickening the passages of the wings, watering them and inclining
+them to grow, and filling the soul of the beloved also with love. And
+thus he loves, but he knows not what; he does not understand and cannot
+explain his own state; he appears to have caught the infection of
+blindness from another; the lover is his mirror in whom he is beholding
+himself, but he is not aware of this. When he is with the lover, both
+cease from their pain, but when he is away then he longs as he is
+longed for, and has love's image, love for love (Anteros) lodging in his
+breast, which he calls and believes to be not love but friendship only,
+and his desire is as the desire of the other, but weaker; he wants
+to see him, touch him, kiss him, embrace him, and probably not long
+afterwards his desire is accomplished. When they meet, the wanton steed
+of the lover has a word to say to the charioteer; he would like to have
+a little pleasure in return for many pains, but the wanton steed of
+the beloved says not a word, for he is bursting with passion which he
+understands not;--he throws his arms round the lover and embraces him
+as his dearest friend; and, when they are side by side, he is not in a
+state in which he can refuse the lover anything, if he ask him; although
+his fellow-steed and the charioteer oppose him with the arguments
+of shame and reason. After this their happiness depends upon their
+self-control; if the better elements of the mind which lead to order
+and philosophy prevail, then they pass their life here in happiness and
+harmony--masters of themselves and orderly--enslaving the vicious and
+emancipating the virtuous elements of the soul; and when the end comes,
+they are light and winged for flight, having conquered in one of the
+three heavenly or truly Olympian victories; nor can human discipline or
+divine inspiration confer any greater blessing on man than this. If,
+on the other hand, they leave philosophy and lead the lower life of
+ambition, then probably, after wine or in some other careless hour, the
+two wanton animals take the two souls when off their guard and bring
+them together, and they accomplish that desire of their hearts which to
+the many is bliss; and this having once enjoyed they continue to enjoy,
+yet rarely because they have not the approval of the whole soul. They
+too are dear, but not so dear to one another as the others, either at
+the time of their love or afterwards. They consider that they have given
+and taken from each other the most sacred pledges, and they may not
+break them and fall into enmity. At last they pass out of the body,
+unwinged, but eager to soar, and thus obtain no mean reward of love and
+madness. For those who have once begun the heavenward pilgrimage may not
+go down again to darkness and the journey beneath the earth, but they
+live in light always; happy companions in their pilgrimage, and when the
+time comes at which they receive their wings they have the same plumage
+because of their love.
+
+Thus great are the heavenly blessings which the friendship of a lover
+will confer upon you, my youth. Whereas the attachment of the non-lover,
+which is alloyed with a worldly prudence and has worldly and niggardly
+ways of doling out benefits, will breed in your soul those vulgar
+qualities which the populace applaud, will send you bowling round the
+earth during a period of nine thousand years, and leave you a fool in
+the world below.
+
+And thus, dear Eros, I have made and paid my recantation, as well and as
+fairly as I could; more especially in the matter of the poetical figures
+which I was compelled to use, because Phaedrus would have them. And now
+forgive the past and accept the present, and be gracious and merciful to
+me, and do not in thine anger deprive me of sight, or take from me the
+art of love which thou hast given me, but grant that I may be yet more
+esteemed in the eyes of the fair. And if Phaedrus or I myself said
+anything rude in our first speeches, blame Lysias, who is the father
+of the brat, and let us have no more of his progeny; bid him study
+philosophy, like his brother Polemarchus; and then his lover Phaedrus
+will no longer halt between two opinions, but will dedicate himself
+wholly to love and to philosophical discourses.
+
+PHAEDRUS: I join in the prayer, Socrates, and say with you, if this
+be for my good, may your words come to pass. But why did you make your
+second oration so much finer than the first? I wonder why. And I begin
+to be afraid that I shall lose conceit of Lysias, and that he will
+appear tame in comparison, even if he be willing to put another as fine
+and as long as yours into the field, which I doubt. For quite lately one
+of your politicians was abusing him on this very account; and called
+him a 'speech writer' again and again. So that a feeling of pride may
+probably induce him to give up writing speeches.
+
+SOCRATES: What a very amusing notion! But I think, my young man,
+that you are much mistaken in your friend if you imagine that he
+is frightened at a little noise; and, possibly, you think that his
+assailant was in earnest?
+
+PHAEDRUS: I thought, Socrates, that he was. And you are aware that the
+greatest and most influential statesmen are ashamed of writing speeches
+and leaving them in a written form, lest they should be called Sophists
+by posterity.
+
+SOCRATES: You seem to be unconscious, Phaedrus, that the 'sweet elbow'
+(A proverb, like 'the grapes are sour,' applied to pleasures which
+cannot be had, meaning sweet things which, like the elbow, are out of
+the reach of the mouth. The promised pleasure turns out to be a long and
+tedious affair.) of the proverb is really the long arm of the Nile. And
+you appear to be equally unaware of the fact that this sweet elbow
+of theirs is also a long arm. For there is nothing of which our great
+politicians are so fond as of writing speeches and bequeathing them to
+posterity. And they add their admirers' names at the top of the writing,
+out of gratitude to them.
+
+PHAEDRUS: What do you mean? I do not understand.
+
+SOCRATES: Why, do you not know that when a politician writes, he begins
+with the names of his approvers?
+
+PHAEDRUS: How so?
+
+SOCRATES: Why, he begins in this manner: 'Be it enacted by the senate,
+the people, or both, on the motion of a certain person,' who is our
+author; and so putting on a serious face, he proceeds to display his own
+wisdom to his admirers in what is often a long and tedious composition.
+Now what is that sort of thing but a regular piece of authorship?
+
+PHAEDRUS: True.
+
+SOCRATES: And if the law is finally approved, then the author leaves the
+theatre in high delight; but if the law is rejected and he is done out
+of his speech-making, and not thought good enough to write, then he and
+his party are in mourning.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Very true.
+
+SOCRATES: So far are they from despising, or rather so highly do they
+value the practice of writing.
+
+PHAEDRUS: No doubt.
+
+SOCRATES: And when the king or orator has the power, as Lycurgus or
+Solon or Darius had, of attaining an immortality or authorship in a
+state, is he not thought by posterity, when they see his compositions,
+and does he not think himself, while he is yet alive, to be a god?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Very true.
