Phaedrus

Subtract and see what goes, and most of what looks loose is required. Lysias’s speech must be given whole, because the second half takes it apart (262d to 264e) for having no beginning, middle or end, its parts as interchangeable as the lines of the epigram on Midas (264d). Socrates’ first speech must be given and must be wrong, because the palinode is its recantation, and the two are reread (265a to 266b) as the left and right hands of one division of madness. The cicadas, which read as ornament, are the drowsiness the conversation has to resist. What holds the axis down is about a tenth of the whole that could go: the catalogue of handbook terms and their inventors (266d to 267d), satire at a length the argument does not need; the programme of matching speech to soul (271a to 272b), stated more than once; and a stretch of assent that carries no weight.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds without the frame it comes in. The soul’s life before birth and the cycle of lives in nine ranks (248d to e) need Plato’s metaphysics, and Socrates himself gives the soul only as what it is like (246a). Strip them, and three findings stand. Love is a madness, and madness is not simply a sickness: the four divine madnesses, prophetic, ritual, poetic and erotic, make a taxonomy of inspiration no one had set out before (244a to 245c). The soul is divided against itself, and desire rightly governed is the means of its recovery: the struggle in the lover (253c to 254e) still reads as true. Writing is a drug for reminding, not for memory; it cannot answer when questioned (275a to e). Held off the top because rhetoric as the leading of souls is sketched (271c to 272b), not shown.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Height and frequency both count, and the height here is gathered in one place. The procession of the gods round the vault of heaven, Zeus driving his winged chariot first and the souls straining after, trampling one another and losing their wings (246e to 248b), is among the heights of Greek prose; above it lies the “huperouranion topon”
“place beyond heaven” (247c), which no poet, Socrates says, has hymned worthily, elevation set as a challenge to poetry and met. The regrowth of the wing, an itching and swelling as in teething (251b to c), risks the absurd to set the sublime in the body. Lesser heights are real: the plane tree by the Ilissus, the cicadas, the short prayer to Pan. What holds it there is frequency. The palinode is about a quarter of the dialogue, and the long inquiry into rhetoric is level ground: the work rises once, greatly, and then reasons about rising.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Myth built, not only evoked, and the built myths bear weight. The charioteer with his two horses, one that obeys and one that bolts, is not an illustration attached to a theory of the soul; it is the theory, and the palinode, from the soul’s fall to the scene of the lovers, is told in its terms. It has become common property and stays particular: the dark horse crooked and heavy, reined back until it falls on its haunches. The cicadas, once men who forgot to eat and drink for singing (259b to d), govern the turn from love to speech; Theuth and Thamus (274c to 275b) carries the case against writing. What holds it there is that the chariot is an allegory with a key, and that much of the inherited myth is raised only to be set aside: Boreas and Oreithyia (229b to 230a), the Nymphs and Achelous, Stesichorus cited as a precedent.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The inherited forms were the Socratic conversation, the display speech of the orators and sophists, and the poets’ hymn, and the dialogue turns each against itself. It is the one dialogue set outside the city, by a Socrates who says he never leaves it. It reproduces a speech by the leading speechwriter of Athens, whether Lysias’s own or Plato’s pastiche is disputed, and beats it twice, once badly and once well, so that its central doctrine arrives as a retraction, on the model of Stesichorus’s palinode for Helen (243a). It argues against writing in the most written of forms, and that wager is its most consequential departure. Held below 9.0 because the turn is largely from Plato’s own practice: the dialogue form was his and well tried, and the Symposium had already crowned a sequence of speeches on love with a Socratic ascent.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Change the form and the dialogue can no longer say what it says. The speeches are performed and then judged, so the reader has felt the difference between Lysias’s speech and the palinode before being told what it is; the recantation is a form that knows a speaker can be wrong and turn. Its rule that a speech must be composed like a living creature, with head and feet, middle and extremities fitting one another and the whole (264c), is its description of itself. The case against writing has its force only from inside a written imitation of living speech, which ends by saying the serious man writes for amusement, sowing in gardens of letters (276d). What holds it there is the second half: Phaedrus thins to assent, the exchange could there be a treatise, and the two halves are joined by argument more than by form.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, over two and a half millennia, and the open questions belong to this dialogue. Its unity has been argued since antiquity: the Neoplatonist Hermias wrote a commentary in the fifth century AD that survives, and Ferrari’s Listening to the Cicadas and Griswold’s Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus argue it still. Whether the case against writing is undone by being written is the question of Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” (1968), built on the word for drug at 275a; Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness reads the palinode as a recantation and asks how far it goes; Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet reads its love again. Each generation finds a different centre, love, soul, rhetoric, writing, the setting, and the echoes between the setting and the myths are left to be found. The yield is formal as well as semantic, though some of it is shared with the larger dialogues and the doctrine of Forms.

