SOCRATES: You go too far: I can’t agree with you about that. If, as a favor to you, I accept your view, I will stand refuted by all the wise men and women of old who have spoken or written about this subject.
PHAEDRUS: Who are these people? And where have you heard anything [c] better than this?
SOCRATES: I can’t tell you offhand, but I’m sure I’ve heard better somewhere; perhaps it was the lovely Sappho or the wise Anacreon or even some writer of prose. So, what’s my evidence? The fact, my dear friend, that my breast is full and I feel I can make a different speech, even better than Lysias’. Now I am well aware that none of these ideas can have come from me—I know my own ignorance. The only other possibility, I think, [d] is that I was filled, like an empty jar, by the words of other people streaming in through my ears, though I’m so stupid that I’ve even forgotten where and from whom I heard them.
PHAEDRUS: But, my dear friend, you couldn’t have said a better thing! Don’t bother telling me when and from whom you’ve heard this, even if I ask you—instead, do exactly what you said: You’ve just promised to make another speech making more points, and better ones, without repeating a word from my book. And I promise you that, like the Nine Archons, I shall set up in [e] return a life-sized golden statue at Delphi, not only of myself but also of you.10
SOCRATES: You’re a real friend, Phaedrus, good as gold, to think I’m claiming that Lysias failed in absolutely every respect and that I can make a speech that is different on every point from his. I am sure that that couldn’t happen even to the worst possible author. In our own case, for example, do you think that anyone could argue that one should favor the non-lover rather than the lover without praising the former for keeping [236] his wits about him or condemning the latter for losing his—points that are essential to make—and still have something left to say? I believe we must allow these points, and concede them to the speaker. In their case, we cannot praise their novelty but only their skillful arrangement; but we can praise both the arrangement and the novelty of the nonessential points that are harder to think up.
PHAEDRUS: I agree with you; I think that’s reasonable. This, then, is what I shall do. I will allow you to presuppose that the lover is less sane than [b] the non-lover—and if you are able to add anything of value to complete what we already have in hand, you will stand in hammered gold beside the offering of the Cypselids in Olympia.11
SOCRATES: Oh, Phaedrus, I was only criticizing your beloved in order to tease you—did you take me seriously? Do you think I’d really try to match the product of his wisdom with a fancier speech?
PHAEDRUS: Well, as far as that goes, my friend, you’ve fallen into your own trap. You have no choice but to give your speech as best you can: [c] otherwise you will force us into trading vulgar jibes the way they do in comedy. Don’t make me say what you said: “Socrates, if I don’t know my Socrates, I must be forgetting who I am myself,” or “He wanted to speak, but he was being coy.” Get it into your head that we shall not leave here until you recite what you claimed to have “in your breast.” We are alone, [d] in a deserted place, and I am younger and stronger. From all this, “take my meaning”12 and don’t make me force you to speak when you can do so willingly.
SOCRATES: But, my dear Phaedrus, I’ll be ridiculous—a mere dilettante, improvising on the same topics as a seasoned professional!
PHAEDRUS: Do you understand the situation? Stop playing hard to get! I know what I can say to make you give your speech.
SOCRATES: Then please don’t say it!
PHAEDRUS: Oh, yes, I will. And what I say will be an oath. I swear to you—by which god, I wonder? How about this very plane tree?—I swear [e] in all truth that, if you don’t make your speech right next to this tree here, I shall never, never again recite another speech for you—I shall never utter another word about speeches to you!
SOCRATES: My oh my, what a horrible man you are! You’ve really found the way to force a lover of speeches to do just as you say!
PHAEDRUS: So why are you still twisting and turning like that?
SOCRATES: I’ll stop—now that you’ve taken this oath. How could I possibly give up such treats?
[237] PHAEDRUS: Speak, then.
SOCRATES: Do you know what I’ll do?
PHAEDRUS: What?
SOCRATES: I’ll cover my head while I’m speaking. In that way, as I’m going through the speech as fast as I can, I won’t get embarrassed by having to look at you and lose the thread of my argument.