+
+SOCRATES: Then do you think that any one of this class, however
+ill-disposed, would reproach Lysias with being an author?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Not upon your view; for according to you he would be casting a
+slur upon his own favourite pursuit.
+
+SOCRATES: Any one may see that there is no disgrace in the mere fact of
+writing.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Certainly not.
+
+SOCRATES: The disgrace begins when a man writes not well, but badly.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Clearly.
+
+SOCRATES: And what is well and what is badly--need we ask Lysias, or any
+other poet or orator, who ever wrote or will write either a political or
+any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet or prose writer, to teach
+us this?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Need we? For what should a man live if not for the pleasures
+of discourse? Surely not for the sake of bodily pleasures, which almost
+always have previous pain as a condition of them, and therefore are
+rightly called slavish.
+
+SOCRATES: There is time enough. And I believe that the grasshoppers
+chirruping after their manner in the heat of the sun over our heads are
+talking to one another and looking down at us. What would they say if
+they saw that we, like the many, are not conversing, but slumbering at
+mid-day, lulled by their voices, too indolent to think? Would they not
+have a right to laugh at us? They might imagine that we were slaves,
+who, coming to rest at a place of resort of theirs, like sheep lie
+asleep at noon around the well. But if they see us discoursing, and
+like Odysseus sailing past them, deaf to their siren voices, they may
+perhaps, out of respect, give us of the gifts which they receive from
+the gods that they may impart them to men.
+
+PHAEDRUS: What gifts do you mean? I never heard of any.
+
+SOCRATES: A lover of music like yourself ought surely to have heard the
+story of the grasshoppers, who are said to have been human beings in
+an age before the Muses. And when the Muses came and song appeared they
+were ravished with delight; and singing always, never thought of eating
+and drinking, until at last in their forgetfulness they died. And now
+they live again in the grasshoppers; and this is the return which the
+Muses make to them--they neither hunger, nor thirst, but from the hour
+of their birth are always singing, and never eating or drinking; and
+when they die they go and inform the Muses in heaven who honours them on
+earth. They win the love of Terpsichore for the dancers by their report
+of them; of Erato for the lovers, and of the other Muses for those who
+do them honour, according to the several ways of honouring them;--of
+Calliope the eldest Muse and of Urania who is next to her, for the
+philosophers, of whose music the grasshoppers make report to them; for
+these are the Muses who are chiefly concerned with heaven and thought,
+divine as well as human, and they have the sweetest utterance. For many
+reasons, then, we ought always to talk and not to sleep at mid-day.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Let us talk.
+
+SOCRATES: Shall we discuss the rules of writing and speech as we were
+proposing?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Very good.
+
+SOCRATES: In good speaking should not the mind of the speaker know the
+truth of the matter about which he is going to speak?
+
+PHAEDRUS: And yet, Socrates, I have heard that he who would be an orator
+has nothing to do with true justice, but only with that which is likely
+to be approved by the many who sit in judgment; nor with the truly good
+or honourable, but only with opinion about them, and that from opinion
+comes persuasion, and not from the truth.
+
+SOCRATES: The words of the wise are not to be set aside; for there is
+probably something in them; and therefore the meaning of this saying is
+not hastily to be dismissed.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Very true.
+
+SOCRATES: Let us put the matter thus:--Suppose that I persuaded you
+to buy a horse and go to the wars. Neither of us knew what a horse was
+like, but I knew that you believed a horse to be of tame animals the one
+which has the longest ears.
+
+PHAEDRUS: That would be ridiculous.
+
+SOCRATES: There is something more ridiculous coming:--Suppose, further,
+that in sober earnest I, having persuaded you of this, went and composed
+a speech in honour of an ass, whom I entitled a horse beginning: 'A
+noble animal and a most useful possession, especially in war, and you
+may get on his back and fight, and he will carry baggage or anything.'
+
+PHAEDRUS: How ridiculous!
+
+SOCRATES: Ridiculous! Yes; but is not even a ridiculous friend better
+than a cunning enemy?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
+
+SOCRATES: And when the orator instead of putting an ass in the place
+of a horse, puts good for evil, being himself as ignorant of their true
+nature as the city on which he imposes is ignorant; and having studied
+the notions of the multitude, falsely persuades them not about 'the
+shadow of an ass,' which he confounds with a horse, but about good which
+he confounds with evil,--what will be the harvest which rhetoric will be
+likely to gather after the sowing of that seed?
+
+PHAEDRUS: The reverse of good.
+
+SOCRATES: But perhaps rhetoric has been getting too roughly handled by
+us, and she might answer: What amazing nonsense you are talking! As if I
+forced any man to learn to speak in ignorance of the truth! Whatever
+my advice may be worth, I should have told him to arrive at the truth
+first, and then come to me. At the same time I boldly assert that mere
+knowledge of the truth will not give you the art of persuasion.
+
+PHAEDRUS: There is reason in the lady's defence of herself.
+
+SOCRATES: Quite true; if only the other arguments which remain to be
+brought up bear her witness that she is an art at all. But I seem to
+hear them arraying themselves on the opposite side, declaring that she
+speaks falsely, and that rhetoric is a mere routine and trick, not an
+art. Lo! a Spartan appears, and says that there never is nor ever will
+be a real art of speaking which is divorced from the truth.
+
+PHAEDRUS: And what are these arguments, Socrates? Bring them out that we
+may examine them.
+
+SOCRATES: Come out, fair children, and convince Phaedrus, who is the
+father of similar beauties, that he will never be able to speak about
+anything as he ought to speak unless he have a knowledge of philosophy.
+And let Phaedrus answer you.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Put the question.
+
+SOCRATES: Is not rhetoric, taken generally, a universal art of
+enchanting the mind by arguments; which is practised not only in courts
+and public assemblies, but in private houses also, having to do with
+all matters, great as well as small, good and bad alike, and is in all
+equally right, and equally to be esteemed--that is what you have heard?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Nay, not exactly that; I should say rather that I have heard
+the art confined to speaking and writing in lawsuits, and to speaking in
+public assemblies--not extended farther.