Score: 9.3 / 10

The field is Greek prose and philosophy of the fourth century BC, and the thought of Europe after it. The force is very high: it founds the theory of rhetoric as the leading of souls, sets out collection and division as the method of dialectic (265d to 266b), and is the first sustained argument about what writing does to the mind. Achieved reach is scored with it: Aristotle’s Rhetoric answers its demand for a rhetoric grounded in the hearer’s soul; Mann gives Aschenbach’s fevered thoughts in Death in Venice as Socrates instructing Phaedrus under the plane; the critique of writing is a founding text for media theory and deconstruction. What holds it there is that on love its reach is shared with the Symposium and often gives way to it, on rhetoric much of it runs through Aristotle, and its later fame lies where the size of the scholarship can stand in for reach.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence. The text survives complete in the medieval Greek tradition of Plato’s works, the whole dialogue as transmitted, nothing lost or reassembled, with an ancient commentary, Hermias’, beside it. Presence was continuous in Greek, in late antique commentary and in Byzantium, and since the fifteenth century it has been read, translated and taught without a break, in philosophy and in the teaching of rhetoric and writing. Its surface is not fixed to its moment: Lysias and the handbook writers are history now, and the work is read for what it made of them. What holds it there is presence. In the Latin West it was largely unknown for close to a millennium, until Leonardo Bruni translated part of it and Ficino the whole, and its life now lies mainly in the academy, in philosophy, classics and rhetoric, more than in common reading.

Score: 9.3 / 10

Command shown in range and in control. Plato writes three speeches in three manners: a pastiche of Lysias’s plain, repetitive, list-like argument, close enough that its authorship is still argued; a first speech that keeps tipping toward dithyramb, as Socrates notices (238d); and the hymnic periods of the palinode. Around them runs conversational Attic of great ease, Socrates’ irony and Phaedrus’ eagerness distinct in a few lines, and a setting drawn with unusual exactness, the height of the plane tree, the cool water at the feet. The architecture is exact: a ring from the walk out of the city to the prayer before the walk back, the second half returning to judge each speech of the first. What holds it there is the second half, functional prose whose exchanges are often perfunctory, and the catalogue passages. The sound of the Attic is beyond this reckoning and is neither credited nor charged.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the place beyond heaven (247c) and the list of terms from the handbooks (266d to 267d). One law governs both: speech is judged by whether it leads a soul toward what is true, and love and rhetoric are both kinds of that leading, each needing madness governed by knowledge. Lysias’s speech, the palinode, the handbooks and the myths are put to the same test, and the prayer to Pan, asking for beauty within and only as much gold as a moderate man can carry, closes it. The law is stated (264c) and largely kept. Held below 9.0 because it is reached by argument after the fact more than felt throughout: the tone falls from rapture to analysis at 257b, and readers since antiquity have had to argue the unity. The hint that the whole was a game (265c to d) both answers and sharpens the charge.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged at the dialogue’s scale, it holds many orders in one structure: the soul and its divisions; erotic love and friendship; the gods, the Muses, the Nymphs, Pan, Delphi and the art of prophecy; the order of heaven and the cycle of lives; nature, in the river, the plane tree and the cicadas; the city, its assembly and law courts, Pericles and his schooling under Anaxagoras (269e to 270a); medicine, with Hippocrates as a model for the art of speech (270c); and the technology of writing. They are joined by the leading of souls, not listed: the palinode holds cosmos, soul and love in one image. What holds it there is what lies outside the walls: the family, labour, war and history, with women present only as the Nymphs and Oreithyia. Two men on a walk hold more than their length suggests; they do not hold a world.

Score: 8.5 / 10