Phædr. Yes, but I will; and my word shall be an oath. " I say, or rather swear '"-but what god will be the witness of my oath?" I swear by this plane-tree, that unless you repeat the discourse here, in the face of the plane-tree, I will never tell you another; never let you have word of another!"

Soc. Villain! I am conquered; the poor lover of discourse has no more to say.

Phædr. Then why are you still at your tricks?

Soc. I am not going to play tricks now that you have taken

the oath, for I cannot allow myself to be starved. Phædr. Proceed.

Soc: Shall I tell you what I will do ?

Phædr. What?

237

241

Soc. 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.

Phædr. Only go on and you may do as you please.

[After an invocation to the Muses, Socrates begins his speech, which he addresses to an imaginary youth, by inquiring into the nature and power of love. He says that in every person there are two principles, a better and a worse, which are in conflict with each other. The better one, reason, if allowed to rule, leads to temperance. The worse, desire, when victorious, leads to excess. Excess has many forms and many names, and among them is found love.]

And now, dear Phædrus, I shall pause for an instant to ask whether you do not think me, as I appear to myself, inspired ?

Phædr. Yes, Socrates, you seem to have a very unusual flow of words.

Soc. 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.30

Phadr. That is quite true.

Soc. And that I attribute to you. But hear what follows, and perhaps the fit may be averted; all is in their hands above. And now I will go on talking to my youth. Listen :

[Socrates proceeds in much the same strain as Lysias, to set forth all the disadvantages and harm that result to a youth from his association with a lover. His speech is a parody on that of Lysias. He shows that he can surpass the rhetoricians in their own art. At the same time he develops still further the germ of truth presented by Lysias, that there is an unworthy and spurious form of love which should be rejected. He concludes his censure of the lover thus:]

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, as I said before, I am speaking in verse, and therefore I had better make an end; that is enough.

Phædr. 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 don't you go on?

Soc. Does not your simplicity observe that I have got out of dithyrambics into epics; and if my censure was in verse, what will my praise be? Don't you see 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 charged with being deficient. And now I will say no more; there has been enough said 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.

242

Phædr. Not yet, Socrates; not until the heat of the day has passed; don't you see that the hour is noon, and the sun is standing over our heads? Let us rather stay and talk over what has been said, and then return in the cool.

Soc. Your love of discourse, Phædrus, is superhuman, simply marvelous, and I do not believe that there is any one of your contemporaries who in one way or another has either made or been the cause of others making an equal number of speeches. I would except Simmias 31 the Theban, but all the rest are far behind you. And now I do verily believe that you have been the cause of another.

Phædr. That is good news. But what do you mean?

Soc. I mean to say that as I was about to cross the stream the usual sign was given to me; that is the sign which never bids but always forbids me to do what I am going to do 2; 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 needs, as you might say of a bad writer-his writing is good enough for him. And, O my friend, how singularly prophetic is the soul ! For at the time I had a sort of misgiving, and, like Ibycus, 33 "I was troubled," and I suspected that I might be receiving honor from men at the expense of sinning against the gods. Now I am aware of the error.

Phædr. What error?

Soc. That was a dreadful speech which you brought with you, and you made me utter one as bad.

Phædr. How was that?

Soc. Foolish, I say, and in a degree impious; and what can be more dreadful than this?

Phædr. Nothing, if the speech was really such as you describe.

Soc. Well, and is not Eros 34 the son of Aphrodite 35 a mighty god ?

Phædr. That is the language of mankind about him.

Soc. But that was not the language of Lysias' speech any more than of that other speech uttered through my lips when under the influence of your enchantments, and which I may call yours and not mine. For Love, if he be a god or divine, cannot be evil. Yet this was the error of both our

speeches. There was also a solemnity about them which 243 was truly charming; they had no truth or honesty in them, and yet they pretended to be something, hoping to succeed in deceiving the manikins of earth and be famous among them. And therefore I must have a purgation. And now I bethink me of an ancient purgation of mythological error which was devised, not by Homer 3% for he never had the wit to discover why he was blind, but by Stesichorus, 37 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 purged himself. And the purgation was a recantation, which began with the words:

"That was a lie of mine when I said that thou never embarkedst on the swift ships, or wentest 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 a recantation before I lose mine; and this I will attempt, not as before, veiled and ashamed, but with forehead bold and bare.

Phædr. There is nothing which I should like better to hear.

Soc. Only think, my good Phædrus, what an utter want of delicacy was shown in the two discourses; I mean, in my own and in the one 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 he heard us speaking of the petty causes of lovers' jealousies, and of their exceeding animosities, and 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 ?

Phædr. Certainly not.

Soc. Therefore, because I blush at the thought of this person, and also because I am afraid of the god Love, I desire to wash down that gall and vinegar with a wholesome draught; and I would counsel Lysias not to delay, but to write another discourse, which shall prove other things being equal that the lover ought to be accepted rather than the non-lover.

Phædr. Be assured that he shall. You shall speak the praises of the lover, and Lysias shall be made to write them in another discourse. I will compel him to do this.

Soc. You will be true to your nature in that, and therefore I believe you.

Phædr. Speak, and fear not.

Soc. But where is the fair youth whom I was addressing, and who ought to listen, in order that he may not be misled by one side before he has heard the other?

Phædr. He is close at hand, and always at your service.

245

[The second discourse of Socrates is a serious attempt 244on his part to make clear what he regards as the truth about love in its highest form. He begins" That was a lie in which I said that the beloved ought to accept the non-lover and reject the lover, because the one is sane and the other mad. For that might have been truly said if madness were simply an evil; but there is also a madness which is the special gift of heaven and the source of the chiefest blessings among men." This divine madness is of four kinds-the gift of prophecy, religious ecstasy in which the soul is purified from sin, poetical inspiration, and lastly the madness of love.]

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 temperate love is preferable to mad love, but let him further show, if he would carry off the palm, that love is not sent by the gods for any good to lover or beloved. 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. And, first of all, let us inquire what is the truth about the affections and actions of the soul, divine as well as human. And thus we begin our proof :

[The soul is immortal because it is the source of all motion both in itself and in all other things.]