+
+SOCRATES: Then I suppose that you have only heard of the rhetoric of
+Nestor and Odysseus, which they composed in their leisure hours when at
+Troy, and never of the rhetoric of Palamedes?
+
+PHAEDRUS: No more than of Nestor and Odysseus, unless Gorgias is your
+Nestor, and Thrasymachus or Theodorus your Odysseus.
+
+SOCRATES: Perhaps that is my meaning. But let us leave them. And do
+you tell me, instead, what are plaintiff and defendant doing in a law
+court--are they not contending?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Exactly so.
+
+SOCRATES: About the just and unjust--that is the matter in dispute?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes.
+
+SOCRATES: And a professor of the art will make the same thing appear to
+the same persons to be at one time just, at another time, if he is so
+inclined, to be unjust?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Exactly.
+
+SOCRATES: And when he speaks in the assembly, he will make the same
+things seem good to the city at one time, and at another time the
+reverse of good?
+
+PHAEDRUS: That is true.
+
+SOCRATES: Have we not heard of the Eleatic Palamedes (Zeno), who has an
+art of speaking by which he makes the same things appear to his hearers
+like and unlike, one and many, at rest and in motion?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Very true.
+
+SOCRATES: The art of disputation, then, is not confined to the courts
+and the assembly, but is one and the same in every use of language; this
+is the art, if there be such an art, which is able to find a likeness of
+everything to which a likeness can be found, and draws into the light of
+day the likenesses and disguises which are used by others?
+
+PHAEDRUS: How do you mean?
+
+SOCRATES: Let me put the matter thus: When will there be more chance of
+deception--when the difference is large or small?
+
+PHAEDRUS: When the difference is small.
+
+SOCRATES: And you will be less likely to be discovered in passing by
+degrees into the other extreme than when you go all at once?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Of course.
+
+SOCRATES: He, then, who would deceive others, and not be deceived, must
+exactly know the real likenesses and differences of things?
+
+PHAEDRUS: He must.
+
+SOCRATES: And if he is ignorant of the true nature of any subject, how
+can he detect the greater or less degree of likeness in other things to
+that of which by the hypothesis he is ignorant?
+
+PHAEDRUS: He cannot.
+
+SOCRATES: And when men are deceived and their notions are at
+variance with realities, it is clear that the error slips in through
+resemblances?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes, that is the way.
+
+SOCRATES: Then he who would be a master of the art must understand the
+real nature of everything; or he will never know either how to make
+the gradual departure from truth into the opposite of truth which is
+effected by the help of resemblances, or how to avoid it?
+
+PHAEDRUS: He will not.
+
+SOCRATES: He then, who being ignorant of the truth aims at appearances,
+will only attain an art of rhetoric which is ridiculous and is not an
+art at all?
+
+PHAEDRUS: That may be expected.
+
+SOCRATES: Shall I propose that we look for examples of art and want of
+art, according to our notion of them, in the speech of Lysias which you
+have in your hand, and in my own speech?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Nothing could be better; and indeed I think that our previous
+argument has been too abstract and wanting in illustrations.
+
+SOCRATES: Yes; and the two speeches happen to afford a very good example
+of the way in which the speaker who knows the truth may, without any
+serious purpose, steal away the hearts of his hearers. This piece
+of good-fortune I attribute to the local deities; and, perhaps, the
+prophets of the Muses who are singing over our heads may have imparted
+their inspiration to me. For I do not imagine that I have any rhetorical
+art of my own.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Granted; if you will only please to get on.
+
+SOCRATES: Suppose that you read me the first words of Lysias' speech.
+
+PHAEDRUS: 'You know how matters stand with me, and how, as I conceive,
+they might be arranged for our common interest; and I maintain that I
+ought not to fail in my suit, because I am not your lover. For lovers
+repent--'
+
+SOCRATES: Enough:--Now, shall I point out the rhetorical error of those
+words?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes.
+
+SOCRATES: Every one is aware that about some things we are agreed,
+whereas about other things we differ.
+
+PHAEDRUS: I think that I understand you; but will you explain yourself?
+
+SOCRATES: When any one speaks of iron and silver, is not the same thing
+present in the minds of all?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
+
+SOCRATES: But when any one speaks of justice and goodness we part
+company and are at odds with one another and with ourselves?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Precisely.
+
+SOCRATES: Then in some things we agree, but not in others?
+
+PHAEDRUS: That is true.
+
+SOCRATES: In which are we more likely to be deceived, and in which has
+rhetoric the greater power?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Clearly, in the uncertain class.
+
+SOCRATES: Then the rhetorician ought to make a regular division, and
+acquire a distinct notion of both classes, as well of that in which the
+many err, as of that in which they do not err?
+
+PHAEDRUS: He who made such a distinction would have an excellent
+principle.
+
+SOCRATES: Yes; and in the next place he must have a keen eye for the
+observation of particulars in speaking, and not make a mistake about the
+class to which they are to be referred.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
+
+SOCRATES: Now to which class does love belong--to the debatable or to
+the undisputed class?
+
+PHAEDRUS: To the debatable, clearly; for if not, do you think that love
+would have allowed you to say as you did, that he is an evil both to the
+lover and the beloved, and also the greatest possible good?
+
+SOCRATES: Capital. But will you tell me whether I defined love at the
+beginning of my speech? for, having been in an ecstasy, I cannot well
+remember.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes, indeed; that you did, and no mistake.
+
+SOCRATES: Then I perceive that the Nymphs of Achelous and Pan the son
+of Hermes, who inspired me, were far better rhetoricians than Lysias
+the son of Cephalus. Alas! how inferior to them he is! But perhaps I
+am mistaken; and Lysias at the commencement of his lover's speech did
+insist on our supposing love to be something or other which he fancied
+him to be, and according to this model he fashioned and framed the
+remainder of his discourse. Suppose we read his beginning over again:
+
+PHAEDRUS: If you please; but you will not find what you want.
+
+SOCRATES: Read, that I may have his exact words.
+
+PHAEDRUS: 'You know how matters stand with me, and how, as I conceive,
+they might be arranged for our common interest; and I maintain I ought
+not to fail in my suit because I am not your lover, for lovers repent of
+the kindnesses which they have shown, when their love is over.'