PHAEDRUS: Just give your speech! You can do anything else you like.
SOCRATES: Come to me, O you clear-voiced Muses, whether you are called so because of the quality of your song or from the musical people of Liguria,13 “come, take up my burden” in telling the tale that this fine fellow forces upon me so that his companion may now seem to him even [b] more clever than he did before:
There once was a boy, a youth rather, and he was very beautiful, and had very many lovers. One of them was wily and had persuaded him that he was not in love, though he loved the lad no less than the others. And once in pressing his suit to him, he tried to persuade him that he ought to give his favors to a man who did not love him rather than to one who did. And this is what he said:
“If you wish to reach a good decision on any topic, my boy, there is [c] only one way to begin: You must know what the decision is about, or else you are bound to miss your target altogether. Ordinary people cannot see that they do not know the true nature of a particular subject, so they proceed as if they did; and because they do not work out an agreement at the start of the inquiry, they wind up as you would expect—in conflict with themselves and each other. Now you and I had better not let this happen to us, since we criticize it in others. Because you and I are about to discuss whether a boy should make friends with a man who loves him [d] rather than with one who does not, we should agree on defining what love is and what effects it has. Then we can look back and refer to that as we try to find out whether to expect benefit or harm from love. Now, as everyone plainly knows, love is some kind of desire; but we also know that even men who are not in love have a desire for what is beautiful. So how shall we distinguish between a man who is in love and one who is not? We must realize that each of us is ruled by two principles which we follow wherever they lead: one is our inborn desire for pleasures, the other is our acquired judgment that pursues what is best. Sometimes these two [e] are in agreement; but there are times when they quarrel inside us, and then sometimes one of them gains control, sometimes the other. Now when judgment is in control and leads us by reasoning toward what is best, that sort of self-control is called ‘being in your right mind’; but when desire [238] takes command in us and drags us without reasoning toward pleasure, then its command is known as ‘outrageousness’.14 Now outrageousness has as many names as the forms it can take, and these are quite diverse.15 Whichever form stands out in a particular case gives its name to the person who has it—and that is not a pretty name to be called, not worth earning at all. If it is desire for food that overpowers a person’s reasoning about what is best and suppresses his other desires, it is called gluttony and it [b] gives him the name of a glutton, while if it is desire for drink that plays the tyrant and leads the man in that direction, we all know what name we’ll call him then! And now it should be clear how to describe someone appropriately in the other cases: call the man by that name—sister to these others—that derives from the sister of these desires that controls him at the time. As for the desire that has led us to say all this, it should be obvious already, but I suppose things said are always better understood than things unsaid: The unreasoning desire that overpowers a person’s considered impulse to do right and is driven to take pleasure in beauty, [c] its force reinforced by its kindred desires for beauty in human bodies—this desire, all-conquering in its forceful drive, takes its name from the word for force (rhōmē) and is called erōs.”
There, Phaedrus my friend, don’t you think, as I do, that I’m
in the grip of something divine?
PHAEDRUS: This is certainly an unusual flow of words for you, Socrates.
SOCRATES: Then be quiet and listen. There’s something really divine about this place, so don’t be surprised if I’m quite taken by the Nymphs’ madness [d] as I go on with the speech. I’m on the edge of speaking in dithyrambs16 as it is.
PHAEDRUS: Very true!
