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.56 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”57 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 speechmaking, 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 anyone 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 |
Anyone 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 midday, lulled by their voices, too indolent to think? Would they not have a right to laugh at us? They might imagine that we |