+
+SOCRATES: Here he appears to have done just the reverse of what he
+ought; for he has begun at the end, and is swimming on his back through
+the flood to the place of starting. His address to the fair youth begins
+where the lover would have ended. Am I not right, sweet Phaedrus?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes, indeed, Socrates; he does begin at the end.
+
+SOCRATES: Then as to the other topics--are they not thrown down anyhow?
+Is there any principle in them? Why should the next topic follow next in
+order, or any other topic? I cannot help fancying in my ignorance that
+he wrote off boldly just what came into his head, but I dare say that
+you would recognize a rhetorical necessity in the succession of the
+several parts of the composition?
+
+PHAEDRUS: You have too good an opinion of me if you think that I have
+any such insight into his principles of composition.
+
+SOCRATES: At any rate, you will allow that every discourse ought to be
+a living creature, having a body of its own and a head and feet; there
+should be a middle, beginning, and end, adapted to one another and to
+the whole?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
+
+SOCRATES: Can this be said of the discourse of Lysias? See whether you
+can find any more connexion in his words than in the epitaph which is
+said by some to have been inscribed on the grave of Midas the Phrygian.
+
+PHAEDRUS: What is there remarkable in the epitaph?
+
+SOCRATES: It is as follows:--
+
+'I am a maiden of bronze and lie on the tomb of Midas; So long as water
+flows and tall trees grow, So long here on this spot by his sad tomb
+abiding, I shall declare to passers-by that Midas sleeps below.'
+
+Now in this rhyme whether a line comes first or comes last, as you will
+perceive, makes no difference.
+
+PHAEDRUS: You are making fun of that oration of ours.
+
+SOCRATES: Well, I will say no more about your friend's speech lest I
+should give offence to you; although I think that it might furnish many
+other examples of what a man ought rather to avoid. But I will proceed
+to the other speech, which, as I think, is also suggestive to students
+of rhetoric.
+
+PHAEDRUS: In what way?
+
+SOCRATES: The two speeches, as you may remember, were unlike; the one
+argued that the lover and the other that the non-lover ought to be
+accepted.
+
+PHAEDRUS: And right manfully.
+
+SOCRATES: You should rather say 'madly;' and madness was the argument of
+them, for, as I said, 'love is a madness.'
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes.
+
+SOCRATES: And of madness there were two kinds; one produced by human
+infirmity, the other was a divine release of the soul from the yoke of
+custom and convention.
+
+PHAEDRUS: True.
+
+SOCRATES: The divine madness was subdivided into four kinds, prophetic,
+initiatory, poetic, erotic, having four gods presiding over them; the
+first was the inspiration of Apollo, the second that of Dionysus, the
+third that of the Muses, the fourth that of Aphrodite and Eros. In the
+description of the last kind of madness, which was also said to be
+the best, we spoke of the affection of love in a figure, into which we
+introduced a tolerably credible and possibly true though partly erring
+myth, which was also a hymn in honour of Love, who is your lord and also
+mine, Phaedrus, and the guardian of fair children, and to him we sung
+the hymn in measured and solemn strain.
+
+PHAEDRUS: I know that I had great pleasure in listening to you.
+
+SOCRATES: Let us take this instance and note how the transition was made
+from blame to praise.
+
+PHAEDRUS: What do you mean?
+
+SOCRATES: I mean to say that the composition was mostly playful. Yet in
+these chance fancies of the hour were involved two principles of which
+we should be too glad to have a clearer description if art could give us
+one.
+
+PHAEDRUS: What are they?
+
+SOCRATES: First, the comprehension of scattered particulars in one idea;
+as in our definition of love, which whether true or false certainly gave
+clearness and consistency to the discourse, the speaker should define
+his several notions and so make his meaning clear.
+
+PHAEDRUS: What is the other principle, Socrates?
+
+SOCRATES: The second principle is that of division into species
+according to the natural formation, where the joint is, not breaking any
+part as a bad carver might. Just as our two discourses, alike assumed,
+first of all, a single form of unreason; and then, as the body which
+from being one becomes double and may be divided into a left side and
+right side, each having parts right and left of the same name--after
+this manner the speaker proceeded to divide the parts of the left side
+and did not desist until he found in them an evil or left-handed love
+which he justly reviled; and the other discourse leading us to the
+madness which lay on the right side, found another love, also having the
+same name, but divine, which the speaker held up before us and applauded
+and affirmed to be the author of the greatest benefits.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Most true.
+
+SOCRATES: I am myself a great lover of these processes of division and
+generalization; they help me to speak and to think. And if I find any
+man who is able to see 'a One and Many' in nature, him I follow, and
+'walk in his footsteps as if he were a god.' And those who have this
+art, I have hitherto been in the habit of calling dialecticians; but God
+knows whether the name is right or not. And I should like to know what
+name you would give to your or to Lysias' disciples, and whether this
+may not be that famous art of rhetoric which Thrasymachus and others
+teach and practise? Skilful speakers they are, and impart their skill to
+any who is willing to make kings of them and to bring gifts to them.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes, they are royal men; but their art is not the same
+with the art of those whom you call, and rightly, in my opinion,
+dialecticians:--Still we are in the dark about rhetoric.
+
+SOCRATES: What do you mean? The remains of it, if there be anything
+remaining which can be brought under rules of art, must be a fine thing;
+and, at any rate, is not to be despised by you and me. But how much is
+left?
+
+PHAEDRUS: There is a great deal surely to be found in books of rhetoric?
+
+SOCRATES: Yes; thank you for reminding me:--There is the exordium,
+showing how the speech should begin, if I remember rightly; that is what
+you mean--the niceties of the art?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes.
+
+SOCRATES: Then follows the statement of facts, and upon that witnesses;
+thirdly, proofs; fourthly, probabilities are to come; the great
+Byzantian word-maker also speaks, if I am not mistaken, of confirmation
+and further confirmation.
+
+PHAEDRUS: You mean the excellent Theodorus.