SOCRATES: Yes, and you’re the cause of it. But hear me out; the attack may yet be prevented. That, however, is up to the god; what we must do is face the boy again in the speech:
“All right then, my brave friend, now we have a definition for the subject of our decision; now we have said what it really is; so let us keep that in [e] view as we complete our discussion. What benefit or harm is likely to come from the lover or the non-lover to the boy who gives him favors? It is surely necessary that a man who is ruled by desire and is a slave to pleasure will turn his boy into whatever is most pleasing to himself. Now a sick man takes pleasure in anything that does not resist him, but sees [239] anyone who is equal or superior to him as an enemy. That is why a lover will not willingly put up with a boyfriend who is his equal or superior, but is always working to make the boy he loves weaker and inferior to himself. Now, the ignorant man is inferior to the wise one, the coward to the brave, the ineffective speaker to the trained orator, the slow-witted to the quick. By necessity, a lover will be delighted to find all these mental defects and more, whether acquired or innate in his boy; and if he does not, he will have to supply them or else lose the pleasure of the moment. [b] The necessary consequence is that he will be jealous and keep the boy away from the good company of anyone who would make a better man of him; and that will cause him a great deal of harm, especially if he keeps him away from what would most improve his mind—and that is, in fact, divine philosophy, from which it is necessary for a lover to keep his boy a great distance away, out of fear the boy will eventually come to look down on him. He will have to invent other ways, too, of keeping the boy in total ignorance and so in total dependence on himself. That way the [c] boy will give his lover the most pleasure, though the harm to himself will be severe. So it will not be of any use to your intellectual development to have as your mentor and companion a man who is in love.
“Now let’s turn to your physical development. If a man is bound by necessity to chase pleasure at the expense of the good, what sort of shape will he want you to be in? How will he train you, if he is in charge? You will see that what he wants is someone who is soft, not muscular, and not trained in full sunlight but in dappled shade—someone who has never worked out like a man, never touched hard, sweaty exercise. Instead, he [d] goes for a boy who has known only a soft unmanly style of life, who makes himself pretty with cosmetics because he has no natural color at all. There is no point in going on with this description: it is perfectly obvious what other sorts of behavior follow from this. We can take up our next topic after drawing all this to a head: the sort of body a lover wants in his boy is one that will give confidence to the enemy in a war or other great crisis while causing alarm to friends and even to his lovers. Enough of that; the point is obvious.
[e] “Our next topic is the benefit or harm to your possessions that will come from a lover’s care and company. Everyone knows the answer, especially a lover: His first wish will be for a boy who has lost his dearest, kindliest and godliest possessions—his mother and father and other close relatives. He would be happy to see the boy deprived of them, since he would [240] expect them either to block him from the sweet pleasure of the boy’s company or to criticize him severely for taking it. What is more, a lover would think any money or other wealth the boy owns would only make him harder to snare and, once snared, harder to handle. It follows by absolute necessity that wealth in a boyfriend will cause his lover to envy him, while his poverty will be a delight. Furthermore, he will wish for the boy to stay wifeless, childless, and homeless for as long as possible, since that’s how long he desires to go on plucking his sweet fruit.
“There are other troubles in life, of course, but some divinity has mixed most of them with a dash of immediate pleasure. A flatterer, for example, [b] may be an awful beast and a dreadful nuisance, but nature makes flattery rather pleasant by mixing in a little culture with its words. So it is with a mistress—for all the harm we accuse her of causing—and with many other creatures of that character, and their callings: at least they are delightful company for a day. But besides being harmful to his boyfriend, a lover is [c] simply disgusting to spend the day with. ‘Youth delights youth,’ as the old proverb runs—because, I suppose, friendship grows from similarity, as boys of the same age go after the same pleasures. But you can even have too much of people your own age. Besides, as they say, it is miserable for anyone to be forced into anything by necessity—and this (to say nothing of the age difference) is most true for a boy with his lover. The older man clings to the younger day and night, never willing to leave him, driven [d] by necessity and goaded on by the sting that gives him pleasure every time he sees, hears, touches, or perceives his boy in any way at all, so that he follows him around like a servant, with pleasure.
“As for the boy, however, what comfort or pleasure will the lover give to him during all the time they spend together? Won’t it be disgusting in the extreme to see the face of that older man who’s lost his looks? And everything that goes with that face—why, it is a misery even to hear them mentioned, let alone actually handle them, as you would constantly be [e] forced to do! To be watched and guarded suspiciously all the time, with everyone! To hear praise of yourself that is out of place and excessive! And then to be falsely accused—which is unbearable when the man is sober and not only unbearable but positively shameful when he is drunk and lays into you with a pack of wild barefaced insults!
