INTRODUCTION.

...the attachment of Aristodemus, who is not forgotten when Socrates takes his departure. (5) We may notice the manner in which Socrates himself regards the first five speeches, not as true, but as fanciful and exaggerated praises of the god Love. (6) We note the ruling passion of Socrates for dialectics—he will argue with Agathon instead of making a speech, and will only speak at all on the condition that he is allowed to speak the truth. We may also note the touch of Socratic irony, (7) which admits of a wide application and reveals a deep insight into the world: that in speaking of holy things and persons, there is a general understanding that you should praise them, not that you should speak the truth of them—this is the sort of praise Socrates is unable to give. Lastly, (8) we may remark that the banquet is a real banquet after all, at which love is the theme of discourse and huge quantities of wine are drunk (214 A, 223 B).

The discourse of Phaedrus is half-mythical, half-ethical; he himself, true to the character given him in the dialogue bearing his name, is half-sophist, half-enthusiast. He is also a critic of poetry, comparing Homer and Aeschylus in the insipid and irrational manner of the schools of the day, characteristically reasoning about matters that do not admit of reasoning. He starts from a noble text: "That without the sense of honor and dishonor, neither states nor individuals ever do any good or great work." But he soon passes on to more commonplace topics. The antiquity of love, the blessing of having a lover, the incentive that love provides for daring deeds, and the examples of Alcestis and Achilles are the chief themes of his discourse. The love of women is regarded by him as almost equal to that of men, and he makes the singular remark that the gods favor the return of love made by the beloved more than the original sentiment, because the lover is of a nobler and diviner nature.

There is something of a sophistical ring in the speech of Phaedrus, which recalls the first speech in imitation of Lysias, occurring in the dialogue called the Phaedrus. This is even more marked in the speech of Pausanias, which follows and is at once hyper-logical in form and also extremely confused and pedantic. Plato is attacking the logical feebleness of the sophists and rhetoricians through their pupils, not forgetting to satirize the monotonous and meaningless rhythms that Prodicus and others were introducing into Attic prose.