+
+SOCRATES: Yes; and he tells how refutation or further refutation is to
+be managed, whether in accusation or defence. I ought also to mention
+the illustrious Parian, Evenus, who first invented insinuations and
+indirect praises; and also indirect censures, which according to some
+he put into verse to help the memory. But shall I 'to dumb forgetfulness
+consign' Tisias and Gorgias, who are not ignorant that probability is
+superior to truth, and who by force of argument make the little appear
+great and the great little, disguise the new in old fashions and the old
+in new fashions, and have discovered forms for everything, either short
+or going on to infinity. I remember Prodicus laughing when I told him of
+this; he said that he had himself discovered the true rule of art, which
+was to be neither long nor short, but of a convenient length.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Well done, Prodicus!
+
+SOCRATES: Then there is Hippias the Elean stranger, who probably agrees
+with him.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes.
+
+SOCRATES: And there is also Polus, who has treasuries of diplasiology,
+and gnomology, and eikonology, and who teaches in them the names of
+which Licymnius made him a present; they were to give a polish.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Had not Protagoras something of the same sort?
+
+SOCRATES: Yes, rules of correct diction and many other fine precepts;
+for the 'sorrows of a poor old man,' or any other pathetic case, no one
+is better than the Chalcedonian giant; he can put a whole company of
+people into a passion and out of one again by his mighty magic, and
+is first-rate at inventing or disposing of any sort of calumny on any
+grounds or none. All of them agree in asserting that a speech should end
+in a recapitulation, though they do not all agree to use the same word.
+
+PHAEDRUS: You mean that there should be a summing up of the arguments in
+order to remind the hearers of them.
+
+SOCRATES: I have now said all that I have to say of the art of rhetoric:
+have you anything to add?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Not much; nothing very important.
+
+SOCRATES: Leave the unimportant and let us bring the really important
+question into the light of day, which is: What power has this art of
+rhetoric, and when?
+
+PHAEDRUS: A very great power in public meetings.
+
+SOCRATES: It has. But I should like to know whether you have the same
+feeling as I have about the rhetoricians? To me there seem to be a great
+many holes in their web.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Give an example.
+
+SOCRATES: I will. Suppose a person to come to your friend Eryximachus,
+or to his father Acumenus, and to say to him: 'I know how to apply drugs
+which shall have either a heating or a cooling effect, and I can give
+a vomit and also a purge, and all that sort of thing; and knowing all
+this, as I do, I claim to be a physician and to make physicians by
+imparting this knowledge to others,'--what do you suppose that they
+would say?
+
+PHAEDRUS: They would be sure to ask him whether he knew 'to whom' he
+would give his medicines, and 'when,' and 'how much.'
+
+SOCRATES: And suppose that he were to reply: 'No; I know nothing of all
+that; I expect the patient who consults me to be able to do these things
+for himself'?
+
+PHAEDRUS: They would say in reply that he is a madman or a pedant who
+fancies that he is a physician because he has read something in a
+book, or has stumbled on a prescription or two, although he has no real
+understanding of the art of medicine.
+
+SOCRATES: And suppose a person were to come to Sophocles or Euripides
+and say that he knows how to make a very long speech about a small
+matter, and a short speech about a great matter, and also a sorrowful
+speech, or a terrible, or threatening speech, or any other kind of
+speech, and in teaching this fancies that he is teaching the art of
+tragedy--?
+
+PHAEDRUS: They too would surely laugh at him if he fancies that tragedy
+is anything but the arranging of these elements in a manner which will
+be suitable to one another and to the whole.
+
+SOCRATES: But I do not suppose that they would be rude or abusive to
+him: Would they not treat him as a musician a man who thinks that he is
+a harmonist because he knows how to pitch the highest and lowest note;
+happening to meet such an one he would not say to him savagely, 'Fool,
+you are mad!' But like a musician, in a gentle and harmonious tone of
+voice, he would answer: 'My good friend, he who would be a harmonist
+must certainly know this, and yet he may understand nothing of harmony
+if he has not got beyond your stage of knowledge, for you only know the
+preliminaries of harmony and not harmony itself.'
+
+PHAEDRUS: Very true.
+
+SOCRATES: And will not Sophocles say to the display of the would-be
+tragedian, that this is not tragedy but the preliminaries of tragedy?
+and will not Acumenus say the same of medicine to the would-be
+physician?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Quite true.
+
+SOCRATES: And if Adrastus the mellifluous or Pericles heard of these
+wonderful arts, brachylogies and eikonologies and all the hard names
+which we have been endeavouring to draw into the light of day, what
+would they say? Instead of losing temper and applying uncomplimentary
+epithets, as you and I have been doing, to the authors of such an
+imaginary art, their superior wisdom would rather censure us, as well
+as them. 'Have a little patience, Phaedrus and Socrates, they would say;
+you should not be in such a passion with those who from some want of
+dialectical skill are unable to define the nature of rhetoric, and
+consequently suppose that they have found the art in the preliminary
+conditions of it, and when these have been taught by them to others,
+fancy that the whole art of rhetoric has been taught by them; but as
+to using the several instruments of the art effectively, or making the
+composition a whole,--an application of it such as this is they regard
+as an easy thing which their disciples may make for themselves.'
+
+PHAEDRUS: I quite admit, Socrates, that the art of rhetoric which these
+men teach and of which they write is such as you describe--there I
+agree with you. But I still want to know where and how the true art of
+rhetoric and persuasion is to be acquired.
+
+SOCRATES: The perfection which is required of the finished orator is,
+or rather must be, like the perfection of anything else; partly given by
+nature, but may also be assisted by art. If you have the natural power
+and add to it knowledge and practice, you will be a distinguished
+speaker; if you fall short in either of these, you will be to that
+extent defective. But the art, as far as there is an art, of rhetoric
+does not lie in the direction of Lysias or Thrasymachus.
+
+PHAEDRUS: In what direction then?
+
+SOCRATES: I conceive Pericles to have been the most accomplished of
+rhetoricians.
+
+PHAEDRUS: What of that?
+
+SOCRATES: All the great arts require discussion and high speculation
+about the truths of nature; hence come loftiness of thought and
+completeness of execution. And this, as I conceive, was the quality
+which, in addition to his natural gifts, Pericles acquired from his
+intercourse with Anaxagoras whom he happened to know. He was thus imbued
+with the higher philosophy, and attained the knowledge of Mind and the
+negative of Mind, which were favourite themes of Anaxagoras, and applied
+what suited his purpose to the art of speaking.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Explain.