“While he is still in love he is harmful and disgusting, but after his love fades he breaks his trust with you for the future, in spite of all the promises he has made with all those oaths and entreaties which just barely kept [241] you in a relationship that was troublesome at the time, in hope of future benefits. So, then, by the time he should pay up, he has made a change and installed a new ruling government in himself: right-minded reason in place of the madness of love. The boy does not even realize that his lover is a different man. He insists on his reward for past favors and reminds him of what they had done and said before—as if he were still talking to the same man! The lover, however, is so ashamed that he does not dare tell the boy how much he has changed or that there is no way, now that he is in his right mind and under control again, that he can stand by the promises he had sworn to uphold when he was under that old [b] mindless regime. He is afraid that if he acted as he had before he would turn out the same and revert to his old self. So now he is a refugee, fleeing from those old promises on which he must default by necessity; he, the former lover, has to switch roles and flee, since the coin has fallen the other way, while the boy must chase after him, angry and cursing. All along he has been completely unaware that he should never have given [c] his favors to a man who was in love—and who therefore had by necessity lost his mind. He should much rather have done it for a man who was not in love and had his wits about him. Otherwise it follows necessarily that he’d be giving himself to a man who is deceitful, irritable, jealous, disgusting, harmful to his property, harmful to his physical fitness, and absolutely devastating to the cultivation of his soul, which truly is, and will always be, the most valuable thing to gods and men.
“These are the points you should bear in mind, my boy. You should know that the friendship of a lover arises without any good will at all. [d] No, like food, its purpose is to sate hunger. ‘Do wolves love lambs? That’s how lovers befriend a boy!’ ”
That’s it, Phaedrus. You won’t hear another word from me, and you’ll have to accept this as the end of the speech.
PHAEDRUS: But I thought you were right in the middle—I thought you were about to speak at the same length about t
he non-lover, to list his good points and argue that it’s better to give one’s favors to him. So why are you stopping now, Socrates?
[e] SOCRATES: Didn’t you notice, my friend, that even though I am criticizing the lover, I have passed beyond lyric into epic poetry?17 What do you suppose will happen to me if I begin to praise his opposite? Don’t you realize that the Nymphs to whom you so cleverly exposed me will take complete possession of me? So I say instead, in a word, that every shortcoming for which we blamed the lover has its contrary advantage, and the non-lover possesses it. Why make a long speech of it? That’s enough about [242] them both. This way my story will meet the end it deserves, and I will cross the river and leave before you make me do something even worse.
PHAEDRUS: Not yet, Socrates, not until this heat is over. Don’t you see that it is almost exactly noon, “straight-up” as they say? Let’s wait and discuss the speeches, and go as soon as it turns cooler.
SOCRATES: You’re really superhuman when it comes to speeches, Phaedrus; you’re truly amazing. I’m sure you’ve brought into being more of [b] the speeches that have been given during your lifetime than anyone else, whether you composed them yourself or in one way or another forced others to make them; with the single exception of Simmias the Theban, you are far ahead of the rest.18 Even as we speak, I think, you’re managing to cause me to produce yet another one.
PHAEDRUS: Oh, how wonderful! But what do you mean? What speech?
SOCRATES: My friend, just as I was about to cross the river, the familiar [c] divine sign came to me which, whenever it occurs, holds me back from something I am about to do. I thought I heard a voice coming from this very spot, forbidding me to leave until I made atonement for some offense against the gods. In effect, you see, I am a seer, and though I am not particularly good at it, still—like people who are just barely able to read and write—I am good enough for my own purposes. I recognize my offense clearly now. In fact, the soul too, my friend, is itself a sort of seer; that’s why, almost from the beginning of my speech, I was disturbed by a very [d] uneasy feeling, as Ibycus puts it, that “for offending the gods I am honored by men.”19 But now I understand exactly what my offense has been.
Complete Works Page 82
