PHAEDRUS: Clearly.
lent to think? Would they not have a right to laugh at us? They might imagine that we were SOCRATES: And what is well and what is badly—
slaves, who, coming to rest at a place of resort of need we ask Lysias, or any other poet or orator, theirs, like sheep lie asleep at noon around the who ever wrote or will write either a political or well. But if they see us discoursing, and like any other work, in metre or out of metre, poet Odysseus sailing past them, deaf to their siren or prose writer, to teach us this?
voices, they may perhaps, out of respect, give us of the gifts which they receive from the gods PHAEDRUS: Need we? For what should a man that they may impart them to men.
live if not for the pleasures of discourse? Surely not for the sake of bodily pleasures, which al-PHAEDRUS: What gifts do you mean? I never most always have previous pain as a condition heard of any.
of them, and therefore are rightly called slavish.
SOCRATES: A lover of music like yourself ought SOCRATES: There is time enough. And I believe surely to have heard the story of the grasshop-that the grasshoppers chirruping after their pers, who are said to have been human beings manner in the heat of the sun over our heads in an age before the Muses. And when the Muses are talking to one another and looking down at came and song appeared they were ravished with us. What would they say if they saw that we, delight; and singing always, never thought of like the many, are not conversing, but slumber-eating and drinking, until at last in their forget-ing at mid-day, lulled by their voices, too indo-fulness they died. And now they live again in 90
Phaedrus
the grasshoppers; and this is the return which SOCRATES: Shall we discuss the rules of writing the Muses make to them—they neither hunger, and speech as we were proposing?
nor thirst, but from the hour of their birth are always singing, and never eating or drinking; PHAEDRUS: Very good.
and when they die they go and inform the Muses in heaven who honours them on earth. They win SOCRATES: In good speaking should not the mind the love of Terpsichore for the dancers by their of the speaker know the truth of the matter about report of them; of Erato for the lovers, and of which he is going to speak?
the other Muses for those who do them honour, according to the several ways of honouring PHAEDRUS: And yet, Socrates, I have heard that them;—of Calliope the eldest Muse and of Urania he who would be an orator has nothing to do with who is next to her, for the philosophers, of whose true justice, but only with that which is likely to music the grasshoppers make report to them; be approved by the many who sit in judgment; for these are the Muses who are chiefly con-nor with the truly good or honourable, but only cerned with heaven and thought, divine as well with opinion about them, and that from opinion as human, and they have the sweetest utterance.
comes persuasion, and not from the truth.
For many reasons, then, we ought always to talk and not to sleep at mid-day.
SOCRATES: The words of the wise are not to be set aside; for there is probably something in PHAEDRUS: Let us talk.
them; and therefore the meaning of this saying is not hastily to be dismissed.