+
+SOCRATES: Rhetoric is like medicine.
+
+PHAEDRUS: How so?
+
+SOCRATES: Why, because medicine has to define the nature of the body
+and rhetoric of the soul--if we would proceed, not empirically but
+scientifically, in the one case to impart health and strength by giving
+medicine and food, in the other to implant the conviction or virtue
+which you desire, by the right application of words and training.
+
+PHAEDRUS: There, Socrates, I suspect that you are right.
+
+SOCRATES: And do you think that you can know the nature of the soul
+intelligently without knowing the nature of the whole?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Hippocrates the Asclepiad says that the nature even of the
+body can only be understood as a whole. (Compare Charmides.)
+
+SOCRATES: Yes, friend, and he was right:--still, we ought not to be
+content with the name of Hippocrates, but to examine and see whether his
+argument agrees with his conception of nature.
+
+PHAEDRUS: I agree.
+
+SOCRATES: Then consider what truth as well as Hippocrates says about
+this or about any other nature. Ought we not to consider first whether
+that which we wish to learn and to teach is a simple or multiform thing,
+and if simple, then to enquire what power it has of acting or being
+acted upon in relation to other things, and if multiform, then to number
+the forms; and see first in the case of one of them, and then in the
+case of all of them, what is that power of acting or being acted upon
+which makes each and all of them to be what they are?
+
+PHAEDRUS: You may very likely be right, Socrates.
+
+SOCRATES: The method which proceeds without analysis is like the groping
+of a blind man. Yet, surely, he who is an artist ought not to admit of
+a comparison with the blind, or deaf. The rhetorician, who teaches his
+pupil to speak scientifically, will particularly set forth the nature of
+that being to which he addresses his speeches; and this, I conceive, to
+be the soul.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
+
+SOCRATES: His whole effort is directed to the soul; for in that he seeks
+to produce conviction.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes.
+
+SOCRATES: Then clearly, Thrasymachus or any one else who teaches
+rhetoric in earnest will give an exact description of the nature of the
+soul; which will enable us to see whether she be single and same, or,
+like the body, multiform. That is what we should call showing the nature
+of the soul.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Exactly.
+
+SOCRATES: He will explain, secondly, the mode in which she acts or is
+acted upon.
+
+PHAEDRUS: True.
+
+SOCRATES: Thirdly, having classified men and speeches, and their kinds
+and affections, and adapted them to one another, he will tell the
+reasons of his arrangement, and show why one soul is persuaded by a
+particular form of argument, and another not.
+
+PHAEDRUS: You have hit upon a very good way.
+
+SOCRATES: Yes, that is the true and only way in which any subject can
+be set forth or treated by rules of art, whether in speaking or writing.
+But the writers of the present day, at whose feet you have sat, craftily
+conceal the nature of the soul which they know quite well. Nor, until
+they adopt our method of reading and writing, can we admit that they
+write by rules of art?
+
+PHAEDRUS: What is our method?
+
+SOCRATES: I cannot give you the exact details; but I should like to
+tell you generally, as far as is in my power, how a man ought to proceed
+according to rules of art.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Let me hear.
+
+SOCRATES: Oratory is the art of enchanting the soul, and therefore he
+who would be an orator has to learn the differences of human souls--they
+are so many and of such a nature, and from them come the differences
+between man and man. Having proceeded thus far in his analysis, he
+will next divide speeches into their different classes:--'Such and such
+persons,' he will say, are affected by this or that kind of speech in
+this or that way,' and he will tell you why. The pupil must have a good
+theoretical notion of them first, and then he must have experience of
+them in actual life, and be able to follow them with all his senses
+about him, or he will never get beyond the precepts of his masters. But
+when he understands what persons are persuaded by what arguments, and
+sees the person about whom he was speaking in the abstract actually
+before him, and knows that it is he, and can say to himself, 'This is
+the man or this is the character who ought to have a certain argument
+applied to him in order to convince him of a certain opinion;'--he who
+knows all this, and knows also when he should speak and when he should
+refrain, and when he should use pithy sayings, pathetic appeals,
+sensational effects, and all the other modes of speech which he has
+learned;--when, I say, he knows the times and seasons of all these
+things, then, and not till then, he is a perfect master of his art; but
+if he fail in any of these points, whether in speaking or teaching or
+writing them, and yet declares that he speaks by rules of art, he who
+says 'I don't believe you' has the better of him. Well, the teacher will
+say, is this, Phaedrus and Socrates, your account of the so-called art
+of rhetoric, or am I to look for another?
+
+PHAEDRUS: He must take this, Socrates, for there is no possibility of
+another, and yet the creation of such an art is not easy.
+
+SOCRATES: Very true; and therefore let us consider this matter in every
+light, and see whether we cannot find a shorter and easier road; there
+is no use in taking a long rough roundabout way if there be a shorter
+and easier one. And I wish that you would try and remember whether
+you have heard from Lysias or any one else anything which might be of
+service to us.
+
+PHAEDRUS: If trying would avail, then I might; but at the moment I can
+think of nothing.
+
+SOCRATES: Suppose I tell you something which somebody who knows told me.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
+
+SOCRATES: May not 'the wolf,' as the proverb says, 'claim a hearing'?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Do you say what can be said for him.
+
+SOCRATES: He will argue that there is no use in putting a solemn face
+on these matters, or in going round and round, until you arrive at first
+principles; for, as I said at first, when the question is of justice and
+good, or is a question in which men are concerned who are just and good,
+either by nature or habit, he who would be a skilful rhetorician has
+no need of truth--for that in courts of law men literally care
+nothing about truth, but only about conviction: and this is based on
+probability, to which he who would be a skilful orator should therefore
+give his whole attention. And they say also that there are cases in
+which the actual facts, if they are improbable, ought to be withheld,
+and only the probabilities should be told either in accusation or
+defence, and that always in speaking, the orator should keep probability
+in view, and say good-bye to the truth. And the observance of this
+principle throughout a speech furnishes the whole art.
+
+PHAEDRUS: That is what the professors of rhetoric do actually say,
+Socrates. I have not forgotten that we have quite briefly touched upon
+this matter already; with them the point is all-important.
