Phaedrus
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