SOCRATES: At any rate, you will allow that ev-So long here on this spot by his sad tomb abiding, ery discourse ought to be a living creature, havI shall declare to passers-by that Midas sleeps below. ’
ing a body of its own and a head and feet; there should be a middle, beginning, and end, adapted Now in this rhyme whether a line comes first or to one another and to the whole?
comes last, as you will perceive, makes no difference.
PHAEDRUS: Certainly.
PHAEDRUS: You are making fun of that oration SOCRATES: Can this be said of the discourse of of ours.
Lysias? See whether you can find any more connexion in his words than in the epitaph which SOCRATES: Well, I will say no more about your is said by some to have been inscribed on the friend’s speech lest I should give offence to you; grave of Midas the Phrygian.
although I think that it might furnish many other examples of what a man ought rather to avoid.
PHAEDRUS: What is there remarkable in the But I will proceed to the other speech, which, as I epitaph?
think, is also suggestive to students of rhetoric.
SOCRATES: It is as follows:—
PHAEDRUS: In what way?
‘I am a maiden of bronze and lie on the tomb of Midas; SOCRATES: The two speeches, as you may re-So long as water flows and tall trees grow, member, were unlike; the one argued that the 100
Phaedrus
lover and the other that the non-lover ought to first was the inspiration of Apollo, the second be accepted.
that of Dionysus, the third that of the Muses, the fourth that of Aphrodite and Eros. In the PHAEDRUS: And right manfully.
description of the last kind of madness, which was also said to be the best, we spoke of the SOCRATES: You should rather say ‘madly;’ and affection of love in a figure, into which we intro-madness was the argument of them, for, as I said, duced a tolerably credible and possibly true
‘love is a madness.’
though partly erring myth, which was also a hymn in honour of Love, who is your lord and PHAEDRUS: Yes.
also mine, Phaedrus, and the guardian of fair children, and to him we sung the hymn in mea-SOCRATES: And of madness there were two sured and solemn strain.
kinds; one produced by human infirmity, the other was a divine release of the soul from the PHAEDRUS: I know that I had great pleasure in yoke of custom and convention.
listening to you.
PHAEDRUS: True.
SOCRATES: Let us take this instance and note how the transition was made from blame to SOCRATES: The divine madness was subdivided praise.
into four kinds, prophetic, initiatory, poetic, erotic, having four gods presiding over them; the PHAEDRUS: What do you mean?