+
+SOCRATES: I dare say that you are familiar with Tisias. Does he not
+define probability to be that which the many think?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Certainly, he does.
+
+SOCRATES: I believe that he has a clever and ingenious case of this
+sort:--He supposes a feeble and valiant man to have assaulted a strong
+and cowardly one, and to have robbed him of his coat or of something or
+other; he is brought into court, and then Tisias says that both parties
+should tell lies: the coward should say that he was assaulted by more
+men than one; the other should prove that they were alone, and should
+argue thus: 'How could a weak man like me have assaulted a strong man
+like him?' The complainant will not like to confess his own cowardice,
+and will therefore invent some other lie which his adversary will thus
+gain an opportunity of refuting. And there are other devices of the same
+kind which have a place in the system. Am I not right, Phaedrus?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
+
+SOCRATES: Bless me, what a wonderfully mysterious art is this which
+Tisias or some other gentleman, in whatever name or country he rejoices,
+has discovered. Shall we say a word to him or not?
+
+PHAEDRUS: What shall we say to him?
+
+SOCRATES: Let us tell him that, before he appeared, you and I were
+saying that the probability of which he speaks was engendered in the
+minds of the many by the likeness of the truth, and we had just been
+affirming that he who knew the truth would always know best how to
+discover the resemblances of the truth. If he has anything else to say
+about the art of speaking we should like to hear him; but if not, we
+are satisfied with our own view, that unless a man estimates the various
+characters of his hearers and is able to divide all things into classes
+and to comprehend them under single ideas, he will never be a skilful
+rhetorician even within the limits of human power. And this skill he
+will not attain without a great deal of trouble, which a good man ought
+to undergo, not for the sake of speaking and acting before men, but in
+order that he may be able to say what is acceptable to God and always
+to act acceptably to Him as far as in him lies; for there is a saying of
+wiser men than ourselves, that a man of sense should not try to please
+his fellow-servants (at least this should not be his first object)
+but his good and noble masters; and therefore if the way is long and
+circuitous, marvel not at this, for, where the end is great, there we
+may take the longer road, but not for lesser ends such as yours. Truly,
+the argument may say, Tisias, that if you do not mind going so far,
+rhetoric has a fair beginning here.
+
+PHAEDRUS: I think, Socrates, that this is admirable, if only
+practicable.
+
+SOCRATES: But even to fail in an honourable object is honourable.
+
+PHAEDRUS: True.
+
+SOCRATES: Enough appears to have been said by us of a true and false art
+of speaking.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
+
+SOCRATES: But there is something yet to be said of propriety and
+impropriety of writing.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes.
+
+SOCRATES: Do you know how you can speak or act about rhetoric in a
+manner which will be acceptable to God?
+
+PHAEDRUS: No, indeed. Do you?
+
+SOCRATES: I have heard a tradition of the ancients, whether true or not
+they only know; although if we had found the truth ourselves, do you
+think that we should care much about the opinions of men?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Your question needs no answer; but I wish that you would tell
+me what you say that you have heard.
+
+SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god,
+whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred
+to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and
+calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his
+great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus
+was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great
+city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the
+god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his
+inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have
+the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about
+their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he
+approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all
+that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But
+when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians
+wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the
+memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the
+parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility
+or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this
+instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of
+your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which
+they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness
+in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories;
+they will trust to the external written characters and not remember
+of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to
+memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but
+only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and
+will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will
+generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show
+of wisdom without the reality.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes, Socrates, you can easily invent tales of Egypt, or of any
+other country.
+
+SOCRATES: There was a tradition in the temple of Dodona that oaks first
+gave prophetic utterances. The men of old, unlike in their simplicity to
+young philosophy, deemed that if they heard the truth even from 'oak or
+rock,' it was enough for them; whereas you seem to consider not whether
+a thing is or is not true, but who the speaker is and from what country
+the tale comes.
+
+PHAEDRUS: I acknowledge the justice of your rebuke; and I think that the
+Theban is right in his view about letters.
+
+SOCRATES: He would be a very simple person, and quite a stranger to the
+oracles of Thamus or Ammon, who should leave in writing or receive
+in writing any art under the idea that the written word would be
+intelligible or certain; or who deemed that writing was at all better
+than knowledge and recollection of the same matters?
+
+PHAEDRUS: That is most true.
+
+SOCRATES: I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately
+like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of
+life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.
+And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had
+intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one
+of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they
+have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those
+who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should
+reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no
+parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.
+
+PHAEDRUS: That again is most true.
+
+SOCRATES: Is there not another kind of word or speech far better than
+this, and having far greater power--a son of the same family, but
+lawfully begotten?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Whom do you mean, and what is his origin?
+
+SOCRATES: I mean an intelligent word graven in the soul of the learner,
+which can defend itself, and knows when to speak and when to be silent.
+
+PHAEDRUS: You mean the living word of knowledge which has a soul, and of
+which the written word is properly no more than an image?
+
+SOCRATES: Yes, of course that is what I mean. And now may I be allowed
+to ask you a question: Would a husbandman, who is a man of sense, take
+the seeds, which he values and which he wishes to bear fruit, and in
+sober seriousness plant them during the heat of summer, in some garden
+of Adonis, that he may rejoice when he sees them in eight days appearing
+in beauty? at least he would do so, if at all, only for the sake of
+amusement and pastime. But when he is in earnest he sows in fitting
+soil, and practises husbandry, and is satisfied if in eight months the
+seeds which he has sown arrive at perfection?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes, Socrates, that will be his way when he is in earnest; he
+will do the other, as you say, only in play.
+
+SOCRATES: And can we suppose that he who knows the just and good and
+honourable has less understanding, than the husbandman, about his own
+seeds?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Certainly not.
+
+SOCRATES: Then he will not seriously incline to 'write' his thoughts
+'in water' with pen and ink, sowing words which can neither speak for
+themselves nor teach the truth adequately to others?
+
+PHAEDRUS: No, that is not likely.
+
+SOCRATES: No, that is not likely--in the garden of letters he will sow
+and plant, but only for the sake of recreation and amusement; he will
+write them down as memorials to be treasured against the forgetfulness
+of old age, by himself, or by any other old man who is treading the same
+path. He will rejoice in beholding their tender growth; and while others
+are refreshing their souls with banqueting and the like, this will be
+the pastime in which his days are spent.
+
+PHAEDRUS: A pastime, Socrates, as noble as the other is ignoble, the
+pastime of a man who can be amused by serious talk, and can discourse
+merrily about justice and the like.
+
+SOCRATES: True, Phaedrus. But nobler far is the serious pursuit of the
+dialectician, who, finding a congenial soul, by the help of science sows
+and plants therein words which are able to help themselves and him who
+planted them, and are not unfruitful, but have in them a seed which
+others brought up in different soils render immortal, making the
+possessors of it happy to the utmost extent of human happiness.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Far nobler, certainly.
+
+SOCRATES: And now, Phaedrus, having agreed upon the premises we may
+decide about the conclusion.
+
+PHAEDRUS: About what conclusion?
+
+SOCRATES: About Lysias, whom we censured, and his art of writing, and
+his discourses, and the rhetorical skill or want of skill which was
+shown in them--these are the questions which we sought to determine, and
+they brought us to this point. And I think that we are now pretty well
+informed about the nature of art and its opposite.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes, I think with you; but I wish that you would repeat what
+was said.
+
+SOCRATES: Until a man knows the truth of the several particulars of
+which he is writing or speaking, and is able to define them as they are,
+and having defined them again to divide them until they can be no longer
+divided, and until in like manner he is able to discern the nature
+of the soul, and discover the different modes of discourse which are
+adapted to different natures, and to arrange and dispose them in such
+a way that the simple form of speech may be addressed to the simpler
+nature, and the complex and composite to the more complex nature--until
+he has accomplished all this, he will be unable to handle arguments
+according to rules of art, as far as their nature allows them to
+be subjected to art, either for the purpose of teaching or
+persuading;--such is the view which is implied in the whole preceding
+argument.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Yes, that was our view, certainly.
+
+SOCRATES: Secondly, as to the censure which was passed on the speaking
+or writing of discourses, and how they might be rightly or wrongly
+censured--did not our previous argument show--?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Show what?
+
+SOCRATES: That whether Lysias or any other writer that ever was or will
+be, whether private man or statesman, proposes laws and so becomes
+the author of a political treatise, fancying that there is any great
+certainty and clearness in his performance, the fact of his so writing
+is only a disgrace to him, whatever men may say. For not to know the
+nature of justice and injustice, and good and evil, and not to be able
+to distinguish the dream from the reality, cannot in truth be otherwise
+than disgraceful to him, even though he have the applause of the whole
+world.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
+
+SOCRATES: But he who thinks that in the written word there is
+necessarily much which is not serious, and that neither poetry
+nor prose, spoken or written, is of any great value, if, like the
+compositions of the rhapsodes, they are only recited in order to be
+believed, and not with any view to criticism or instruction; and who
+thinks that even the best of writings are but a reminiscence of what we
+know, and that only in principles of justice and goodness and nobility
+taught and communicated orally for the sake of instruction and graven
+in the soul, which is the true way of writing, is there clearness and
+perfection and seriousness, and that such principles are a man's own and
+his legitimate offspring;--being, in the first place, the word which
+he finds in his own bosom; secondly, the brethren and descendants and
+relations of his idea which have been duly implanted by him in the souls
+of others;--and who cares for them and no others--this is the right sort
+of man; and you and I, Phaedrus, would pray that we may become like him.
+
+PHAEDRUS: That is most assuredly my desire and prayer.
+
+SOCRATES: And now the play is played out; and of rhetoric enough. Go and
+tell Lysias that to the fountain and school of the Nymphs we went
+down, and were bidden by them to convey a message to him and to other
+composers of speeches--to Homer and other writers of poems, whether set
+to music or not; and to Solon and others who have composed writings in
+the form of political discourses which they would term laws--to all of
+them we are to say that if their compositions are based on knowledge of
+the truth, and they can defend or prove them, when they are put to the
+test, by spoken arguments, which leave their writings poor in
+comparison of them, then they are to be called, not only poets, orators,
+legislators, but are worthy of a higher name, befitting the serious
+pursuit of their life.
+
+PHAEDRUS: What name would you assign to them?
+
+SOCRATES: Wise, I may not call them; for that is a great name which
+belongs to God alone,--lovers of wisdom or philosophers is their modest
+and befitting title.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Very suitable.
+
+SOCRATES: And he who cannot rise above his own compilations and
+compositions, which he has been long patching and piecing, adding some
+and taking away some, may be justly called poet or speech-maker or
+law-maker.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
+
+SOCRATES: Now go and tell this to your companion.
+
+PHAEDRUS: But there is also a friend of yours who ought not to be
+forgotten.
+
+SOCRATES: Who is he?
+
+PHAEDRUS: Isocrates the fair:--What message will you send to him, and
+how shall we describe him?
+
+SOCRATES: Isocrates is still young, Phaedrus; but I am willing to hazard
+a prophecy concerning him.
+
+PHAEDRUS: What would you prophesy?
+
+SOCRATES: I think that he has a genius which soars above the orations of
+Lysias, and that his character is cast in a finer mould. My impression
+of him is that he will marvellously improve as he grows older, and that
+all former rhetoricians will be as children in comparison of him. And I
+believe that he will not be satisfied with rhetoric, but that there is
+in him a divine inspiration which will lead him to things higher still.
+For he has an element of philosophy in his nature. This is the message
+of the gods dwelling in this place, and which I will myself deliver to
+Isocrates, who is my delight; and do you give the other to Lysias, who
+is yours.
+
+PHAEDRUS: I will; and now as the heat is abated let us depart.
+
+SOCRATES: Should we not offer up a prayer first of all to the local
+deities?
+
+PHAEDRUS: By all means.
+
+SOCRATES: Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, give
+me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be
+at one. May I reckon the wise to be the wealthy, and may I have such
+a quantity of gold as a temperate man and he only can bear and
+carry.--Anything more? The prayer, I think, is enough for me.
+
+PHAEDRUS: Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in
+common.
+
+SOCRATES: Let us go.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Phaedrus, by Plato
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